Text: Zechariah 12:10
OT Text Referred to: Genesis 22:2
Subject: Mourning for the only son — the elegy of the irreplaceable, beloved child
Source: Treasury of Scripture Knowledge; Gary E. Schnittjer, Old Testament Use of Old Testament (2021)
Reference Type: Echo
Connection Method(s): Longitudinal Theme
Anchor Text: Zech 12:10 — They Shall Look on Him
Significance: Zechariah 12:10 describes the mourning over the pierced One in deliberately chosen elegiac terms: "they will mourn for Him as one mourns for an only child (yāḥîḏ), and grieve bitterly for Him as one grieves for a firstborn son." The word yāḥîḏ — "only one" — is the very term that marks Isaac in the Akedah, where God says, "Take your son, your only son (yəḥîḏəḵā) Isaac, whom you love" (Gen 22:2), repeated as the refrain of the binding (22:12, 16). Zechariah draws on the Akedah's vocabulary of only-son love and only-son loss to give the mourning over the pierced One its peculiar shape: not generic grief but the specific, irreplaceable anguish reserved for a beloved, only child offered up. The connection runs along the longitudinal "beloved/only son" theme that the canon carries from Isaac through Israel-as-firstborn (Exod 4:22) to its consummation in the only-begotten Son (John 3:16; 1:14, 18) — the One whom the Father did not spare but gave up for us all (Rom 8:32, itself echoing Gen 22:16). Zechariah's elegiac word thus anticipates the NT identification of the pierced One as the Father's only Son, mourned with Akedah-grief. The pastoral weight is the wonder of substitution: at Moriah the only son was spared because a ram was provided; at the cross the only Son was not spared, because He is the provision. To mourn the pierced One as an only child is to grasp the costliness of the Father's love and to find the Son, given and pierced, infinitely precious — the beloved Son in whom the Father's love is poured out toward us.