Zechariah 12:10
Whom Have They Pierced?

Objection 1 · "Et Asher" Means "Because Of," Not "Whom"

Singer has argued that the phrase אֵת אֲשֶׁר (et asher) should be read causally — "because of the one" — rather than as a relative clause, "whom." This would shift the verse from "they will look upon me, whom they pierced" toward something closer to "they will look to me because of the one who was pierced," loosening the identity between the speaker and the pierced party.

Weight: This specific grammatical claim does not hold up against comparable constructions elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. In 1 Samuel 16:3 and Jeremiah 38:9, אֵת אֲשֶׁר functions as a definite direct-object marker plus relative pronoun — marking "whom," a genuine accusative — not a causal "because of." Jeremiah 38:9's construction is grammatically identical to Zechariah 12:10's. Reading et asher causally here, but not in the parallel constructions, is special pleading rather than a consistent grammatical rule.

Objection 2 · Modern Translations Render It as Plural

Both the Stone Edition and the NJPS Tanakh render the verse with a plural object — "those whom they have stabbed," "those who are slain" — turning an individual pierced figure into an indefinite group of battle casualties.

Weight: The plural rendering is a minority translation choice without strong textual support. The Masoretic Text itself is singular throughout: אֲשֶׁר־דָּקָרוּ (a singular relative pronoun, though with a plural verb "they pierced" — the plurality belongs to the piercers, not the pierced), followed immediately by unambiguous singular pronouns and singular comparisons — "mourn for him," "as one mourns for an only child," "as for a firstborn." The ancient versions agree: the Septuagint, Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, the Vulgate, and the Targum all render with singular objects. The plural reading is a modern interpretive choice, not the plain sense of the received text in any era before the twentieth century.

Objection 3 · The Context Is National Battle-Mourning

Zechariah 12:1–9 describes Jerusalem's military victory over besieging nations. Singer reads verse 10 as continuing that military context — the people mourning their own war dead collectively, not weeping over a singular messianic figure.

Weight: The military context of 12:1–9 is real, but verse 10 marks a deliberate shift — "and I will pour out... a spirit of grace and supplications" introduces something distinct from the battle narrative, an act of repentance rather than a victory report. The specific comparisons used — mourning "as for an only child," "as for a firstborn" — are personal, singular, and intimate in a way that generic references to fallen soldiers are not. Nowhere else does Zechariah use "only child" or "firstborn" language for collective war casualties; both images describe the loss of one uniquely precious individual.

Objection 4 · The Me/Him Shift Signals Textual Corruption

The verse opens with God speaking in the first person — "they shall look upon me" — then shifts to third person — "they shall mourn for him." Singer treats this as evidence the text is corrupt or was altered, since a coherent original would not have God, the speaker, also be the one physically pierced.

Weight: A first-to-third-person shift within a single divine oracle is not unique to this verse and does not by itself indicate corruption — it is a recognized feature of Hebrew prophetic style (grammarians call it enallage) occurring elsewhere in the prophets without implying two separate referents. Some later Hebrew manuscripts do smooth the difficulty by reading אֵלָיו ("to him") in place of אֵלַי ("to me") — but this is visibly a secondary correction move, not the original reading: the earlier and more difficult "me" is preserved in the Masoretic Text's primary reading, the Septuagint, and the other ancient versions. The harder reading, not the smoothed one, is the more likely original — which is the opposite of what Objection 4 needs.

Objection 5 · John Changed the Text to Fit Jesus

John 19:37 quotes the verse as "they will look on him whom they pierced" — using "him" throughout, not "me." Singer and others read this as proof the New Testament altered Zechariah's wording to avoid the awkward implication that Jesus is Yahweh, and to make the whole verse point cleanly at Jesus.

Weight: John's phrasing traces to a Greek recension already circulating in the first century — a text-form followed by Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus, and echoed in other pre-Johannine Jewish Greek witnesses — not an invention original to John. New Testament writers regularly quoted the Old Testament according to the Greek text-form available to them rather than translating fresh from the Hebrew each time; this is a citation practice, not an alteration of the underlying Hebrew Vorlage, which is the actual text under dispute and which this exhibit's other sections address directly.

Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 52a

Commenting on Zechariah 12:12 ("the land shall mourn, every family apart"), the Talmud records a dispute between Rabbi Dosa and the other sages over what the nation will be mourning. Rabbi Dosa's answer: the death of Messiah ben Joseph, a slain messianic figure of Jewish tradition, whose death is directly tied to the language of 12:10 — "And they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and shall mourn for him, as one mourns for his only son." The Talmudic redactor sides with Rabbi Dosa's reading over the alternative (that the mourning is for the destruction of the evil inclination). Scholarly analysis of the passage's Hebrew-Aramaic layering (David Mitchell, Review of Rabbinic Judaism, 2005) argues the tradition may reach back to the Tannaitic period, potentially before 70 CE — independent of, and possibly predating, Christian use of the verse.

This is a direct answer to Objection 3: one of the oldest strata of rabbinic interpretation reads Zechariah 12:10 not as collective mourning over war casualties or an abstraction like the evil inclination, but as mourning for one specific, named messianic individual who is killed.

Rabbi Moshe Alshech (16th century)

Even centuries later, and explicitly rejecting the Christian application, the respected commentator Alshech preserved the same individual, atoning reading: the people will look to God in repentance "when they see him whom they pierced, that is, Messiah, the Son of Joseph; for our Rabbis... have said that he will take upon himself all the guilt of Israel, and shall then be slain in the war to make atonement... it shall be accounted as if Israel had pierced him, for on account of their sin he has died." A medieval rabbi, independent of any Christian argument, describes a Messiah who bears Israel's guilt and dies to atone for it — vicarious, substitutionary language applied to an individual pierced Messiah, from within Judaism's own interpretive tradition.