“They shall look on him whom
they have pierced.”
John’s citation of Zech 12:10 does not follow verbatim either the MT or the
most common LXX reading. The MT is: “They shall look upon me whom they have
pierced.” In the context the “me” is Yahweh; the implication is strange and the
text may well be corrupt, perhaps accounting for early translators’ attempts to
improve. Since all the following sentences refer to “him,” both scribes
(forty-five of the Hebrew mss. collated by Kennicott and De Rossi) and
commentators have read “him” for “me.” Codex Vaticanus and most other LXX
witnesses read: “They shall look upon me because they have danced insultingly
[=mocked],” reflecting a verbal form from the Hebrew root dqr, “to pierce,” misread as a form from rqd, “to skip about.” Yet there is a Greek reading in the 5th- or
6th-century Vienna Codex (L) that is much closer to a literal rendering of the
MT. Almost certainly the Vienna reading stems from an early
(proto-Theodotionic) recension, conforming the LXX to what was then (1st
century a.d.) becoming the standard Hebrew text. We can be reasonably certain
that John’s citation stems from such an early Greek recension, perhaps in the
short form, “They shall look upon whom they have pierced.” (Actually there is
no “him” in John’s text, but it is required by sense; compare the citation of
Zechariah in Rev 1:7: “Every eye will see him, everyone who pierced him.”).
(Raymond E. Brown, The
Gospel according to John (XIII-XXI): Introduction, Translation, and Notes [AYB
29A; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 938)
