Zechariah 8:6 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

If it be marvellous— Difficult. Houbigant. It might seem difficult and marvellous to the Jews of those times, that Jerusalem should be called a city of truth, and that it should be full of old men and children, as if some great and extraordinary period was about to begin; therefore, lest the Jews should interpret this as spoken of their own times, it is immediately subjoined, Zechariah 8:7. I will save my people from the east and from the west, to give them to understand that other times and a different state of their nation were predicted. The Jews, upon the completion of the Babylonish captivity, returned from the north, or from the east, but not from the west: nor can any other time here be pointed out, than the last return of the Jews; when they shall flow from all parts of the world to the new Jerusalem, and there constitute a new empire; the fame of whose sanctity shall allure and draw to it many nations, as is foretold at the end of this chapter. We cannot understand this either of the Jews, or of the Gentiles, who embraced the faith upon the preaching of the apostles: not of the Jews, because the Lord did not save at that time the Jewish nation, which he was about to disperse in a very short period;—not of the Gentiles, because the Gentiles were not, according to the common scriptural phrase, the people of God—(my people, as the Jews in a national sense were,) before he had called them from the east and from the west.