Whom Were the Fasts Really For?

Two years later, a fasting question is turned back on the fasters

In the fourth year of Darius, about 518 BCE, a delegation comes to entreat the LORD and to speak to the priests and prophets. Should I weep in the fifth month, separating myself, as I have done these so many years? The fifth-month fast remembered the temple's destruction. Rebuilding has advanced. The calendar question is sincere.

The word comes to all the people of the land and to the priests: When ye fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh month, even those seventy years, did ye at all fast unto me, even to me? And when ye did eat, and when ye did drink, did not ye eat for yourselves, and drink for yourselves? The LORD will not authenticate a discipline by its age. He asks whom the fasting and the feasting actually served.

The real answer begins with the prophets they already had

Should ye not hear the words which the LORD hath cried by the former prophets, when Jerusalem was inhabited and in prosperity? The inquiry wanted a yes or no on a fast. The first reply is motive, then memory. Verse 2's names and whether Bethel is sender or destination are difficult. The seventh-month fast likely remembered Gedaliah. Those details do not blunt the question.

This unit does not condemn fasting, mourning, Jewish practice, food, drink, or religious calendars. It does not let outsiders declare another person's grief fake. Seventy years is not a modern countdown. Chapter 8 will transform the fasts into feasts. The road there runs through justice the ancestors refused.