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They Will Mourn for the One They Pierced

10 “I[a] will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace, who pleads for mercy.[b] Then they will look at me, the one they have pierced.”

They will mourn for him[c] as one mourns for an only child. They will grieve bitterly for him, as one grieves over his firstborn. 11 On that day there will be great mourning in Jerusalem, as great as the mourning for Hadad Rimmon[d] in the plain of Megiddo. 12 The land will mourn, each family by itself: the family of the house of David by itself, and their wives by themselves; the family of the house of Nathan[e] by itself, and their wives by themselves; 13 the family of the house of Levi by itself, and their wives by themselves; the family of Shimei[f] by itself, and their wives by themselves; 14 all the families that remain, each family by itself, and their wives by themselves.

A Fountain to Wash Away Sin

13 On that day[g] a fountain will be opened for the house of David and for the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for uncleanness.

In that day, declares the Lord of Armies, I will cut off the names of the idols from the land, and they will no longer be remembered. I will also remove the prophets and the impure spirit from the land. If anyone still prophesies, his father and his mother who gave birth to him will tell him, “You shall not live, because you have spoken lies in the name of the Lord!” Then his father and his mother who gave birth to him will stab him when he prophesies.

In that day each of those prophets will be ashamed of his vision. When he prophesies, he will not put on a prophet’s garment made of hair in order to deceive. Instead he will say, “I am not a prophet. I have been a tiller of the soil since my youth, when a man bought me.” Someone will ask him, “What are these wounds on your body?”[h] He will reply, “I received these wounds in the house of my friends.”

Footnotes

  1. Zechariah 12:10 The speaker is the coming Messiah.
  2. Zechariah 12:10 Or a spirit that pleads for grace and mercy
  3. Zechariah 12:10 Sudden, unmarked shifts from first person (look at me) to third person (mourn for him) are not unusual in prophecy. The words set off by quotation marks are the words of the Messiah. The following words are commentary spoken by the prophet.
  4. Zechariah 12:11 Or at Hadad Rimmon. Hadad Rimmon may be the name of a heathen god, whose death was mourned like the death of Tammuz. Or it may be the name of a place where Israel mourned the death of Josiah.
  5. Zechariah 12:12 Not the well-known prophet Nathan, but Nathan the son of David who was an ancestor of Jesus (Luke 3:31)
  6. Zechariah 12:13 One of the divisions of the Levites
  7. Zechariah 13:1 This may refer specifically to Good Friday (see 3:9) or it may refer to the New Testament era.
  8. Zechariah 13:6 Heathen priests gashed themselves as part of their frenzied prayers.