The result of the national repentance is the removal of guilt. The figure of the fountain is perhaps suggested by Ezekiel 47. The first sign of Judah's true restoration will be the abolition of all idolatry and of the spirit of uncleanness, i.e. Greek disregard of Hebrew laws of purity. There will also be a total abolition of all the professional prophets who, like modern fortune-tellers and palmists, traded upon the credulity of the foolish. The utter disrepute into which the prophetic order had fallen was due to the abandonment by the better teachers since Ezra's time of the older forms of prophecy for the exposition of the written Scripture. In other words, the true prophets had become scribes, while those who merely prophesied for a livelihood still carned on the calling which they had brought into disrepute. Some of the scribes were no doubt in the highest sense of the word prophets, but since they no longer spoke in the authoritative manner of the ancient prophets, it seemed to their contemporaries that the era of prophecy had passed away (cf. Psalms 74:9 1Ma 14:41). The writer looks forward to a time when those who wear a hairy garment to deceive will be no more tolerated, and when the popular indignation against them will be so great, that even the parents of one who claims to be a prophet will have no hesitation in putting him to death. Then if anyone be accused of prophesying on the ground that he has wounds like the self-inflicted lacerations which the prophets exhibit as a proof of their inspired frenzy, he will prefer to charge himself with disgraceful conduct rather than admit the truth, and will pretend that the wounds have been inflicted on him in some vile debauch. The word rendered friends means elsewhere lovers and that in a bad sense. A different vocalisation would give the sense amours; i.e. the false prophet will pretend that he has been wounded by the indignant relatives of the victims of his lusts. [J. G. Frazer (Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 3 i. 74f.) thinks that the wounds between the arms were marks tattooed on his shoulders in token of his holy office, the lovers being the Baalim. The shoulders are among some primitive peoples the sensitive part of the medicine-man, and are often covered with an infinite number of small marks, like dots, set close together. A. S. P.]
Zechariah 13:1-6
1 In that day there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for uncleanness.a
2 And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD of hosts, that I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land, and they shall no more be remembered: and also I will cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to pass out of the land.
3 And it shall come to pass, that when any shall yet prophesy, then his father and his mother that begat him shall say unto him, Thou shalt not live; for thou speakest lies in the name of the LORD: and his father and his mother that begat him shall thrust him through when he prophesieth.
4 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the prophets shall be ashamed every one of his vision, when he hath prophesied; neither shall they wear a roughb garment to deceive:
5 But he shall say, I am no prophet, I am an husbandman; for man taught me to keep cattle from my youth.
6 And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.