Lives of Scripture

Regem-melech appears once in Scripture, alongside a man named Sharezer, sent -- on the most common reading of Zechariah 7:2 -- by the people of Bethel to Jerusalem, 'to seek the favor of the LORD, and to speak to the priests... and to the prophets, saying, Shall I weep in the fifth month and abstain, as I have done these many years?' (Zechariah 7:2-3). The question concerned whether the fasts of mourning kept since the temple's destruction decades earlier should continue, now that the exile was ending and the temple was being rebuilt under Darius. Regem-melech's inquiry, brief as his own role in it is, prompted an extended response from the LORD through Zechariah spanning two full chapters. Rather than answering the calendar question directly, God rebuked the nation for fasting and feasting for their own sake rather than His, recalling how their ancestors' failure to practice 'justice and kindness' toward the vulnerable, not mere ritual observance, had led to the exile in the first place (7:5-14). Zechariah closes with God's promise that the very fasts in question would one day be turned into 'joy, gladness, and cheerful feasts' for a restored Jerusalem (8:19). Regem-melech himself never speaks again in the text, but his delegation's question became the occasion for one of the clearest post-exilic statements that God desires genuine obedience over religious performance.