Zechariah 7:11

"But they refused to hearken, and pulled away the shoulder, and stopped their ears that they might not hear. Yea, they made their hearts as an adamant stone, lest they should hear the law, and the words which Jehovah of hosts and sent by his Spirit by the former prophets: therefore there came great wrath from Jehovah of hosts."

These verses are one of the most eloquent witnesses in the Bible to the effect that the Law, that is, the Pentateuch, existed before the former prophets (all of them). The ancestors of that generation addressed by Zechariah had refused to hear the Law, which all of them possessed before the days of the prophets; for the text observes that they refused to hear the Law, AND the word spoken by the Spirit of God through the former prophets. This provides a categorical answer to the question of whether or not the Pentateuch existed before the pre-exilic prophets. It did exist; of course it did.

"They pulled away the shoulder ..." This expression has come down to modern times in the description of one unwilling to hear, who is said to "give a cold shoulder" to some proposition. Perhaps the metaphor is founded upon the rebellion of a beast against his yoke.

"Hearts as an adamant stone ..." Hailey noted this:

"In preparing Ezekiel to meet the stubbornness of the Jews in Babylon, God said, "As an adamant harder than flint have I made thy forehead" ... It is thought that Jehovah referred to the diamond, harder than flint."[22]

There is no sin greater than that of inordinate stubbornness manifested in an adamant refusal to hear God's holy word, through which men have the right to live, if only they will. The ancient Israel indeed had exceeded all permissible levels of behavior in such refusals. The inherent reason underlying these words of the prophet was his purpose of showing his questioners the utter foolishness of their ridiculous fasts. The events those fasts commemorated were directly the result of Israel's rebellious refusal to heed the Word of God. Any rules relative to an illegal fast commemorating the wrong thing would have been as ridiculous as the fasts. What was needed was for Israel to hear the word of the Lord, a thing they had long neglected to do.

"The former prophets ..." These included a number of names besides those of contributors to the sacred Canon. Dean provided this list of the former prophets: "Samuel (1 Samuel 1:1), Ahijah of Shilo (1 Kings 14:2,4), Jehu, son of Hanani (1 Kings 16:7), Elijah, and Elisha, Hosea, and Jonah, Iddo, Shemaiah, Hanani, and Huldah."[23] There were also a number of the other Canonical prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Haggai, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Obadiah, Amos, Micah, Joel, Malachi, Nahum, and the one we are studying, Zechariah. Not all of these were "former," for some of them were contemporary with Zechariah. The prophetess Deborah should also be added to this list, and perhaps others. God had abundantly provided witnesses to the requirements of his sacred Law.

The astounding revelation of this passage is that Israel's obduracy was of their own doing. Matthew Henry commented on this:

"Nothing is so hard, so unmalleable, so inflexible, as the heart of a presumptuous sinner; and those whose hearts are hard may thank themselves; they are of their own hardening, and it is just with God to give them over to a reprobate sense, to the hardness and impenitence of their own hearts."[24]