Biblical Oddities: The Vision of Zerubbabel

The book of Zechariah is filled with odd and unusual things. One of the strangest is the vision that we find in chapter 4:

Zechariah 4:4: “And the angel that talked with me came again, and waked me, as a man that is wakened out of his sleep.
2 And said unto me, What seest thou? And I said, I have looked, and behold a candlestick all of gold, with a bowl upon the top of it, and his seven lamps thereon, and seven pipes to the seven lamps, which are upon the top thereof:
3 And two olive trees by it, one upon the right side of the bowl, and the other upon the left side thereof.”

So far this is a bit unusual, but not too strange. We have a candlestick, a bowl, seven lamps, seven pipes, and two olive trees. It’s interesting, but there’s no good way to know what it means. So Zechariah asks for an interpretation – and gets a really odd answer:

Zechariah 4:4: “So I answered and spake to the angel that talked with me, saying, What are these, my lord?
5 Then the angel that talked with me answered and said unto me, Knowest thou not what these be? And I said, No, my lord.
6 Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.”

I imagine you could have spent days thinking over the candlestick, bowl, lamps, pipes, and trees, and not come up with the interpretation of “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit”. (This, incidentally, is why it is so important to use the Bible to interpret symbolism, instead of coming up with your own interpretation. The actual answer can easily be something you would never have guessed.)

This interpretation, while illuminating, still leaves a lot of questions. How on earth does a candlestick, a bowl, some lamps, some pipes, and some trees symbolize that? What is the connection?

I looked up the passage in a number of commentaries and found wildly different interpretations. Apparently there isn’t a lot of agreement here – which is to be expected, given the cryptic nature of these verses.

The chapter does give us one further clue. We find it a few verses later:

Zechariah 4:11: “Then answered I, and said unto him, What are these two olive trees upon the right side of the candlestick and upon the left side thereof?
12 And I answered again, and said unto him, What be these two olive branches which through the two golden pipes empty the golden oil out of themselves?
13 And he answered me and said, Knowest thou not what these be? And I said, No, my lord.
14 Then said he, These are the two anointed ones, that stand by the Lord of the whole earth.”

The two olive trees are the “two anointed ones, that stand by the Lord”. That alone is newsworthy – after all, did you know what two anointed ones stand by the Lord? Just who are these anointed ones, and what do they do? The passage doesn’t say.

If the olive trees are anointed ones, then what is the candlestick, the bowl, the lamps, and the pipes? From what I can tell based on the verse, it seems that the bowl is on top of the candlestick. The olive trees supply oil to the bowl, which then goes through the pipes to the lamps to keep them burning. It’s an automatic system – doing away with the need to manually refill the lamps (which was one of the Temple duties in the Old Testament).

In the Bible, oil is usually symbolic of the Holy Spirit. Christ once told a parable about 10 virgins, 5 of which ran out of oil for their lamps. In this system, however, that would never be a problem. The lamps are directly connected to the source of oil and will never run out.

If the anointed ones are the trees, then that makes them the source of the oil that runs the lamps; if the oil is the Holy Spirit, then that means – what, exactly? The Holy Spirit is one of the three persons of the Trinity; it is not a byproduct of an angelic anointed one.

Perhaps the answer can be found in the middle of the chapter. We have skipped a verse that may be key:

Zechariah 4:7: “Who art thou, O great mountain? before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain: and he shall bring forth the headstone thereof with shoutings, crying, Grace, grace unto it.”

In the system of pipes and bowls and trees, the bowls have an endless supply of oil. They don’t have to worry about running out; that’s not an issue. They will have everything they need to keep burning.

In verse 7 God tells Zerubbabel that he will be unstoppable. The task that is facing him seems insurmountable, but it won’t be because God is with him. Perhaps the vision is intended to show him that God is supplying him a constant stream of grace – that God has connected him to the Source, and his lamp will never run out. He will have everything he needs to turn the mountain into a plain (or to rebuild the Temple, which was his actual goal). After all, it will be done “not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit”.

At the very least, it’s a thought.