Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Zechariah · About this commentary
They Will Look to Me
Zechariah 12:10-14
10 I will pour on David’s house and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the spirit of grace and of supplication. They will look to me whom they have pierced; and they shall mourn for him as one mourns for his only son, and will grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for his firstborn. · WEB
The grief is poured out before it is felt, and a whole nation mourns household by household with nobody consoling anybody.
The order of verse 10 decides how the rest reads. Before anyone looks or mourns, something is given: I will pour on David's house and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the spirit of grace and of supplication.
So the mourning that follows is not a spontaneous change of heart. It is the effect of a gift, and the two words naming the gift are grace and the disposition to ask — which means the capacity to see what they had done arrives from the same hand as the pardon for it.
Then the sentence itself: they will look to me whom they have pierced; and they shall mourn for him.
The person shifts inside one clause. The one pierced speaks as me; the mourning is for him. Every English version keeps the shift, so it is in the Hebrew rather than in any translator's choice. Whatever else the verse does, it identifies the pierced one with the speaker — and the speaker through the whole passage has been God.
The New Testament resolves it toward the third person when it quotes the line John 19:37, and elsewhere holds the piercing and the mourning together as this verse does Revelation 1:7.
The grief is then measured by the two sharpest domestic losses available: as one mourns for his only son, and as one grieves for his firstborn. Not a national reverse, and not a defeat. The death of the one child.
Verse 11 gives it a historical scale — like the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddo — which points to the last time a lament in Judah became a permanent institution 2 Chronicles 35:25.
And then the detail that makes the passage strange. The mourning is itemized by household, and each one is apart: David's house apart, and their wives apart; Nathan's house apart, and their wives apart; Levi apart, the Shimeites apart, all the families who remain, every family apart, and their wives apart.
The word repeats eleven times in three verses. A nation is grieving simultaneously and nobody is comforting anyone — not the royal house, not the priests, not husbands and wives. This is not a public ceremony. It is the same grief arriving separately in every room in the country.
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