to drive or press someone into compliance: to bear down on people (or animals) with forced labor, debt, tribute, or sheer domination.
At its root this verb pictures one person bearing down on another to make them do what they are told. The oldest and most concrete image is a driver urging an animal forward with shouts. From there the word stretches to a slave-driver standing over laborers, a creditor pressing a neighbor for payment, a king squeezing tribute out of his subjects, and a foreign ruler holding a whole nation down.
One figure ties all of these together: the person who forces others to comply, whether by the whip, the account book, the tax roll, or raw power. English has no single word for him, so translators reach for taskmaster, exactor, oppressor, or tyrant depending on the scene.
The word carries a heavy history in the Bible. It first names Pharaoh's slave-drivers in Exodus, and after that almost every appearance is negative: the creditor that fellow Israelites are forbidden to press, the king who bleeds his own people, the foreign tyrant whose rod God promises to break. When it turns to describe being on the receiving end, it means to be worn down and hard-pressed. Only once, in a startling promise in Isaiah, is the word turned inside out, when God replaces the harsh overseer with one whose name is Peace.
Nuances
Whether the word here names an oppressor to be removed or, by a deliberate reversal, a legitimate ruler God raises up from Judah.
- contestedAn oppressor: the promise is that no oppressor will overrun Judah again, continuing the protective theme of the previous chapter.; David L. Petersen, Zechariah 9-14 and Malachi, OTL (1995)
- contestedA legitimate ruler: the word is turned to a positive sense, so that Judah will produce its own rightful leaders, named alongside the cornerstone, the tent peg, and the battle bow.; Carol L. Meyers and Eric M. Meyers, Zechariah 9-14, Anchor Bible 25C (1993)
- contestedDeliberately ironic: God's own appointed rulers will look like harsh drivers from the viewpoint of Judah's enemies.; Mark J. Boda, The Book of Zechariah, NICOT (2016)