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How many people named Zechariah are mentioned in the Bible (including Hebrew Bible and New Testament)?
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Answer: 32
Technically, the entry for “Zechariah” in The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible1 lists 27 people with that name—all in the Hebrew Bible—including, most notably, the sixth-century B.C.E. prophet Zechariah who preached in post-Exilic Judah and whose story is told in the Book of Zechariah (as well as in parts of the Book of Ezra). But if you include related (albeit less popular) spellings such as “Zachariah,” “Zacher” and “Zacharias,” the number rises to 32. Two of these are men named “Zachariah” and one “Zacher,” again all in the Hebrew Bible.
Only two people are listed with the name “Zacharias” (both are mentioned in the New Testament, which was written in Greek, thus the spelling variation). One is the priest Zacharias, father of John the Baptist and husband of Elizabeth, who features prominently at the beginning of Luke’s gospel (the only one that mentions him). The other Zacharias is a bit confusing: In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus refers to Zacharias “son of Barachiah,” who was “murdered between the sanctuary and the altar” (Matthew 23:35; cf. Luke 11:51). This reference may be a conflation of the aforementioned sixth-century B.C.E. prophet Zechariah of Judah (notice that the spelling of his name changed in the Greek New Testament), who was “son of Berechiah son of Iddo” (Zechariah 1:1), with a different Zechariah “son of Jehoiada,” who was stoned to death in the Temple court by command of King Jehoash in the ninth century B.C.E. (2 Chronicles 24:20–23). Some experts believe that the patronymic “son of Barachiah” was a later addition in Matthew (it is not included in Luke’s text) to clear up confusion over which Biblical Zechariah/Zacharias was meant. Another early Christian tradition, recorded in the second-century Protoevangelium of James, tried to resolve the question by suggesting that John the Baptist’s father was also killed in the Temple—because he refused to disclose his infant son’s whereabouts during Herod’s massacre of the innocents (Matthew 2:16–18)—and therefore Jesus was referring to him. Nonetheless, it seems likely that the original reference was to Zechariah son of Jehoiada from 2 Chronicles.
So even during the Biblical period, it was difficult to keep track of the many Zechariahs mentioned in the Bible.
How many people named Zechariah are mentioned in the Bible (including Hebrew Bible and New Testament)?
070 Answer: 32
