Zechariah 12:11

In that day shall there be a great mourning in Jerusalem,.... Great numbers being awakened, convinced, and converted, and brought to true repentance: as the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddon.

In that day shall there be a great mourning in Jerusalem, as the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddon. In that day shall there be a great mourning in Jerusalem, as the mourning of Hadadrimmon.

In that day, when the Jews shall know, own, and mourn for their sins and for that great sin in crucifying the Lord of glory, shall there be a great mourning; a very great mourning, which is expressed by the greatest the Jews ever were acquainted with. and which for its greatness grew up into a proverb: The mourning of Hadadrimmon, or the mourning for Josiah slain at Hadadrimmon, a town in the valley of Megiddon. Of this mourning see ,25.

Zechariah 12:11 In that day shall there be a great mourning in Jerusalem, as the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddon.Ver. 11. In that day shall there be a great mourning in Jerusalem] Magnificabitur luctus (so the Hebrew hath it), their mourning shall be greatened, their heaviness heightened, they shall rise in their repentance above all that is ordinary. The casuists and schoolmen affirm sorrow for sin to be the greatest of all sorrows. 1. In conatu: in the effort, the whole soul seems to send springs into it, out of every faculty. 2. In extensione: in the strain, it is a spring which in this life more or less is continually dropping; neither would God have the wounds of godly sorrow to be so dosed up at all, as not to bleed afresh upon every good occasion. 3. In appreciatione: In understanding, the true penitentiary doth ever judge that a good God offended, a Saviour crucified, should be the primo cause of greatest grief. 4. In intensione: in aim, for intention of displicence in the will; there being no other things with which, or for which, the will is more displeased with itself than for sinning against God. There is more cause of grief, say they, for sinning than for the death of Christ; because therein was aliquid placens, pleasing anyone but sin is simpliciter displicens, simply displeasing. But is it not godly mourning, may some say, unless it be so great? I answer, that other mourning may make more noise, like a dashing shower of rain, or a land flood that by a small shallow channel comes down from a hill. When a man mourns for his only son, or the like, this comes from God as a judgment; it comes downhill, as it were, hath nature to work with it, and nothing to hinder it; but this mourning and melting over Christ is as a stream that goeth uphill, and through many reeds and flags, as Mr Cotton expresseth it. As the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddo] Where good Josiah was slain, and where the people saw, to their unspeakable grief and heart break, family, Church, and commonwealth plucked up by the roots in the loss of that one man, who was the very breath of all their nostrils, as Jeremiah sadly acknowledgeth in his Lamentations, composed on that very occasion, and when he died, all their prosperity here died with him; and themselves were no better than living ghosts, walking sepulchres of themselves; a being they had, but not a life; those that before seemed to touch heaven with their finger, fell down to the earth as if they had been planet-struck, as Budaeus speaketh of the French courtiers at the death of Louis XII - nunc humi derepente serpere sideratos esse diceres. When Augustus died, orbis ruinam timueramus, saith Paterculus, we thought all had been lost, and that the world would have fallen about our ears.

(11) Hadadrimmon, says Jerome, “is a city near Jezreel, now called Maximianopolis, in the field of Mageddon, where the good king Josiah was (mortally) wounded in battle with Pharaoh-necho.” (Comp. 2 Chronicles 35:22-25). Assyriologists seem to be of opinion that the name should be pronounced Hadar-Ramman.It has been urged as an objection to the post-exilic origin of this prophecy that the expression “as the mourning of Hadad-rimmon in the valley of Megiddon” is a note of time, which should fix the date of this prophecy to a time shortly after the death of Josiah. We reply that this mourning over Josiah was a typical instance, and became “an ordinance for Israel” (2 Chronicles 35:25’), and so was naturally cited with reference to a similar occasion. Moreover, the fact that a place in the tribe of Issachar was, in the prophet’s time, known by an Assyrian name seems to us a proof, in itself almost conclusive, that the date of this prophecy is post-exilian.

Verse 11. A great mourning] A universal repentance. As the mourning of Hadadrimmon] They shall mourn as deeply for the crucified Christ as their forefathers did for the death of Josiah, who was slain at Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddon. See 2 Chronicles 35:24-25.

11. Hadadrimmon] This is generally supposed, on the authority of Jerome, to have been a city near Jezreel, called in his day Maximinianopolis, in the valley of Megiddo, and the place where Josiah was fatally wounded by Pharaoh-Necho, king of Egypt. Both accounts of Josiah’s death state that it was “at,” or “in the valley of” Megiddo, that his wound was received (2 Kings 23:29; 2 Chronicles 35:22), while the fuller account in the Book of Chronicles not only affirms the national character of the mourning for him at the time, “all Judah and Jerusalem mourned for Josiah,” but informs us that the prophet Jeremiah, probably in some dirge composed for the occasion, “lamented for him,” and that the anniversary of his death long continued to be observed as a day of national calamity. “All the singing men and the singing women spake of Josiah in their lamentations to this day, and (they) made them an ordinance in Israel; and behold they are written in the lamentations.” “The grief of the people at the fall of their brave and pious king at the age of thirty-nine years was extraordinarily deep. It seemed as though a gloomy foreboding would take possession of their minds that his fall really involved that of the realm itself, of which he had been the last great prop. Long years after, the elegies composed on him by Jeremiah, and sung among the people, were still preserved, and were repeated with a sad pleasure on the days set apart for the commemoration of the royal hero.” Ewald.

As the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddon - This was the greatest sorrow, which had fallen on Judah. Josiah was the last hope of its declining kingdom.

VARIOUS THE FUTURE OF ISRAEL, Zechariah 12:1 to Zechariah 14:21.The heading (Zechariah 12:1) names the subject of these utterances, Israel, a term used here not in a national but in a religious sense of the people of Jehovah.