Six: The gold lampstand and the two olive trees (The Fifth Vision) - Zech 4
- Oct 17, 2024
- 12 min read
Updated: Oct 20, 2024
Then the angel who talked with me returned and woke me up, like someone awakened from sleep. 2 He asked me, ‘What do you see?’
I answered, ‘I see a solid gold lampstand with a bowl at the top and seven lamps on it, with seven channels to the lamps. 3 Also there are two olive trees by it, one on the right of the bowl and the other on its left.’
4 I asked the angel who talked with me, ‘What are these, my lord?’
5 He answered, ‘Do you not know what these are?’
‘No, my lord,’ I replied.
6 So he said to me, ‘This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel: “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord Almighty.
7 ‘What are you, mighty mountain? Before Zerubbabel you will become level ground. Then he will bring out the capstone to shouts of “God bless it! God bless it!”’
8 Then the word of the Lord came to me: 9 ‘The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this temple; his hands will also complete it. Then you will know that the Lord Almighty has sent me to you.
10 ‘Who dares despise the day of small things, since the seven eyes of the Lord that range throughout the earth will rejoice when they see the chosen capstone [or the plumb-line] in the hand of Zerubbabel?’
11 Then I asked the angel, ‘What are these two olive trees on the right and the left of the lampstand?’
12 Again I asked him, ‘What are these two olive branches beside the two gold pipes that pour out golden oil?’
13 He replied, ‘Do you not know what these are?’
‘No, my lord,’ I said.
14 So he said, ‘These are the two who are anointed to [or two who bring oil and] serve the Lord of all the earth.’
“Mum, what’s for tea? Mum, what’s for tea? Muuuummmm, what’s for tea?” Anyone who spends time with small children will know that ignoring their questions or pretending not to hear just does not work. They go on and on, becoming ever more insistent until the adult answers them.
There is a little flavour of that in Zechariah 4. The angel shows Zechariah a lampstand with olive trees either side. Zechariah asks, ‘What are these, my lord?’ and the angel (infuriatingly for us!) says, ‘Do you not know what these are?’
‘No, my lord,’ replies Zechariah. The angel changes the subject entirely, but by v11 Zechariah is ready to have another go. ‘What are these two olive trees on the right and the left of the lampstand?’ he asks. And again, ‘What are these two olive branches beside the two gold pipes that pour out golden oil?’
Once again, the angel decides to be infuriating (or maybe disappointed at Zechariah’s obtuseness). ‘Do you not know what these are?’
‘No, my lord,’ says Zechariah.
At last the angel gives an answer, but it’s rather cryptic. ‘These are the two who are anointed to (or maybe ‘bring oil and’) serve the Lord of all the earth.’
The passage seems muddled up. Some translators have tried rearranging the verses, but it doesn’t help that much. Perhaps dreams and visions are just like that – we know from v1 that Zechariah is having a kind of waking dream. Or maybe it heightens the suspense.
Now, between the vision of the lampstand and the olive trees, and the eventual ‘explanation’ there’s a middle section (v6-10). Let’s look at that first and see if it helps.
Here is v6: ‘So he said to me, ‘This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel: “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord Almighty.’’
Zerubbabel, whose name means ‘seed or shoot of Babylon’, has returned from exile, according to Ezra 3:2, 8, and has been appointed by the Persian ruler as governor of Judah (Hag 1:1, 2:21). No doubt the people would have preferred to choose their own king from the line of David, but they were still a subject people. Moreover, they were demoralised. Even the project to rebuild the Temple had stalled for about 16 years, and it had taken Haggai’s and Zechariah’s prophecies to get the work restarted, with Zerubbabel masterminding the work (Ezra 5:1-2).
God’s promise to Zerubbabel – not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit – must have come as a great encouragement. He had no military might. The people had very little muscle power (even the prophets were lending a hand, according to Ezra 5:2b). But where God’s Spirit is at work, such drawbacks are of no account.
One of my favourite characters in the Bible is Gideon, the original seven-stone weakling. When we meet him in Judges 6:11 he is so scared of the Midianite invaders that he is threshing wheat in a winepress. (The act of threshing, separating the grain from the chaff, needs to be done in a windy place; the heavier grain stays put while the chaff blows away. Doing it in a winepress would take a long, long time). He tells the angel of the Lord that he’s the least in his family and his clan is the smallest in the tribe, but God chooses him anyway. With just three hundred men Gideon wins a famous victory over the enemy (Jdg 7:15-22).
The story of Gideon as told in Judges 6-8 is also instructive for how a humble leader chosen by God can still go spectacularly off the rails once victory is won. Gideon quickly becomes a brutal tyrant, ignoring God’s commands about worship and leading the people away from the Lord. But that’s a story for another day.
The apostle Paul wrote in 1 Cor 1:27, 29 “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong… so that no one may boast before him.”
Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit.
We are, I think, constantly tempted to do things in our own strength, rather than relying on the Spirit of God to fill us and work through us. Many years ago, I came across the chilling phrase ‘functional atheism.’[1] It describes the practice that church leaders can easily fall into – believing and saying all the right things, yet acting as though everything depended on us, and God was only theoretically involved. I still have to check myself regularly and make sure I haven’t slipped back into it.
