Zechariah 11:5

"Whose possessors slay them, and hold themselves not guilty; and they that sell them say, Blessed be Jehovah, for I am rich; and their own shepherds pity them not."

"Whose possessors ... and they that sell them ... and their own shepherds ..." These are not three classes, but rather three designations of one class of men, the evil shepherds. The conflict between the Good Shepherd and the evil shepherds is one of the central themes of the four gospels. We believe that here is the key to the identification of the "three shepherds" that were "cut off" in Zechariah 11:8 the scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees, or (by identifying the scribes and the Pharisees as one party), the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians who are so visible in Matthew 22.

"Blessed be Jehovah, for I am rich ..." This is a further clue to the identity of the "possessors ... sellers ... and shepherds" mentioned as they who said such a thing. In Hosea 12:8, the same class of persons, the leaders of Ephraim, as evil and crooked as any of the old Canaanites ever were, holding in their hands the "balances of deceit," and "loving to oppress" God's people (Hosea 12:7), attempted to justify themselves before God by the bold and arrogant assertion that, "Surely I have become rich, I have found me wealth: in all my labors they shall find in me no iniquity that were sin!" (Hosea 12:8). (See my full comment on this passage in Hosea, Commentary on the Minor Prophets, vol. 2, pp. 198,199.) This attitude on the part of the class of men which dominates this verse represents exactly that of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians of Jesus' personal ministry. Whatever made them rich was justifiable in their eyes. Selling and slaying God's sheep, which they counted as their personal possessions, were all in the day's work for them.

"And their own shepherds pity them not ..."; John 9-10, recounting the brutal and inhuman behavior of the Sanhedrin (Pharisees, and Herodians) in their harassment of the man born blind, along with his poor parents, and their "casting him out" of the synagogue, afford a classic example of their pitiless conduct toward the innocent.