Matthew 21:5

Tell ye the daughter of Sion. — The words seem to have been cited from memory, the Hebrew text of Zechariah 9:9 beginning, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Sion; shout O daughter of Jerusalem,” and inserting “just, and having salvation” in the description of the King. As the words stand in Zechariah (we need not here discuss the question as to the authorship or composition of that book) they paint the ideal King coming, not with “chariot” and “horse” and “battle bow,” like the conquerors of earthly kingdoms, but as a prince of peace, reviving the lowlier pageantry of the days of the Judges (Judges 5:10; Judges 10:4; Judges 12:14), and yet exercising a wider dominion than David or Solomon had done, “from sea to sea, and from the river (Euphrates) to the ends of the earth” (Zechariah 9:10). That ideal our Lord claimed to fulfil. Thus interpreted, His act was in part an apparent concession to the fevered expectations of His disciples and the multitude; in part also a protest, the meaning of which they would afterwards understand, against the character of those expectations and the self-seeking spirit which mingled with them. Here, as before, we trace the grave, sad accommodation to thoughts other than His own to which the Teacher of new truths must often have recourse when He finds Himself misinterpreted by those who stand altogether on a lower level. They wished Him to claim the kingdom, that they might sit on His right hand and on His left. Well, He would do so, but it would be a kingdom “not of this world” (John 18:36), utterly unlike all that they were looking for.

A colt the foal of an ass. — Literally, of a beast of burden, the word not being the same as that previously used. In the Hebrew of Zechariah the word reproduces the old poetic phraseology of Genesis 49:11.