Zechariah and Esther

This is a theory I've been working on. I'm hesitant to publicly declare it, so I decided to hide it safely away where none may find it.

It started when I was trying to figure out the significance of different types of trees in Scripture. I finally decided to just pick one type and try to track it, seeing if there are any patterns, etc, and the type I picked was myrtle. Initial results were rather scattered, but a fact that interested me was that the Hebrew for myrtle was also a name: Hadassah.

Then, ages passed, things that should never have been forgotten were eternally lost (like my keys), Gollum picked up a ring and I read Zechariah about three weeks after reading Esther: whose name in Hebrew is of course Hadassah.

Now, a great deal of my theory is dependent upon the dates for these two books, so let it be said from the outset that I believe Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther to have been contemporaries, and I think they were shortly preceded by Zechariah. I won't be defending that here; have fun tracking it down if you want.

My theory in brief: the events described in Esther were a fulfillment of the prophecies of Zechariah 2:6-13.

The ramifications of this (so far as an interpretation of Zechariah is concerned) aren't really all that great, but are kind of interesting. First, Zechariah and Ezekiel are strongly linked (Ezekiel 36's new covenant and Zechariah 3's High Priest is one of the more obvious correlations), so if this link is carried forward, it would quite possibly link the armies of Gog and Magog to the Agogite (from the Amalekites) son of Esau, Haman (see Ezekiel 39:11: Hamon-Gog and Haman are obviously very similar linguistically). Second, the "wall of fire" that the Lord will be around Israel in Zechariah 2:5 is exemplified by an arrogant, pragmatic pagan ruler.

There is more there, but I need to buttress the theory before I build it any higher.

Blessings,
JB