The next verse in the middle section (v7) begins, ‘What are you, mighty mountain? Before Zerubbabel you will become level ground.’
Zerubbabel faced a mountain of opposition. We know there were hostile enemies all around. We know the people were disenchanted and hard to motivate. The problems that faced him must have seemed like a mountainous obstacle. But God says, “What are you, mighty mountain? Before Zerubbabel you will become level ground.”
For many of us, there are steep mountains in our path. Problems of debt, family breakdown, illness or unemployment. We take heart from these words, and from the promise in Is 40:4 – ‘Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low.’
The next few verses (v7b-9a) read:
“Then he [Zerubbabel] will bring out the capstone to shouts of “God bless it! God bless it!”’
Then the word of the Lord came to me: ‘The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this temple; his hands will also complete it.”
As we said earlier, Zerubbabel was there at the beginning of the project, laying the first stone. Now God promises that he’ll complete it. Zerubbabel will put the final stone into place, with everyone shouting “God bless it! God bless it!” These words must have given huge encouragement to the governor in his leadership task.
The start of a project is always exciting and its successful conclusion is exhilarating. It’s the middle that’s hard, when we are slogging away and others have lost their initial enthusiasm.
A few years ago, the Anglican churches in the Bridlington area formed a charity, Hope Housing Bridlington, to tackle the scandal of homelessness. In partnership with the national charity Green Pastures, we have acquired two houses in the town to provide accommodation and support for six formerly homeless men. Since the heady early days of getting our charity number and finding our first house we have encountered a number of problems, including the sudden death of a much-loved Housing Support Officer we employed, the need to evict one of the residents whose activities were making life intolerable for the neighbours, and the constant struggle to get some of the others to engage with the support being offered. At regular intervals, however, our regional reps from Green Pastures, first Carl Good and now Christa McNaughton, have travelled many miles to visit us, share some seaside fish and chips, and pour encouragement and blessing over us. They have shared the load and given us a spring in our step for the next part of the journey.
Many of us can think of someone who is in the middle of something – a project, or a trial, or an illness, or bringing up children – whom we can encourage. Perhaps we can remind them (like God did through Zechariah) of what the end will look like, and give them a renewed spring in their step.
There’s a bit of encouragement for Zechariah himself too, at the end of v9: “Then you will know that the Lord Almighty has sent me to you.”
When the Temple is completed, Zechariah will be vindicated. Which presumably happened, because history tells us that the Temple was completed, and (from a human point of view) enough people thought it was worth treasuring and copying Zechariah’s words that they found their way into the Bible.
The last verse of the middle section (v10) goes all weird again, with its rejoicing eyes:
‘Who dares despise the day of small things, since the seven eyes of the Lord that range throughout the earth will rejoice when they see the chosen capstone [or the plumb-line] in the hand of Zerubbabel?’
The gist here is that the Temple project had got off to a slow start – it was a ‘day of small things’ – but when Zerubbabel laid the final capstone there would be great rejoicing. And we have already met seven eyes in Zech 3:9, where they are on the stone set in front of Joshua the High Priest, and seem to be symbolic of God’s ability to see and know all things. (This is confirmed by Rev 5:6, in which seven eyes are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth.)
But what about the alternative translation – instead of the capstone, a plumb-line?
A literal translation of this verse goes something like this: ‘For who despises the day of small things? And they will rejoice when they see the stone of tin in the hand of Zerubbabel; these seven are the eyes of the Lord; they are the ones ranging to and fro over all the earth.
So Zerubbabel has a ‘stone of tin’ in his hand. Older translations reckoned this was a plumb-line, hence the alternative. But this is unlikely, since tin is too light a metal for this purpose – you need lead. And Zerubbabel wouldn’t be wielding a plumb-line at the very end of the project, surely? It’s too late by then.
The word ‘tin’ can also mean ‘separation’, implying that this is a special stone – so maybe the final capstone? Perhaps then this is the same stone that is set before Joshua in Zech 3. This suggests that both Joshua and Zerubbabel are involved in setting into place the final capstone, and that their roles are somehow combined – something we will meet again in Zech 6: 9-15.
Another complication is that the verse (at least in its literal translation) is a bit vague about who’s doing the rejoicing. Maybe it’s the ones who were despising the project, now won over. Or maybe it’s the Lord himself – represented here by the ‘seven eyes of the Lord’ – a symbol of his watchful care over the whole world.
Let’s go back to the first bit of v10: ‘Who dares despise the day of small things?’ This is a favourite saying of a much-loved colleague, Pamela Hamilton, who was a deaconess in the Bedworth Team Ministry in Warwickshire and with whom I served. If, as sometimes happened, events or projects weren’t as well supported as we’d hoped, she would be heard to say, “Who despises the day of small things?”
Many of us are tempted to look down on the little things of God. The first stumbling words of faith of a child or a new Christian, perhaps. A church group with just a handful of people. Or the slow work of grace in our own lives, that seems to be two steps forward, one step back. But Zechariah reminds us that God’s work often begins small – small as a mustard-seed, perhaps – yet produces mighty results.
