Zechariah 5:9 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Then lifted I up mine eyes— There are great difficulties in explaining this part of the vision, and commentators are very much divided upon it. Calmet says, that the woman inclosed 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 in 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 some sense, 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 every where. There is no necessity to be anxious about explaining why the ephah is 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.