Zechariah 5:9-11 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Then lifted I up mine eyes, &c. Great difficulties attend the interpretation of this part of the vision, and commentators are much divided upon it. According to Calmet, the woman enclosed in the ephah denoted the iniquity of Babylon; the mass of lead which fell down upon her was the vengeance of the Lord; and the two women who lifted her up into the air were the Medes and Persians, who destroyed the empire of Babylon. Houbigant, however, observes, “that nobody has yet found out, nor ever will find out, why these women should carry the ephah into the land of Shinar, or of the Chaldees, if Shinar be understood literally, and not metaphorically. The Jews were not again carried captive into the land of the Chaldeans, after the rebuilding of the temple by Zerubbabel; nor can the Chaldeans be understood by the ephah which is carried into the land of Shinar with the woman, who abused it to fraudulent purposes; for the ephah is a Hebrew measure; and this woman, who is kept shut up in the ephah, is carried into a land not her own. Shinar will be more properly understood, as spoken metaphorically of the last captivity, under which the Jews now live; being, in the several kingdoms of the world, in the same state of servitude as they lived in under, the kings of the Chaldeans; having their dwelling everywhere, with the deceitful ephah, to denote their usury and fraud. There is no necessity to be anxious about explaining why the ephah was to be carried by two women, and not by one only, or more, for the empire of the Greeks and Romans is not denoted hereby, but two women pertain only to the parable; as it might have seemed too much for one to have carried into a distant country an ephah burdened with lead, and with a woman shut up in it.” Archbishop Newcome understands the words in this sense: considering the two women as “mere agents in the symbolical vision;” the meaning of which, he says, seems to be, “that the Babylonish captivity had happened on account of the wickedness committed by the Jews; and that a like dispersion would befall them, if they relapsed into like crimes. Thus the whole chapter would be an awful admonition that multiplied curses, and particularly that dispersion and captivity, would be the punishment of national guilt.” Blayney interprets the vision in a similar way. “These, [namely, two women,] and the other circumstances mentioned Zechariah 5:9, seem to indicate nothing more particular, than that Providence would make use of quick and forcible means to effect its purpose.” Hence these women are said to have had wings like the wings of a stork; the stork, like other birds of passage, being provided with strong wings. Though the land of Shinar signifies, as he observes, the land of Babylon, (see Genesis 11:2,) yet “this does not necessarily imply that Babylon would be the scene of the next captivity; but only that the people, in case of fresh transgression, might expect another severe captivity, like that in Babylon, but of still longer duration. In this manner Egypt is used proverbially for any grievous calamity, inflicted by the judgment of God: see Deuteronomy 28:68; Hosea 8:13; Hosea 9:3.”