Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 21:5

"Tell ye the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, Meek, and riding upon an ass, And upon a colt the foal of an ass." — Matthew 21:5 (ASV)

Tell the daughter of Zion — The words seem to have been cited from memory, as the Hebrew text of Zechariah 9:9 begins, Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem, and also includes the phrase just, and having salvation in the description of the King.

As the words stand in Zechariah (we need not discuss the authorship or composition of that book here), they paint the ideal King. He comes not with chariot and horse and battle bow, like the conquerors of earthly kingdoms, but as a prince of peace. He revives the humbler pageantry of the days of the Judges (Judges 5:10; Judges 10:4; Judges 12:14), yet exercises a wider dominion than David or Solomon had, from sea to sea, and from the river (Euphrates) to the ends of the earth (Zechariah 9:10).

Our Lord claimed to fulfill that ideal. Interpreted this way, His act was partly an apparent concession to the fevered expectations of His disciples and the crowd. It was also partly a protest—the meaning of which they would later understand—against the nature of those expectations and the self-seeking spirit that accompanied them.

Here, as before, we see the solemn, sad accommodation to the thoughts of others that a teacher of new truths must often resort to when He finds Himself misinterpreted by those who are on a completely lower level of understanding. They wanted Him to claim the kingdom so that they might sit on His right hand and on His left. He would do so, but it would be a kingdom not of this world (John 18:36), utterly unlike anything they were expecting.

A colt, the foal of a donkey — Literally, of a beast of burden, as the word is not the same as that previously used. In the Hebrew of Zechariah, the word reproduces the old poetic phrasing of Genesis 49:11.