In Luke 11:51, Jesus says that the blood of all the prophets which was “shed from the foundation of the world,” will “be charged against this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary.”
Jesus is saying to the Pharisees and lawyers that God sent the prophets in order to bring down judgment upon Israel for their unbelief and rebellion.
This is why Jesus uses Abel and Zechariah as his examples. In English it works well to say, all the martyrs from “from A to Z.” Of course in Greek (like in Hebrew), Z is not the last letter of the alphabet. But in the Hebrew Bible Abel is the first to die for his faith, as he is killed by his brother Cain in Genesis 4. And Zechariah is the last of the prophets to die for his faith in 2 Chronicles 24– since Chronicles is the last book of the Hebrew Bible.
To say “from Abel to Zechariah” is to give not an alphabetical list of the martyrs, neither is it a historical list (since there are other prophets who died afterwards).
Rather, “from Abel to Zechariah” only makes sense as a canonical list. If Jesus wanted to include all prophetic martyrs, he could have said from Abel to John the Baptist (cf. Luke 9:9), but when our Lord Jesus speaks of “the blood of all the prophets,” he focuses on those that are listed in the canonical books of the OT, from Genesis to Chronicles.
We hear about the death of Zechariah in our passage tonight.
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