Albert Barnes Commentary Zechariah 1:9

"Then said I, O my lord, what are these? And the angel that talked with me said unto me, I will show thee what these are." — Zechariah 1:9 (ASV)

What are these?—He asks, not who, but what they signify.

The angel that talked with me—Literally, “spoke in me.” The very rare expression seems intended to convey the thought of an inward speaking, by which the words would be conveyed directly into the soul, without the intervention of the ordinary outward organs.

God says to Moses, “If there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, will make Myself known to him in a vision, I will speak (literally) in him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so—in him will I speak mouth to mouth” (Numbers 12:6–9); and Habakkuk says of similar inward teaching, “I will watch to see, what He will speak in me.”

It is the characteristic title of the one attendant angel who was God’s expositor of the visions to Zechariah (Zechariah 1:13–14, Zechariah 1:19, Zechariah 2:2 [Hebrew text], Zechariah 2:3 [Hebrew text, verse 7]; Zechariah 4:1, Zechariah 4:4–5; Zechariah 5:5, Zechariah 5:10; Zechariah 6:4).

Dionysius: “By his ministry God showed me things to come, in that the angel formed in the spirit and imaginative power of Zechariah phantasms or images of things which were shown him beforehand, and gave him to understand what those images signified.”