Zechariah

Zechariah or Zecharya (Hebrew: זְכַרְיָה, "Renowned/Remembered of/is the Lord") was a person in the Old Testament bible and Jewish Tanakh. He was the author of the Book of Zechariah.

It is a theophoric name, the ending -iah being a short Hebrew form for the Tetragrammaton.

He was a prophet of the two-tribe kingdom of Judah, and the eleventh of the minor prophets. Like Ezekiel, he was of priestly extraction. He describes himself (Zechariah 1:1) as "the son of Berechiah." In Ezra 5:1 and 6:14 he is called "the son of Iddo," who was properly his grandfather. His prophetical career began in the second year of Darius, king of Persia (B.C. 520), about sixteen years after the return of the first company from their Babylonian exile. He was contemporary with Haggai (Ezra 5:1).

Although there is an indication in Targum Lamentations that "Zechariah son of Iddo" was killed in the Temple, scholars generally understand this as a reference to the death of a much earlier figure, Zechariah Ben Jehoiada.

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