Zechariah 12: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Zechariah delivers a message from the LORD about Israel, describing a day when the surrounding nations gather to attack Jerusalem and Judah. God says he will make the city a cup that makes the nations stagger and a heavy stone that gashes all who lift it, will panic their horses and riders, and will make Judah's leaders like fire among dry wood, saving the tents of Judah first so that David's family and Jerusalem are not held above the rest. He promises to protect Jerusalem's people and to destroy the nations that attack it. He then says he will pour out on David's family and Jerusalem a spirit of kindness and pleading prayer, and that they will look on the one they have pierced and mourn, family by family, across the land.

Claim by Claim

1. 12:1
   • This is the burden of the word of the LORD concerning Israel.
   • The LORD declares this.
   • The LORD stretches out the heavens.
   • The LORD lays the foundation of the earth.
   • The LORD forms the spirit of man within him.
2. 12:2
   • The LORD says he is making Jerusalem a bowl that makes all the surrounding peoples reel.
   • Judah also will be involved in the siege against Jerusalem, though whether Judah is besieged along with Jerusalem or takes part in besieging it is left unclear.
3. 12:3
   • On that day the LORD will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples.
   • All who lift that stone will be badly gashed.
   • All the nations of the earth will gather against Jerusalem.
4. 12:4
   • On that day, the LORD declares, he will strike every horse with panic.
   • He will strike the horse's rider with madness.
   • He will open his eyes upon the house of Judah.
   • He will strike every horse of the peoples with blindness.
5. 12:5
   • The chiefs of Judah will say in their heart that the inhabitants of Jerusalem are strength to them through the LORD of hosts, their God.
6. 12:6
   • On that day the LORD will make the chiefs of Judah like a firepot among wood.
   • He will make them like a flaming torch among cut sheaves.
   • They will devour all the surrounding peoples on the right hand and on the left.
   • Jerusalem will again be inhabited in her own place, in Jerusalem.
7. 12:7
   • The LORD will save the tents of Judah first.
   • This is so that the glory of the house of David and the glory of the inhabitants of Jerusalem will not be magnified above Judah.
8. 12:8
   • On that day the LORD will shield the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
   • On that day the one who stumbles among them will be like David.
   • The house of David will be like God.
   • The house of David will be like the angel of the LORD going before them.
9. 12:9
   • On that day the LORD will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem.
10. 12:10
    • The LORD will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplications.
    • They will look to the LORD regarding the one they have pierced, the text leaving unclear whether the pierced one is the LORD himself or another.
    • They will mourn for him as one mourns for an only son.
    • They will grieve bitterly for him as one grieves bitterly for a firstborn.
11. 12:11
    • On that day the mourning in Jerusalem will be great.
    • That mourning will be like the mourning of Hadad-rimmon in the plain of Megiddo.
12. 12:12
    • The land will mourn.
    • Each family will mourn by itself.
    • The family of the house of David will mourn apart, and their wives apart.
    • The family of the house of Nathan will mourn apart, and their wives apart.
13. 12:13
    • The family of the house of Levi will mourn apart, and their wives apart.
    • The family of Shimei will mourn apart, and their wives apart.
14. 12:14
    • All the remaining families will mourn, each family apart, and their wives apart.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

12:1

"Burden" is the standard heading over a prophetic announcement. The Hebrew word means both a load someone has to carry and a thing said out loud, and it usually introduces a message of judgment. "The LORD" in capitals stands for the personal name of Israel's God, written in Hebrew with four consonants and read aloud by Jews as "the Lord" out of reverence; where the text says plain "Lord" or "God" the King James uses ordinary type.

12:2

The cup is a stock prophetic image: God pours, a nation is made to drink, and the drinker reels about helpless, unable to defend itself. Zechariah twists it, Jerusalem is not the one drinking but the cup itself, forced on the armies that come against her.

12:3

"On that day" is a fixed prophetic phrase, repeated all through chapters 12 to 14, for the decisive moment when God acts. It names no date on a calendar. The heavy stone may point to a real practice: heavy boulders kept in a town for young men to heave as a test of strength. The Hebrew behind "badly torn" means gashed or lacerated, the kind of injury a man does to himself lifting more than he can hold.

12:4

Horses meant chariots and cavalry, the fastest and most feared arm of an ancient army; to panic the horses was to break the force. "I will keep my eyes open" translates a Hebrew idiom for watching over someone protectively, the opposite of turning a blind eye.

12:5

The word behind "leaders" means clan chiefs, heads of the extended family groups that made up Judah, not officials appointed from above. "The LORD of Armies" (the King James "LORD of hosts") is a title picturing God as commander of the massed armies of heaven; it is Zechariah's favorite way of naming him.

12:6

A firepot was a portable clay container holding live coals, used to carry fire from house to house, harmless where it belongs, catastrophic tipped into stacked firewood. The cut stalks of grain are sheaves, bundles left standing in the field at harvest and bone dry. "On the right hand and on the left" is Hebrew for "in every direction."

12:7

The "tents" of Judah are the open, unwalled settlements of the countryside, set against the fortified capital; calling them tents recalls the years before Israel lived in towns. Country people were normally the first overrun by an invading army and the last to be helped. Here the order is reversed.

12:8

David was remembered as the fighter who killed a giant as a boy, so "as strong as David" is a way of saying the frailest man will fight like the nation's greatest warrior. "The angel of the LORD" is the figure who went ahead of Israel through the wilderness in the older stories, a messenger so closely identified with God that the two sometimes speak as one voice.

12:10

"Kindness" and "pleading prayer" are built on the same Hebrew root: favor freely given, and the crying out for favor that answers it. ("They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him": the Hebrew jumps from "me" to "him" in mid-sentence, and translators have never agreed how to resolve it; a few ancient copies read "look on him" throughout. The rendering keeps the jolt as the Hebrew has it.) An only son, or a firstborn, was a household's heir and its whole future; losing one was the standard measure of grief beyond bearing.

12:11

Nobody is certain what Hadadrimmon refers to. Hadad and Rimmon were both names of the storm god worshiped in Syria, and some take the phrase to mean the ritual wailing for a god believed to die each year. Others read Hadadrimmon as a place near Megiddo. Megiddo guarded the pass into the great northern plain and was the site of King Josiah's death in battle in 609 BC, a loss the whole nation mourned and still commemorated in Zechariah's time.

12:12

Israelite mourning was loud and public, but grief on this scale was organized: each clan gathered on its own, and within each clan the men and the women kept apart, as custom required at such gatherings. The Nathan named here is a son of David, not the prophet of the same name; David and Nathan together stand for the royal line.

12:13

Levi was the ancestor of the priests and temple servants, and Shimei the head of one of the main Levite families. Set beside the two names in the previous verse, they pair the priestly line with the royal line, the two households at the top of the nation grieving alongside everyone else.