Prophet Zechariah, from among the 12 Minor Prophets

Zechariah, son of Berechiah and grandson of Iddo, was a prophet from a priestly family that returned from the Babylonian exile with Zerubbabel. With the prophet Haggai he began to preach in 520 BC, in the second year of King Darius, when work on the ruined Temple of Jerusalem had stopped for years amid poverty, drought and the hostility of the Samaritans. He urged the people to finish the rebuilding, and the Second Temple was completed in 516/515 BC.

His book, the eleventh of the Minor Prophets, is full of night visions. His Slavonic name 'Serpovidets', 'who saw the sickle', comes from one of them: a flying scroll, which the Greek and Slavonic Bible render as a flying sickle (Zech 5:1–2).