Zechariah 5
Zechariah's night visions have so far been full of comfort - horsemen patrolling a quiet earth, a lampstand burning by the Spirit, a high priest re-clothed and forgiven. Now, in the sixth and seventh visions, the tone turns grave. God is not only rebuilding His people; He is cleansing them, and that means dealing with the sin in their midst. The chapter opens with a scroll flying through the air, unrolled so its writing can be read, and the angel names it without softening: This is the curse that goeth forth over the face of the whole earth (v. 3). It is the written sentence of the broken law against the thief and the false-swearer, and it does not merely hover - it enters the guilty house to consume it.3
Then comes the second vision, and it answers the first. An ephah - an ordinary market basket used to measure out grain - goeth forth, and the angel lifts the lid to show what is inside: a woman, sitting in the basket, whom he names plainly, This is wickedness (v. 8). She is thrust back down and a heavy weight of lead is dropped over the mouth of the basket to seal her in. This is sin made visible, measured out, and pinned under a lid. The vision is not gentle about it - wickedness is named for what it is, and held down so it cannot get out.
And then it is carried away. Two women with wings like a stork's lift the sealed basket up between the earth and the heaven and bear it off to the land of Shinar - the old country of Babel and Babylon, far from Jerusalem - where it is set down on its own base, a thing returned to the place it belongs (vv. 9-11). The two visions read as one message. Sin is real, and it must be dealt with; God will not leave it festering in the house of His people. Either it is borne away - measured, sealed, and carried clean out of the land - or it stays and consumes. The chapter sets both endings before the reader and asks which one the heart is choosing.2
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Zechariah 5:1-4The Curse That Goeth Forth
1Then I turned, and lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and behold a flying roll. 2And he said unto me, What seest thou? And I answered, I see a flying roll; the length thereof is twenty cubits, and the breadth thereof ten cubits. 3This is the curse that goeth forth over the face of the whole earth: for every one that stealeth shall be cut off as on this side according to it; and every one that sweareth shall be cut off as on that side according to it. 4I will bring it forth, saith the LORD of hosts, and it shall enter into the house of the thief, and into the house of him that sweareth falsely by my name: and it shall remain in the midst of his house, and shall consume it with the timber thereof and the stones thereof.
Zechariah lifts his eyes and sees something no one had ever seen: a scroll, unrolled and airborne, flying over the land. Behold a flying roll (v. 1). When the angel asks what he sees, the prophet gives its dimensions: the length thereof is twenty cubits, and the breadth thereof ten cubits (v. 2) - roughly thirty feet by fifteen, the size of a large room. This is no private note. A scroll that big, unrolled in plain sight, is a public proclamation, a document meant to be read by everyone at once. And the fact that it is unrolled matters: a sealed scroll keeps its contents hidden, but this one is open, its writing exposed for all to see. Whatever is written on it, God intends it to be known. The sheer scale of the thing presses the point home. This is not a small or hidden matter. It is a sentence written large and sent out over the whole land, impossible to overlook and impossible to mistake.3
The angel reads the scroll aloud: This is the curse that goeth forth over the face of the whole earth: for every one that stealeth shall be cut off as on this side according to it; and every one that sweareth shall be cut off as on that side according to it (v. 3). The two sides of the scroll carry two charges. One side condemns the thief - the one who wrongs his neighbor. The other condemns the false-swearer - the one who profanes God's name with a lying oath. It is a telling pair. The first stands for sins against people; the second for sins against God; together they reach across the whole law, both tables of it. And the verdict written on both sides is the same: cut off. The phrase is the language of the covenant's own sanctions - to be cut off is to be removed, severed from the people and from the life of the community. The scroll, then, is not arbitrary cruelty. It is the written sentence of the broken law, the curse that the law itself attaches to those who break it. God's rebuilding of His people is not a soft thing that overlooks wrongdoing. It comes with a reckoning, and the reckoning is published for all to read.
Then the curse does something startling: it moves. I will bring it forth, saith the LORD of hosts, and it shall enter into the house of the thief, and into the house of him that sweareth falsely by my name: and it shall remain in the midst of his house, and shall consume it with the timber thereof and the stones thereof (v. 4). The scroll is not a passive announcement pinned to a wall; it is sent, and it goes in. It enters the very house of the guilty person, lodges itself there - it shall remain in the midst of his house - and stays until the house is consumed, down to its timber and its stones. Even the stones are eaten away. This is a picture of sin's working that we badly need. We imagine wrongdoing as something we can keep tucked away in a corner, sealed off from the rest of life, doing no real harm. The vision says otherwise. Unaddressed sin does not stay in its corner; it takes up residence and works its way through the whole structure, hollowing out everything from the inside until the house itself collapses. The curse is not a lightning bolt from outside. It is a corruption that moves in and consumes. And the phrase saith the LORD of hosts seals it: this reckoning is not the prophet's opinion but the word of the One who commands the armies of heaven.
