Denial
Not everybody sees it as a crisis — three groups in particular come under scrutiny. See which of the three groups grabs most of your sympathy, and try to work out why.
First, the establishment, those who welcome everything foreign and others who rush in to get what they can (vv 8-9). Zephaniah seems to suggest these people are ‘on the make’, able to afford foreign clothes, anxious to take advantage of the new trading opportunities (to ‘buy in to globalisation’), welcome all manner of foreign goods and use their position to flaunt a new way of life. A more generous view may be that they are accepting the inevitable and building bridges to a new world but that is not how it is perceived by those who stand for purity nor by those who would like to join in but have no chance.
Second, the traders and their customers (vv 10-11). Business thrives on the back of the foreign presence but these will be the first to ‘wail’ when the ‘crash’ comes. They live and work near the Fish Gate and the Mortar, an area where invading armies will strike first and where defences are minimal. But are the merchants condemned for taking advantage of the situation or for exploiting the disadvantaged? Either way, spare a thought for the poor people whose desperation drove them into their arms but who then found themselves abandoned when the going got rough.
The third group is the biggest — the indifferent — but is it due to apathy, or because they can’t make up their minds (the ‘don’t knows’), or because they want to believe that it will all come right in the end? Whatever it is they are going to be hunted down. They have undermined a fundamental principle that Yahweh is a God who intervenes in the history of his people and ‘invented’ a world in which he never does anything (vv 12-13).
The prophet knows better. All of them will discover that the Day of the Lord is darkness and gloom, not victory and vindication as they would like to believe (vv 14-18).