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the fourth year of King Darius, the word of the Lord came to Zechariah on the fourth day of the ninth month, the month of Chislev. 2 Now the people of Bethel had sent Sharezer and Regem-melech, together with their men, to entreat the favour of the Lord, 3 and to ask the priests who were at the house of the Lord of Hosts and the prophets, “Should I mourn and fast in the fifth month, as I have done for so many years?”
4 Then the word of the Lord of Hosts came to me: 5 “Ask all the people of the land and the priests, ‘When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months for these seventy years, was it really for Me that you fasted? 6 And when you eat and drink, do you not really eat and drink for yourselves? 7 Are these not the words that the Lord proclaimed through the earlier prophets when Jerusalem was inhabited and prosperous, along with its surrounding cities, and when the Negev and the Judean foothills were inhabited?’ ”
8 And the word of the Lord came again to Zechariah: 9 “This is what the Lord of Hosts says: ‘Render true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. 10 Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor, and do not devise evil in your hearts against each other’.
11 “But they refused to pay attention; instead they shrugged their shoulders and stopped up their ears so they could not hear. 12 They made their hearts as hard as flint, and refused to hear the law or the words that the Lord of Hosts had sent by His Spirit through the earlier prophets. Therefore great wrath came from the Lord of Hosts.
13 “ ‘Just as when I called out to them, and they would not listen, so when they called out, I would not listen’, says the Lord of Hosts. 14 ‘I scattered them with a whirlwind among the nations which they had not known. So the land was left desolate behind them, with no one coming or going. This is how they turned the pleasant land into a desolation’.”