Charles Ellicott Commentary Zechariah 11:13

"And Jehovah said unto me, Cast it unto the potter, the goodly price that I was prized at by them. And I took the thirty [pieces] of silver, and cast them unto the potter, in the house of Jehovah." — Zechariah 11:13 (ASV)

This verse proves, if proof be needed, that the prophet, in his action, represents the Lord.

Potter. —The price was so contemptible that it is flung to the lowliest of craftsmen. It seems probable that “to the potter with it!” was a proverbial expression, used for throwing away anything that was utterly worthless. The Septuagint, by changing one letter, read “the treasury” instead of “potter.”

A goodly price ... of them. —A better rendering is: Oh, the magnificent price at which I was valued by them! That is to say, “What a price!” ironically. The prophet—in imagination, no doubt—goes into the Temple, and there before God and Israel, in the place where the covenant had been so often ratified by sacrifice, he meets “a potter” (the article is indefinite), and there flings to him the “goodly price,” and so pronounces the divorce between God and the congregation of Israel. The prophet, in his symbolic act, represented God (Ezekiel 34:5), but at the same time he might well (or must) have represented God’s vice-gerent, “my servant David,” or, in other words, the Messiah. (See Notes on Zechariah 3:8; Zechariah 6:12–13.)

Thus, although this prophecy undoubtedly received numerous fulfillments in the often-recurring ingratitude of Israel, we can well, with Saint Matthew, see its most remarkable and complete fulfillment in Him who was in every sense “the Good Shepherd,” and in whose rejection the ingratitude of the chosen nation culminated. The citation in the New Testament is a free paraphrase of the original, probably made from memory, and agrees in all the main points with the original. The introduction of the word “field” (Matthew 27:10) was made, probably inadvertently, by an unconscious act of a mind that wished to find an excellent parallel between the prophecy and its fulfillment; but the price, thirty pieces of silver, does not seem to have been a mere coincidence.

May not the “chief priests” have viciously proposed to Judas this price of a slave (the same that Hosea paid for the adulterous woman, half in money, and half in kind, Zechariah 2:1–2)? And may not the wretched Judas have maliciously accepted this very sum from the same motives that the prophet supposes to have motivated the people to whom he prophesies? Such a fulfillment would be a fulfillment indeed; while a mere chance coincidence between the sum mentioned in one case and that mentioned in another, apart from any agreement in the latter with the spirit of the former, would, in our estimation, amount to no fulfillment at all.