Was Zechariah Iddo's son or grandson?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The disagreement turns on a single biographical datum stated in structurally identical Hebrew. Ezra 5:1 and 6:14 call the prophet zĕkaryāh bar-ʿiddôʾ — note that Ezra here uses the Aramaic patronymic bar (the books's Aramaic sections run from 4:8 to 6:18), 'Zechariah son/descendant of Iddo.' Zechariah 1:1 (in Hebrew) reads zĕkaryāh ben-berekyāh ben-ʿiddôʾ, 'Zechariah son of Berechiah son of Iddo.' On the surface Ezra makes Iddo the father; Zechariah 1:1 makes Iddo the grandfather and inserts Berechiah as the father.

The lexical harmonization is genuinely strong and should be granted its full weight. Both Hebrew ben and Aramaic bar routinely denote any male descendant, not strictly a first-generation son. The clearest biblical proof is Matthew 1:1, 'Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham,' where a thousand years separate the named figures; comparable generation-skipping occurs throughout the Chronicler's genealogies and in the frequent biblical usage of 'sons of Israel' for distant descendants. So Ezra's 'son of Iddo' can be read as 'descendant of Iddo,' identifying the prophet by his more famous ancestral house rather than his immediate father. This is the position of Archer and most conservative commentators, and it is not special pleading: identifying a person by a prominent grandfather was ordinary in priestly contexts.

There is, moreover, positive corroborating evidence for the three-generation scheme. Nehemiah 12:4 lists 'Iddo' among the priestly heads who returned with Zerubbabel, and Nehemiah 12:16 names 'Zechariah' as head of the house of Iddo in the next generation — precisely the ancestral relationship Zechariah 1:1 presupposes, with Iddo as the founder of a priestly clan and Zechariah as a later representative of it. If the prophet Zechariah was reckoned as belonging to the 'house of Iddo,' then calling him 'son of Iddo' is exactly the abbreviation one would expect. On the genealogical fact, then, the texts are reconcilable: Iddo is the clan ancestor, Berechiah the father, Zechariah the prophet.

What keeps this from a clean 'harmonized' verdict is the textual and traditional status of 'Berechiah' itself. The Septuagint of Ezra and of 1 Esdras (6:1; 7:3) likewise call him son of Addo/Iddo without Berechiah, so the abbreviated form is the consistent witness outside the book of Zechariah. More troubling is the broader tangle around the name. Isaiah 8:2 names a 'Zechariah son of Jeberechiah' (yĕberekyāhû, a longer theophoric variant) two centuries earlier, and the resemblance has long raised the suspicion that 'Berechiah' migrated into Zechariah 1:1 from that figure or from scribal harmonization. The suspicion is reinforced by Matthew 23:35, where Jesus refers to 'Zechariah son of Berechiah whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar' — a description that actually belongs to Zechariah son of Jehoiada in 2 Chronicles 24:20-22 (the last murder in the Hebrew canonical order). The Gospel thus fuses at least two, possibly three, distinct Zechariahs, and the Lukan parallel (Luke 11:51) tellingly omits the patronymic 'son of Berechiah' altogether — a likely sign that early scribes recognized the difficulty.

Meyers and Meyers in the Anchor Bible and Petersen in the OTL read Zechariah 1:1 as a literal three-link genealogy and treat Ezra's form as compression. Williamson and Blenkinsopp note the same. The result is a layered picture: the lexical and prosopographic data reconcile the two patronymics easily, but the independent evidence that 'Berechiah' may be a secondary intrusion means the underlying tradition about the prophet's father is not fully secure.

Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable as to the son/descendant idiom, but with a real residual textual question about whether 'Berechiah' was ever original.