⁴ Thus says the Lord my God, “Pasture the flock doomed for slaughter, ⁵ whose buyers slay them and go unpunished, and those who sell them say, ‘Blessed be the Lord, for I have become rich!’ And their own shepherds have no pity on them nor protect them [from the wolves]. ⁶ For I will no longer have pity on the inhabitants of the land,” declares the Lord; “but behold, I will cause the men to fall, each into the hand of another and into the hands of his [foreign] king. And the enemy will strike the land, and I will not rescue the people from their hand.”

⁷ So I [Zechariah] pastured the flock doomed for slaughter, truly [as the name implies] the most miserable of sheep. And I took two [shepherd’s] staffs, the one I called Favor (Grace) and the other I called Union (Bonds); so I pastured the flock. ⁸ Then I eliminated the three [incompetent, unfit] shepherds [the civil rulers, the priests, and the prophets] in one month, for I was impatient with them, and they also were tired of me and despised me.^{(A) 9} So I said, “I will not pasture you. What is to die, let it die, and what is to be destroyed, let it be destroyed; and let the survivors devour one another’s flesh.” ¹⁰ I took my staff, Favor, and broke it in pieces, breaking the covenant which I had made with all the peoples. ¹¹ So the covenant was broken on that day, and thus the most wretched of the flock who were watching me realized that it was the word of the Lord. ¹² I said to them, “If it seems good to you, give me my wages; but if not, do not.” So they weighed out ^[a]thirty pieces of silver as my wages. ^13 [b]Then the Lord said to me, “Throw it to the potter [as if to the dogs]—that magnificent sum at which I am valued by them!” So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them to the potter in the house of the Lord.^{(B) 14} Then I broke my second staff, Union, into pieces to break the brotherhood between Judah (the Southern Kingdom) and Israel (the Northern Kingdom).