Hopefully that’s enough suspense. We are ready now to look at the vision itself (v1-5) and the angel’s interpretation (v11-14).
Zechariah has seen a solid gold lampstand. We are not to think of seven-branched Jewish candelabra at this point (despite the picture at the head of this blog). Zechariah’s lampstand is more like a column, with a bowl of oil at the top, and the seven lamps round the outside. The ‘lamps’ would have been maybe just crimps in the edge where the wicks would go. Or they would have been seven more bowls, each with their own crimps and wicks. Archaeologists have dug up simple lampstands dating from this period. They were made of stone, but in Zechariah’s vision the lampstand is solid gold.
The angel doesn’t explain what the lampstand means, but most of the commentators agree it represents the Temple itself, witnessing to the presence of God among his people, and shining its light to the whole world.
Then there are two olive trees, one on either side, pouring their oil directly into the lamp reservoir via two branches or golden pipes. This surely implies an inexhaustible supply, to have an oil-burner replenished directly from two olive trees!
The angel explains cryptically that these are (literally) the two ‘sons of oil’ who serve the Lord of all the earth (v14).
What does ‘sons of oil’[2] mean? The NIV gives two options: “the two who are anointed” or (in the footnote) “the two who bring oil.” Again, the commentators are helpful here, and most of them reckon that these olive trees represent Zerubbabel the governor and Joshua the high priest.
The whole picture, then, seems to fit together like this. At the centre is the lampstand – the witness of the Temple (still in its early stages of rebuilding, so this is looking ahead to when it’s finished). The lampstand – or witness of the Temple – is constantly being replenished by the two ‘servants of God’, Zerubbabel the governor and Joshua the high priest. They’ve both been anointed with oil for their tasks (kings and priests routinely were, at any rate). And just as trees are nourished by the sun and the rain, so these two are fed and nurtured by God’s Spirit, so they can carry out their ministry without growing weary.
Zechariah’s vision must lie behind the mysterious ‘two witnesses’ who prophesy for 1,260 days clothed in sackcloth in Rev 11:3, for the very next verse says, ‘They are “the two olive trees” and the two lampstands, and “they stand before the Lord of the earth.”’ It maybe that the author of Revelation had a kingly figure and a priestly figure in mind, or that he was taking an OT image and pressing it into a new mould.
The normal term for anointing oil, shmn, is not used in this passage, but it is not clear whether or not this is significant. The commentator Thomas McComiskey (p1093) believes that this may be a literary device to force our attention on the oil flowing from the trees, not the ritual of anointing.
Suddenly the middle section (v6-10) falls into place. Zerubbabel is assured it’s not by might nor by power but by my Spirit, says the Lord. Mighty mountains of opposition will become level ground. He will bring out the capstone to great rejoicing and finish the Temple, just as he helped lay the foundation. The ‘day of small things’ will yield success in the end. And the ‘eyes of the Lord’ will watch to make sure all is accomplished.
As Christians we all have a ministry to perform. We all serve the Lord of all the earth in our different ways. Some of us wear funny collars, most of us don’t. But we all have opportunities to share our faith, to look after each other, to serve the poor, to say our prayers and grow in our love for God.
Next time we are feeling weary, perhaps it would help to think of ourselves as one of those two olive trees. We are pouring out oil, trying to keep the flame burning on the lampstand, but it’s really taking it out of us. (We sometimes talk about feeling drained, don’t we?)
But olive trees never run out of olive oil, do they? They just have to stay rooted in the soil, drinking in the sun and the rain – and the olives grow. That golden pipe never runs dry. We just have to stay connected to our God and accept the provision he lays on for us – and the oil of our ministry will keep on flowing and flowing and flowing.
One last thing. Like many passages in Zechariah, indeed in the OT, this chapter points us towards Jesus. The word ‘Messiah’ after all means ‘anointed [with oil].’
In the later Jewish community at Qum’ran, perhaps on the basis of Zech 4, they reckoned there would be two Messiahs. There would be a kingly one, in the line of King David, passing through Zerubbabel. And there would be a priestly one, in the line of Moses’ brother Aaron, down through High Priest Joshua.
But Jesus fulfils both perfectly. In earthly terms, he was a descendant of King David. But his ministry was that of a priest, a mediator between God and humanity. He operated, not by might nor by power, but by God’s Spirit. He rebuilt the Temple out of living stones – a new community of God’s people that included both Jews and non-Jews – and told us to let our light shine before people.
Perhaps we should think, as well as ourselves, of Jesus as being like those two olive trees, rooted in God, constantly pouring the oil of his Spirit into his Temple the church, which shines brightly in a dark world.
[1] The Anglican mission agency CPAS runs an 18-month leadership programme called Arrow. I was on the Arrow course in 2000-01, where I made some lifelong friends and learnt some things that probably saved my sanity and my ministry, including this phrase. I will always be grateful for it.
[2] Richard D Phillips (p111) has ‘oily ones’, which I rather like.
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