John 19:37
John 19:3737And, as another Scripture says: “They will look on the One they have pierced.”
JWs read as the apostle citing to confirm that Jesus, sent by Jehovah, was pierced on the cross. The verse is treated as a fulfilment of an Old Testament prediction about the Messiah, with no overlap between Jehovah's identity and Jesus' identity — Jehovah is the speaker who foretold the piercing of his Son. The cross-reference apparatus in the NWT does point to but typically without surfacing the first-person Hebrew construction.
is one of the most theologically loaded citation seams in the New Testament. The apostle quotes — but read Zechariah 12 as a unit. The speaker throughout chapter 12 is Jehovah (vv. 1, 4, 6, 9, 10). Verse 10 in the Hebrew reads "they will look upon ME, the one whom they have pierced, and they will mourn over HIM." The shift from "me" to "him" within a single verse is exactly what we would expect if the One speaking and the One pierced share Yahweh's identity but are distinct persons. John reaches for that verse to interpret the cross. Pair with — "every eye will see him, even those who pierced him." The apostolic conclusion: when Roman soldiers pierced Jesus' side, they were piercing the Yahweh of Zechariah 12. On the doorstep, walk the Witness through Zechariah 12 from verse 1 in their own NWT, then to , and ask the gentle question: when was Jehovah pierced?
The NWT 2013 renders as "they will look to the One whom they pierced" and as "they will look to the one whom they pierced" — flattening the Hebrew first-person construction ("they will look upon ME, the one they pierced") into a third-person antecedent. Standard English translations (ESV, NASB, KJV) preserve the "me… him" shift in that the NWT smooths out. The change muffles the Christological force: a verse where Yahweh identifies himself as the pierced one becomes a verse where Yahweh speaks about a separate pierced figure. John's apostolic citation presupposes the Hebrew first-person reading.