Zechariah 12:10

10. The spirit of grace and of supplications See on Joel 2:28. Grace is, as in many other passages in the Old Testament, the favor shown by Jehovah toward his people (compare Zechariah 4:7). In this passage it is thought of as active within man, making him conscious of wrongdoing and leading him to make supplication for mercy and pardon (compare Romans 2:4, “the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance”).

The house of David,… the inhabitants of Jerusalem The former as in Zechariah 12:7; the latter may represent the population of the whole land, for the spiritual blessings are surely not to be limited to the inhabitants of the capital. The entire nation, from the rulers down, shall turn in humble penitence to Jehovah, and then they shall become partakers of the spiritual gifts (compare Zechariah 13:1).

They shall look upon me whom they have pierced The speaker is Jehovah; the subject of look and have pierced is the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem; me can refer only to Jehovah, whom they have pierced (metaphorically) by their cruel rebellion. The look is one of contrition.

Mourn for him The pronoun can refer only to some representative of Jehovah whom they rejected. “The prophet may have pictured to himself the man of God, whom he leaves mysteriously indefinite, as a prophetic national leader, who incurs at the hands of princes and people the fate prepared, according to tradition, by Manasseh for Isaiah, by Jehoiakim for Uriah (Jeremiah 26:20 ff.), and by several rulers almost for Jeremiah.” Some interpret him as referring to Jehovah himself for me. If so, the change from the first to the third person must be explained by the tendency, which is common in prophetic discourse, not to distinguish clearly between Jehovah and his representative (compare introductory remarks to Zechariah 11:4-14). The thought might be expressed more clearly in a paraphrase, “They shall look unto me whom they pierced in the person of my representative, and they shall mourn for him whom they thus cruelly rejected.” There may be an allusion to the fate of the good shepherd whom the people rejected (compare Zechariah 11:4-14). On the other hand, some see in the representative of Jehovah the good high priest Onias III, who was deposed in 175 and slain in 170 ( 2Ma 4:27-34 ). In John 19:37, this passage is applied to Jesus (see Introduction p. 603f). Some Hebrew manuscripts and some manuscripts of LXX. read unto him instead of upon me, R.V. unto me, and some modern commentators consider it the original.

However, it seems preferable to retain the present Hebrew text; the change into him is probably due to the desire of a pious Jew to remove a reading which he considered offensive, because it made God himself the object of a murderous attack. The rest of the verse indicates the bitterness of the grief (see on Amos 8:10).