Zechariah 5:5-8This Is Wickedness
5Then the angel that talked with me went forth, and said unto me, Lift up now thine eyes, and see what is this that goeth forth. 6And I said, What is it? And he said, This is an ephah that goeth forth. He said moreover, This is their resemblance through all the earth. 7And, behold, there was lifted up a talent of lead: and this is a woman that sitteth in the midst of the ephah. 8And he said, This is wickedness. And he cast it into the midst of the ephah; and he cast the weight of lead upon the mouth thereof.
The angel calls Zechariah to look again: Lift up now thine eyes, and see what is this that goeth forth (v. 5). What he sees is humble and ordinary - This is an ephah that goeth forth (v. 6). An ephah was a standard dry measure, and the basket that held it was a common sight in every market, the container a merchant used to measure out grain. There is nothing dramatic about it; that is part of the point. Then the angel adds a strange phrase: This is their resemblance through all the earth. The basket somehow represents the people - their likeness, their condition - across the whole land. A measuring basket is an apt symbol for it. The ephah is where weights and measures are kept honest or made crooked; it is the very instrument by which a dishonest merchant cheats, shrinking the measure he sells and swelling the one he buys. The prophets thundered against exactly this: the scant measure that is abominable. So when wickedness appears, it appears inside a market basket - sin lodged in the ordinary commerce of daily life, in the buying and selling and weighing that fill an ordinary day. The vision does not locate evil in some far-off dramatic place. It finds it in the basket on the counter.3
Now the lid comes up. And, behold, there was lifted up a talent of lead: and this is a woman that sitteth in the midst of the ephah (v. 7). A heavy disc of lead - a talent in weight, the round leaden cover of the basket - is raised, and underneath sits a woman. The angel does not leave her a mystery. He names her with a single, unsparing word: This is wickedness (v. 8). Sin, which we so often keep abstract and unnamed, is here given a face and a body and called what it is. There is mercy in the naming, hard as it sounds. Evil thrives on staying hidden, on being called anything but its true name - a mistake, a weakness, a complicated situation. The angel refuses all of that. He lifts the lid, points, and says the plain word: wickedness. Only what is named can be dealt with. As long as sin sits in the basket unidentified, it does its work in the dark; the moment it is named for what it is, it can be confronted, sealed, and removed. The vision's first act of judgment, then, is simply to tell the truth about what is in the basket.
What happens next is decisive and forceful: And he cast it into the midst of the ephah; and he cast the weight of lead upon the mouth thereof (v. 8). The woman is thrust back down into the basket - not coaxed, not negotiated with, but cast in - and then the heavy leaden disc is slammed down over the opening to seal her inside. The repeated verb cast carries the violence of it; this is decisive restraint, wickedness pinned and shut in under a weight it cannot lift. The lead is the point. It is dense and heavy precisely so that what is underneath cannot rise again. There is something bracing here about how God deals with sin once it is named. He does not leave the lid off, hoping wickedness will behave. He presses it down and seals it under a weight. This is not the whole story - the next verses will carry the basket away entirely - but it is a necessary first move. Before sin can be removed, it must be contained, held down, kept from spreading. The God who is rebuilding His people will not let the wickedness in their midst roam free. He measures it, names it, and pins it under lead - and only then lifts it out.
Zechariah 5:9-11Borne Away to the Land of Shinar
9Then lifted I up mine eyes, and looked, and, behold, there came out two women, and the wind was in their wings; for they had wings like the wings of a stork: and they lifted up the ephah between the earth and the heaven. 10Then said I to the angel that talked with me, Whither do these bear the ephah? 11And he said unto me, To build it an house in the land of Shinar: and it shall be established, and set there upon her own base.
Now the sealed basket is taken away. Then lifted I up mine eyes, and looked, and, behold, there came out two women, and the wind was in their wings; for they had wings like the wings of a stork: and they lifted up the ephah between the earth and the heaven (v. 9). Two winged figures bear the basket up off the ground and carry it through the air. The detail of the stork is deliberate. The stork is a great migratory bird, strong on the wing, known for travelling vast distances - and under the law it was reckoned among the unclean birds. Both notes fit. These are wings made for a long journey, carrying their burden far; and a basket of wickedness is fittingly borne by what is itself unclean, taken up by its own kind and removed from the holy land. The basket is lifted between the earth and the heaven - suspended, in transit, no longer resting in the place it had been. Wickedness, named and sealed in the previous verses, is now plainly on its way out. It is not being dealt with where it sat; it is being lifted up and carried off, the whole weight of it leaving the land entirely.
