Zacharias and Elizabeth

The Forerunner is born into the priesthood of the Old Covenant, of a father who served at the altar and a mother “of the daughters of Aaron.” Both were “righteous before God,” yet they were barren and advanced in years (Luke 1:5–7), so that, as with Sarah, Hannah, and the mothers of old, the child God grants comes manifestly by promise and not by nature. This file follows the Lukan account of the parents: the annunciation by Gabriel at the altar of incense, Zacharias’s doubt and silencing, the words spoken about who the child will be, Elizabeth’s conception and concealment, and the Visitation in which the unborn John leaps before his Lord.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Forerunner)

The Priestly Parents

Luke opens the whole Gospel infancy narrative not in Nazareth but in the Temple, with a priest and his wife. “In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zacharias, of the division of Abijah; and he had a wife of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth” (Luke 1:5). The note of the priestly “division” is precise: David had organized the descendants of Aaron into twenty-four courses, of which Abijah was the eighth (1 Chron. 24:10), each serving in the Temple in rotation. Both parents thus stand within the priesthood of the Law — Zacharias serving it, Elizabeth born of it — and the prophet who will end the prophets and the Law (cf. Matt. 11:13) comes forth from the very heart of the Old Covenant’s worship.

Luke is emphatic about their righteousness and their childlessness together. “They were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless. But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years” (Luke 1:6–7). The barren and aged couple is a deliberate scriptural echo: as Abraham and Sarah (Gen. 18:11), and as Elkanah and Hannah (1 Sam. 1:2) before them, Zacharias and Elizabeth receive a child of promise when nature has failed, so that the birth itself proclaims that the child is given by God. Chrysostom presses this pattern of the holy barren as God’s way of preparing His people to believe in births beyond nature, that the supreme birth of all might be believed (John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew 4.3; NPNF I/10).

The Annunciation at the Altar of Incense

The birth is announced in the sanctuary, during the liturgy. “While he was serving as priest before God when his division was on duty, according to the custom of the priesthood, it fell to him by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense” (Luke 1:8–10). The offering of incense at the golden altar was among the highest priestly privileges (cf. Exod. 30:7–8), and the people stood at prayer in the courts while the priest entered the Holy Place. Into this most solemn moment of Israel’s worship the archangel comes: “And there appeared to him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense” (Luke 1:11).

The angel announces the answered prayer and names the child: “Do not be afraid, Zacharias, for your prayer is heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth” (Luke 1:13–14). What follows is the angel’s portrait of the Forerunner before he is conceived. “For he will be great before the Lord, and he shall drink no wine nor strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb. And he will turn many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God” (Luke 1:15–16). The abstention from wine and strong drink marks him with the consecration of the Nazirite (cf. Num. 6:3) and recalls Samson and Samuel; the filling with the Spirit “even from his mother’s womb” sets him apart from birth for prophecy.

The angel then makes the decisive identification: “And he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared” (Luke 1:17). The words deliberately take up the close of the prophet Malachi — “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children” (Mal. 4:5–6) — so that John is announced from the first as the Elijah who is to come, not by reincarnation but “in spirit and power.” The Lord Himself later confirms the identification: “if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come” (Matt. 11:14; cf. 17:12–13). The Elijah-typology is therefore not a later embellishment but the angel’s own word in the Gospel.

The Doubt and the Silencing

Zacharias, like Abraham before him, asks for a sign, but his asking is reproved as unbelief. “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years” (Luke 1:18). The angel answers with his own name and authority: “I am Gabriel, who stand in the presence of God; and I was sent to speak to you, and to bring you this good news. And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things come to pass, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time” (Luke 1:19–20). The silencing is at once a chastisement of doubt and itself the sign Zacharias asked for. Chrysostom draws the contrast that the Church’s reading has kept ever since: the Theotokos, asking “How shall this be?” (Luke 1:34), inquired in faith and was answered with the descent of the Spirit, while Zacharias, doubting, was bound in silence — the one question rising from belief, the other from disbelief (John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew 4.5; NPNF I/10).

The people, meanwhile, “were waiting for Zacharias, and they wondered at his delay in the temple” (Luke 1:21). When he came out unable to speak and could only make signs to them, “they perceived that he had seen a vision in the temple; and he made signs to them and remained dumb” (Luke 1:22). He finishes his days of service and returns home (Luke 1:23), bearing in his silence the whole weight of the promise he could not yet proclaim.

