to run a person through with a blade or spear: the weapon thrust that is meant to kill
This is a soldier's word. Every time it appears someone is driving a sword or a spear into a body, and the wound is meant to be fatal. Phinehas goes after a couple with a spear, Abimelech's armor bearer finishes off his dying master, Saul begs his own armor bearer for the same mercy, and parents are told to put their son to death this way for lying in God's name. Nothing gentler ever happens with it.
The word gets used from more than one angle, which is why the senses below look different while the picture behind them stays the same. Sometimes it names the act. Sometimes it names the men the act leaves behind, so that "the run through" becomes a plain way of counting casualties in the streets. Once, in Lamentations, it is stretched past the battlefield: people dying of hunger are described as though a blade had gone through them.
Two nearby Hebrew words are worth keeping apart from it. One is the broader verb for making a hole, boring or punching through something (נָקַב); the other is the noun for a casualty, the body already fallen (חָלָל). This verb is narrower than the first and more active than the second, because it is the thrust itself.
One line, Zechariah 12:10, has carried more argument than the rest of the word's history put together: "they will look to me, the one whom they pierced." When the New Testament quotes it (John 19:37, Revelation 1:7) it reaches for the Greek verb for running someone through (ἐκκεντέω). What the Hebrew verb means is not the hard part; who was pierced, and how the wound belongs to God, is.
Nuances
The identity of the pierced figure in Zechariah 12:10. MT reads וְהִבִּיטוּ אֵלַי אֵת אֲשֶׁר־דָּקָרוּ, with a first-person object followed immediately by third-person mourning (וְסָפְדוּ עָלָיו), and the proposals include an individual leader or prophet put to death, the smitten shepherd of Zechariah 13:7, a collective use of the singular for the faithful killed in the community's own conflicts, and YHWH wounded through the treatment of his representative. Part of the Hebrew manuscript tradition and some early versions read אֵלָיו. The lexical sense of דקר is not itself in question: BDB, HALOT and DCH list this occurrence with the other physical piercings.
- majorityThe harder MT reading אֵלַי is original, and the verse speaks of an actual killing that God treats as a wound done to himself; the mourning that follows names the person killed.; HALOT, s.v. דקר; Carol L. Meyers and Eric M. Meyers, Zechariah 9-14 (Anchor Bible 25C, 1993); Mark J. Boda, The Book of Zechariah (New International Commentary on the Old Testament, 2016)
- minorityThe reading אֵלָיו, "they will look to him," attested in part of the Hebrew manuscript tradition and in early versions, is preferred, which makes the pierced figure plainly someone other than God.; Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, apparatus at Zechariah 12:10