Zechariah asks the obvious question - Whither do these bear the ephah? (v. 10) - and the angel's answer carries enormous freight: To build it an house in the land of Shinar: and it shall be established, and set there upon her own base (v. 11). Shinar is not a random destination. It is the ancient name for the plain of Babylonia - the land of Babel, where men once built a tower to make themselves a name (Gen. 11:2); the seat of the empire that had burned Jerusalem and dragged its people into exile. Shinar is, in the language of Scripture, the very emblem of human pride organized against God. And there, the angel says, wickedness will be given an house and set… upon her own base - established in its proper place. The irony is sharp and intentional. Wickedness is not annihilated in a flash; it is sent home, returned to the country that fits it, set up on the pedestal where it belongs. The land of God's people is to be cleansed by sending the evil back to its source. There is a deep logic here. Sin removed is sin returned to its own place - out of the holy land, away from the people God is making clean, established somewhere else entirely. The house of the thief, which the curse entered to consume (v. 4), and the house built for wickedness far off in Shinar (v. 11), stand at opposite ends of the chapter: where sin is kept, it consumes; where God removes it, it is carried out of the house for good.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Zechariah 5 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for megillah afah (vv. 1-2, the “flying roll”), for the verb behind cut off (v. 3), and for ha-rish'ah (v. 8, “wickedness” personified and named) and the ephah measure that carries her.
- Zechariah 5 ↔ Deuteronomy 27 · Galatians 3 · Micah 7 · Psalm 103Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Zechariah 5 to the rest of Scripture - the flying curse against the lawbreaker (vv. 3-4) read beside Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things (Deut. 27:26) and the One made a curse for us (Gal. 3:13), and wickedness sealed and carried far away (vv. 8-11) read alongside sin removed as far as the east is from the west (Ps. 103:12) and cast into the depths of the sea (Mic. 7:19).
- Zechariah 5 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Zechariah 5 - the dimensions and meaning of the flying scroll in verses 1-2, the curse formula and the pairing of theft with false oaths in verses 3-4, the ephah measure and the “talent of lead” in verses 6-8, and the significance of the land of Shinar in verse 11.
Where this echoes in Scripture
The Curse That Goeth Forth
- Deuteronomy 27:26Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do them. And all the people shall say, Amen.The written curse of the broken law - the very sentence the flying scroll carries in verses 3-4.
- Galatians 3:13Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.The curse of verse 3 borne by Christ - the flying scroll’s sentence absorbed on the cross.
- Exodus 20:7, 15Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain... Thou shalt not steal.The two commandments the scroll’s two sides enforce (v. 3) - false swearing against God, theft against neighbor.
- Leviticus 19:11-12Ye shall not steal... And ye shall not swear by my name falsely, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God.Theft and false oaths paired together, exactly as in verses 3-4 - sins against neighbor and against God.
- Romans 8:1There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.The end of the curse for those who are His - the sentence of verse 4 landed already on the cross.
This Is Wickedness
- Micah 6:10-11Are there yet the treasures of wickedness... and the scant measure that is abominable? Shall I count them pure with the wicked balances, and with the bag of deceitful weights?The dishonest ephah condemned - the very measure in which wickedness is found sitting (vv. 6-7).
- John 1:29Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.The wickedness named and carried off (vv. 8-11) answered in the One who takes sin away entirely.
- Romans 6:12-13Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body... neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin.The lead pressed down over wickedness (v. 8) - sin held down, not left to reign in its house.
- 1 John 1:9If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.The naming of wickedness (v. 8) lived out - agreeing with God about what is in the basket.
- Zechariah 3:9I will remove the iniquity of that land in one day.The same promise this vision enacts - God taking the wickedness of His people away.
Borne Away to the Land of Shinar
- Leviticus 16:21-22the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.The sin carried far away to an uninhabited land - the same removal the ephah enacts toward Shinar (vv. 9-11).
- Psalm 103:12As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.The distance the basket travels (v. 11) - sin removed past all returning.
- Micah 7:19he will turn again, he will have compassion upon us... thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.The same act as verses 9-11 - God carrying sin away from His people entirely.
- Genesis 11:2as they journeyed from the east... they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.Shinar (v. 11) - the land of Babel, the biblical emblem of pride organized against God, where wickedness is returned.
- Hebrews 9:26now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.What the carried-away basket points toward - sin put away for good by the One who takes it.