Zechariah 13:6 - Exposition

What are these wounds in thine hands? or rather, between thy hands , i.e. on thy breast; Revised Version, between thine arms . Cheyne compares, "between his arms," i.e; in his back ( 2 Kings 9:24 ) and "between your eyes" i.e. on your foreheads ( Deuteronomy 11:18 ). Not satisfied with the assertion in Zechariah 13:5 , the questioner asks the meaning of these wounds which he sees on his body. Jerome considers these scars to be marks of correction and punishment at the hands of his parents. More probably they are thought to be self-inflicted in the service of some idol, according to the practice mentioned in 1 Kings 18:28 ; Jeremiah 48:37 . Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends. This may be a confession of guilt, the impostor owning that his friends, had thus punished him for his pretensions; or, as the word rendered "friends" is generally used in the case of illicit or impure love or spiritual fornication, it may be here applied to the idols whom he served. But it seems most probable that the answer is intentionally false and misleading; as if he had said, "The wounds were not made as you suppose, but are the result of something that happened to me in my friends' house." The LXX . renders, ἂς ἐπλήγην ἐν τῷ οἴκῳ τῷ ἀγαπητῷ μου , "with which I was struck in my beloved house." To see in this passage a reference to our blessed Lord and his crucifixion, though such an opinion has the support of the Roman Liturgy and of many interpreters, is to do violence to the context, and to read into the words a meaning wholly alien from the subject of false prophets, which is the matter in hand.