(v) What is the intended series or line of which Zechariah is the last representative? Abel is naturally the first, but, chronologically, Z. ben Jehoiada was not the last prophet whose murder is recorded in the O.T.; Uriah (Jer. xxvi. 20 ff.) was later. The usual explanation that his murder stands last in the arrangement of the Hebrew Bible with Chronicles at the end is unsatisfactory; the books of the O.T. still circulated separately in the first century of our era. Moore’s answer is “It is not because the death of Z. was the last crime of the kind in Jewish history that it is named in the Gospel, but because it was in popular legend the typical example of the sacrilegious murder of a righteous man, a prophet of God, and of the appalling expiation God exacted for it.” But the identification of the victim with the prophet of the Restoration suggests another answer. Zechariah ben Berechiah _did_ in fact stand chronologically at the end of the prophets; as Josephus writes (§ 63), the succession failed after Artaxerxes (_i. e._ Ahasuerus). The context in Matthew relates to the _ancient_ prophets; the later generation that built the prophets’ tombs is set over against that of the forefathers who murdered them. That the final instance of such murder should be drawn from recent (to say nothing of future) history would be inappropriate. The son of Bariscæus was no prophet or priest and “as a layman would have no business in the part of the court between the temple and the altar” (Moore). For the opposite view see Wellhausen _Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien_, ed. 2 (1911), pp. 118 ff. His main points are that Chronicles was a learned, not a popular, book and not likely to have been known to or quoted by Christ (but Christ is apparently quoting at second hand from one of those apocryphal books which were essentially popular), and that the rabbinical legend is in its origin unconnected with the story in Chronicles and really an echo (_Nachklang_) of the episode in Josephus, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans having here, as elsewhere, been confused with the earlier destruction by the Babylonians. Footnote 431: Tradition also connects Z. ben Jeberechiah (Isa. viii. 2) and Zacharias, father of John the Baptist, with the N.T. passage. Footnote 432: Translated from _T.J., Taanith_ iv. 5, by G. F. Moore in the _Journal of the American Oriental Society_, vol. xxvi. (1906), pp. 317 ff.; cf. Lightfoot _Horæ Hebraiacæ_ on Matt. _l. c._ VI. Note on § (50). PORTENTS AND ORACLES With this passage should be compared the following allusions in Roman writers:—