On the twenty-fourth day of the eleventh month, the month Shebat, in the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord came to Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, the son of Iddo the prophet. — Zechariah 1:7
Zechariah — Jah has remembered, from the Hebrew זְכַרְיָה — receives eight visions in a single night, and each one runs a different piece of the vocabulary the court fixed at creation. His father is Berechiah, "knee of Jah" or Jehovah's blessing, and his grandfather Iddo, "the appointed time." The names themselves declare the mechanism before a single vision opens: the appointed, blessed remembering of the court. What follows is not eight unrelated pictures. It is Genesis run in sequence — vegetation, firmament, garment, light, word, the plain of Shinar, the four directions — until the court's own botanical vocabulary is raised to a title: the Branch, the sprout, the one who builds. Elohim, the judges and rulers, enforces after its kind through every one of the eight enclosures.
The Myrtle Trees and the Patrol — Genesis Day Three, the Vegetation Category
The first vision opens among myrtle trees in a valley — a man on a red horse, and behind him horses red, black, white, and mixed in colour. Genesis 1:11, day three, fixed the category of things that grow from the ground; the myrtle is the setting the court chooses for its report on the whole earth. The riders have gone up and down through the earth and found it quiet — the same patrol pattern later run by Elohim in Job's council. YHVH, present consciousness, hears the report and is answered with good and comforting words: Zion will again be measured, the towns will overflow. The vegetation category is not decoration here. It is the ground the court stands on while it takes the report — growth surrounding the announcement of what is about to grow.
The Four Horns and the Four Craftsmen — Elohim as Judges and Rulers
Four horns have scattered Judah, Israel, and Jerusalem — horns being the standard Hebrew figure for a nation's power to dominate. Against them the Lord shows four craftsmen, workmen raised for the specific purpose of casting the horns down. This is Elohim in its plainest form: the plural bench of judges and rulers matching every instrument of scattering with an instrument of its own, one for one. Nothing here is vegetation or firmament; it is pure enforcement — the statute that whatever lifts itself up against the assumed I AM of Jerusalem is met by a corresponding