The Conception and Concealment

“After these days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she hid herself, saying, ‘Thus the Lord has done to me in the days when he looked on me, to take away my reproach among men’” (Luke 1:24–25). Her words name the reproach that childlessness carried in Israel and the joy of its reversal, in language that recalls Rachel’s cry, “God has taken away my reproach” (Gen. 30:23). The five-month concealment also prepares the chronology Luke is laying down: when Gabriel comes to Nazareth, Elizabeth is in her sixth month (Luke 1:26, 36), a synchronism the Church will keep in placing the Forerunner’s Nativity six months before Christ’s.

The Visitation and the Leaping in the Womb

Gabriel had told the Virgin a confirming sign: “And behold, your kinswoman Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For with God nothing will be impossible” (Luke 1:36–37). The naming of Elizabeth as the Theotokos’s kinswoman (Greek syngenis) joins the two households, though Luke does not specify the precise relation. Mary then “went with haste into the hill country, to a city of Judah, and she entered the house of Zacharias and greeted Elizabeth” (Luke 1:39–40).

What follows is the first meeting of the Forerunner and his Lord, both still unborn. “And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit” (Luke 1:41). The order is significant: the child’s leaping precedes and prompts the mother’s prophecy, for the Spirit who fills John from the womb (Luke 1:15) moves him to greet his Master, and the grace passes from the child to the mother. Elizabeth cries out the words the Church has joined to the Annunciation greeting ever since: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:42–43). She herself names the cause of John’s joy: “For behold, when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the babe in my womb leaped for joy” (Luke 1:44). The unborn prophet “goes before” his Lord here as he will at the Jordan — recognizing and rejoicing before the One he cannot yet see or name.

A Note on the Death of Zacharias

Luke tells of Zacharias only through the Benedictus and the naming of his son (Luke 1:57–79; treated in The Conception and Nativity); the Gospels say nothing of his death. A later tradition holds that he was slain in the Temple. Its earliest source is the second-century apocryphon, the Protoevangelium of James, which narrates that when Herod sought the infant John amid the slaughter of the innocents and Elizabeth fled with him into the hill country, Herod’s officers killed Zacharias at the altar when he would not betray his son (Protoevangelium of James 22–24). [Disputed: the identification of John's father with the "Zechariah son of Barachiah" whom the Lord names as slain "between the sanctuary and the altar" (Matt. 23:35; cf. Luke 11:51) is the reading of the *Protoevangelium of James* 23–24 and is followed by some later Fathers; but the better-attested view refers that saying to Zechariah son of Jehoiada, stoned in the temple court under King Joash (2 Chron. 24:20–22), the last murder in the Hebrew canon's order, so that "from Abel to Zechariah" spans the whole of Scripture]. This account is not found in the canonical Gospels; it belongs to the later hagiographical tradition and is pinned to its attestation here, not asserted as history (per METHODOLOGY §3.5). The Church keeps the memory of the righteous Zacharias and Elizabeth liturgically (their joint commemoration falls on September 5), independent of the resolution of this textual question.

References

The Gospel According to Luke 1:5–45. Revised Standard Version. (The priestly parents and their barrenness, 1:5–7; the annunciation at the altar of incense and the angel’s portrait of John, 1:8–20; the doubt and silencing, 1:18–22; the conception and concealment, 1:24–25; the kinswoman Elizabeth and the Visitation with the leaping in the womb, 1:36–45.)
The Gospel According to Matthew 11:13–14; 17:12–13; 23:35. Revised Standard Version. (The Lord’s identification of John with the Elijah who is to come; the saying on Zechariah son of Barachiah.)
1 Chronicles 24:10; Numbers 6:3; Genesis 18:11; 30:23; Judges 13:2–3; 1 Samuel 1:2; Malachi 4:5–6; 2 Chronicles 24:20–22. Revised Standard Version (Old Testament background: the course of Abijah, the Nazirite consecration, the holy barren, the Elijah prophecy, and the murder of Zechariah son of Jehoiada).
John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew 4.3, 4.5. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 10. (The pattern of the holy barren as preparation for belief in births beyond nature; the contrast between the faithful question of the Virgin and the doubting question of Zacharias.)
The Protoevangelium of James 22–24. In The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations, ed. and trans. Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. (The extra-canonical account of the flight of Elizabeth and the slaying of Zacharias at the altar; cited as the earliest attestation of the tradition, not as history.)