This paper provides a theoretical description of ZnP that agrees with experiment and accounts for its semiconductive nature. ZnP has an electronic structure analogous to antiaromatic molecules, making it susceptible to Peierls distortion. This distortion is sufficiently large to produce two equivalent semiconductive D2h minima connected through a low-energy D4h gapless transition structure, which can be captured with DFT only if a hybrid functional with a sufficient amount of exact exchange is used.