Zechariah 5: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Zechariah sees two more visions. In the first, a huge flying scroll goes out over the land as a curse against thieves and against people who swear falsely by the LORD's name, entering their houses and destroying them. In the second, a woman called Wickedness is shut inside a measuring basket under a lead cover, and two winged women carry the basket off to the land of Shinar, where a house will be built for it.

Claim by Claim

1. 5:1
   • The prophet turned again.
   • He lifted up his eyes and looked.
   • He saw a flying scroll.
2. 5:2
   • The one speaking asked him what he saw.
   • He answered that he saw a flying scroll.
   • The scroll was twenty cubits long.
   • The scroll was ten cubits wide.
3. 5:3
   • He told the prophet that this scroll is the curse.
   • The curse goes out over the face of the whole land.
   • Everyone who steals is purged away from one side according to the curse (the Hebrew verb means cleansed or purged, rendered in the King James as cut off).
   • Everyone who swears is purged away from the other side according to the curse.
4. 5:4
   • The LORD of hosts declares that he brings the curse forth.
   • The curse will enter the house of the thief.
   • The curse will enter the house of the one who swears falsely by the LORD's name.
   • The curse will lodge inside that house.
   • The curse will consume that house.
   • The curse will consume the house's timbers and its stones.
5. 5:5
   • The angel who talked with the prophet went out.
   • The angel told him to lift up his eyes.
   • The angel told him to see what this is that is going forth.
6. 5:6
   • The prophet asked what it was.
   • The angel said that it is the ephah that is going forth.
   • The angel said further that this is their eye, or appearance, throughout all the land (the Hebrew word is read either as their look or as their iniquity).
7. 5:7
   • A round disk of lead was lifted up.
   • A single woman was sitting inside the ephah.
8. 5:8
   • The angel said that this is wickedness.
   • He threw the woman into the middle of the ephah.
   • He threw the lead weight onto the mouth of the ephah.
9. 5:9
   • The prophet lifted up his eyes and looked.
   • He saw two women coming out.
   • Wind was in their wings.
   • They had wings like the wings of a stork.
   • They lifted up the ephah between the earth and the heaven.
10. 5:10
    • The prophet asked the angel who talked with him where they were carrying the ephah.
11. 5:11
    • The angel answered that they were carrying it to build a house for it in the land of Shinar.
    • The house will be prepared.
    • The ephah will be set down there on its own pedestal.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

5:1

A scroll was the ordinary form of a book: a long sheet of leather or papyrus rolled onto rods and unrolled to be read. Legal documents, contracts and written verdicts took this form too, so a scroll could stand for an official written sentence, not just a story. This one is unrolled, which is why its length and width can be seen and why it can have writing on both faces (verse 3).

5:2

A cubit was about eighteen inches, roughly the length of a forearm from elbow to fingertips. The scroll is therefore about thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide, the size of a large room, not of a document anyone could hold.

5:3

"Curse" here does not mean bad language. It means a formal sentence of punishment, of the kind written into ancient treaties and law codes: a clause naming what happens to anyone who breaks the agreement. Likewise "swears falsely" means breaking an oath sworn in a legal or business setting, perjury, not obscene speech. The Hebrew word behind "the whole land" can mean either the land of Judah in particular or the whole earth, and translators divide over which is meant. The verb rendered "swept away" or "cut off" is also disputed: it can mean purged away, or (with the opposite force) let off unpunished.

5:4

"The LORD of hosts" or "of Armies" translates a title of Israel's God; "hosts" is an old English word for armies. Where the King James prints LORD in capitals, the Hebrew has the personal name of God rather than the ordinary word for a master. To swear "by my name" was to call God as witness that what you said was true, so a false oath dragged God's name into a lie.

5:6

An ephah was a dry measure of about five to six gallons, roughly a bushel, the standard container for grain in the marketplace. It was the largest measure in everyday commercial use, which is why a basket of that size is the natural image for buying and selling; it was also far too small to hold a person, which is part of what makes the vision strange. Because the ephah was the merchant's measure, and because rigged measures were a stock example of fraud, the container itself carries a suggestion of dishonest trade.

5:7

A talent was a unit of weight, roughly seventy-five pounds. The lead disc is therefore a lid heavy enough that whatever is inside the basket cannot push it off.

5:8

The Hebrew word for "wickedness" is grammatically feminine, which is why wickedness appears in the vision as a woman; the figure is a personification of the thing, not a statement about women. Verse 6, in the King James, reads "this is their resemblance", the Hebrew there is uncertain, and other ancient versions read a word differing by one letter meaning "their guilt," which is why modern translations differ at that point.

5:9

The stork is a large migratory bird with a wide wingspan that flies long distances, including out of Israel toward Mesopotamia. It was also listed among the birds Israelites were forbidden to eat, so the wings carrying the basket belong to a creature classed as unclean.

5:11

Shinar is the old name for southern Mesopotamia (Babylonia, the region of Babylon, where earlier scripture places the tower of Babel. For Zechariah's first hearers, who had recently returned from exile there, it named the place they had just come home from. The word translated "house" is the ordinary Hebrew word for a dwelling, but it is also the standard word for a temple, a god's house. "Its own base" or "pedestal" is the term for the fixed stand on which a statue or cult object was mounted inside a shrine) the language of installing an image for worship.