A Crisis of Faith
To identify the disaster which faced Zephaniah look first at what had been going on. Hezekiah (727-687) had gone down in history as one of the best kings of Judah (2 Kings 18:5), having centralised worship in Jerusalem and condemned all forms of idolatry, alien rituals and ceremonies, including Canaanite religious practices associated with child sacrifice, fertility rites, sexual licence and prostitution, sacred pillars and trees. Manasseh (687-642), his successor, did exactly he opposite. Very much under the thumb of Assyria, he distinguished himself by throwing Hezekiah’s policy into reverse, promoting idolatry and syncretism, and though he gained a certain amount of autonomy for his people his success was all at the expense of embracing foreign gods and customs. (2 Kings 21:1-9, 17, 21-2).
Zephaniah’s prophecy therefore opens with a subtle charge. As Manasseh has ‘uncreated’ the work of Hezekiah, so Yahweh will reverse (‘uncreate’) Genesis 1: 20-28 until nothing remains but the silence that existed before creation. Zephaniah then invites the people to use that silence to ponder the meaning of what is happening.
On a first reading the picture may not immediately ring bells for us. Religious syncretism is hardly our problem. The alien rites and practices of the Canaanite Baal and the Ammonite Milcom (vv 4-5) scarcely appear on our horizon. But then the more we become a multi-cultural, multi-faith society and find ourselves addressing the problems of religion, race, culture, education and charitable law, the less remote they appear, and if instead of worrying about the detail we enter into the emotions of the people they are not very far away at all.
Zephaniah’s contemporaries were facing a crisis of faith. For the most part they had grown up in a relatively isolated community with one God and one pattern of worship. History told them it hadn’t always been like that. Their ancestors had had to resist the local gods to establish their own and had succeeded in doing so. Now, over the last fifty years or so, foreign gods and other faiths were coming back and the purity of their faith was under attack. Time for a period of silence to see where they stood.