The blood of Zacharias son of Barachias. — A very memorable martyrdom is recorded in 2 Chronicles 24:20-22, in which a prophet, named Zechariah, was stoned “in the court of the house of the Lord, at the commandment of the king.” That Zacharias was, however, the son of Jehoiada; and the only “Zechariah the son of Barachias” in the Old Testament, is the minor prophet whose writings occupy the last place but one among the prophetic books of the Old Testament. Of his death we know nothing, and it is not probable, had he been slain in the manner here described, that it would have passed unrecorded. The death of the son of Jehoiada, on the other hand, is not only recorded, as above in 2 Chronicles 24, but had become the subject of popular legends. The blood of the prophet, it was said in the Talmud, would not dry up. It was still bubbling up when Nebuzaradan, the Chaldean commander (Jeremiah 39:9) took the Temple. No sacrifices availed to stay it, not even the blood of thousands of slaughtered priests. Wild as the story is, it shows, as does the so-called tomb of Zacharias, the impression which that death had made on the minds of men, and explains why it was chosen by our Lord as a representative example. The substitution of Barachias for Jehoiada may be accounted for as the mistake of a transcriber, led by the association of the two names, like that of Jeremy for Zechariah in Matthew 27:9 (where see Note). In the Sinaitic MS. the words “son of Barachiah” are omitted, but this betrays the hand of a corrector cutting the knot of the difficulty. The assumptions (1) that Jehoiada may have borne Barachiah as a second name, (2) or that he may have had a son of that name, and been really the grandfather of the martyr, are obviously hypotheses invented for the occasion, without a shadow of evidence. Singularly enough, Josephus (Wars, iv. 5, § 4) recounts the murder of a “Zecharias, the son of Baruch,” i.e., Barachiah, as perpetrated in the Temple by the Zealots just before the destruction of Jerusalem. It is possible that this also may not have been without its weight in so linking the two names together in men’s minds as to mislead the memory as to the parentage of the older prophet. The list of conjectures is not complete unless we add that one of the Apocryphal Gospels (The Protevangelion of James, chap. 16) records the death of Zacharias, the father of the Baptist, as slain by Herod in the Temple, and near the altar, and that some have supposed that he was the son of Barachias referred to.
Between the temple and the altar — i.e., between the sanctuary (the word is the same as in Matthew 26:61; John 2:19) — the Holy of Holies — and the altar of burnt offerings that stood outside it.