In Zechariah 5, God shows His prophet a woman confined inside a basket used for measuring grain, and an angel explains that she represents Wickedness. Two women with wings then carry the basket toward Shinar, the land associated with Babylon. I understand the vision to show God exposing and removing wickedness from among His people, while also showing where that wickedness will be given a settled place.
Zechariah’s Setting
Zechariah was speaking to Jewish people who had returned home after the Babylonian exile. Babylon had conquered Judah, destroyed Jerusalem and the temple Solomon had built, and taken many of the people away as captives. Later, Persia defeated Babylon, and Cyrus, the Persian king, permitted the Jews to return and rebuild the Lord’s house in Jerusalem. When someone describes Zechariah as a post-exilic prophet, that is the setting they mean: he ministered after the exile, among those who had come home.
Coming home did not mean that everything was immediately restored. The people faced opposition, their resources were limited, and the work on the temple had stopped. They were a small community trying to rebuild, far removed from the strength and prosperity Israel had known under kings David and Solomon. Ezra 4:24-5:2 tells us that Haggai and Zechariah prophesied among them, and then the work resumed under Zerubbabel and Jeshua, the leaders involved in rebuilding. The prophets continued helping them as the work went forward.
That helps us understand why Zechariah’s night visions speak about both restoration and sin. God promised mercy to Jerusalem and addressed the powers that had opposed her. He also dealt with the priesthood and encouraged the completion of the temple. But rebuilding a place of worship would not make dishonesty in the people’s homes or business dealings acceptable. The Lord was concerned with the people who would worship there as well as with the building itself.
We can see that concern in the vision immediately before the basket. At the beginning of Zechariah 5, Zechariah looks up and sees a flying scroll, a written document that is moving through the air in the vision. The angel explains that it carries God’s curse against theft and false swearing:
Then he said to me, “This is the curse that goes out over the face of the whole earth: Every thief shall be expelled, according to this side of the scroll; and, Every perjurer shall be expelled, according to that side of it.”
A perjurer is someone who lies under oath. In the next verse, the Lord specifically identifies the person who swears falsely by His name, using God’s name to give authority to a lie. He says that the curse will enter that person’s house and the thief’s house, remaining there until it consumes the timber and stones. The place where someone might expect his wrongdoing to remain private will not shield him from God.
I find that connection between worship and conduct to be very direct. These people had returned to the land and were rebuilding the Lord’s house, but He still confronted the theft that injured their neighbors and the lies spoken in His name. Being part of the returned community did not excuse what they were doing. When we read the next vision, we should carry that concern with us. The woman in the basket appears in a chapter that has already exposed sin among God’s own covenant people.
The Ephah
The angel next tells Zechariah to look at something going forth. Zechariah asks what it is, and the first answer identifies the container:
So I asked, “What is it?” And he said, “It is a basket that is going forth.”
The Hebrew word translated basket is ephah. An ephah was a dry measure used for grain, and the word could also refer to the container holding that quantity. So this is an object associated with ordinary buying and selling. A customer buying grain needed to know that the merchant’s measure actually contained the amount he was paying for.
I believe the choice of that container directs our attention to economic life, where a transaction can look routine while someone is being cheated. That does not mean the vision is limited to dishonest merchants. The angel will name what is inside as Wickedness, a description broader than a single kind of fraud. But the measuring basket gives us a reason to examine the way evil can become part of dealings that people accept as normal.
There is a difficulty in the wording in the rest of verse 6 that readers may notice when comparing translations. The NKJV speaks of the people’s resemblance, following the Masoretic Hebrew text, the Hebrew wording on which its Old Testament translation is based. Some other translations speak of iniquity, meaning wrongdoing, following a different reading found in the ancient Greek and Syriac versions. I understand the image as representing wickedness spread through the community rather than the wrongdoing of only one individual. The next part of the vision gives us the angel’s own identification of the woman, so we do not have to resolve every question about verse 6 before we can understand what she represents.
The Woman Named Wickedness
When the lead cover is lifted, Zechariah sees that the basket contains a woman. The angel names her and then shuts her inside:
Here is a lead disc lifted up, and this is a woman sitting inside the basket; then he said, “This is Wickedness!” And he thrust her down into the basket, and threw the lead cover over its mouth.
The woman is a personification of wickedness. That means moral evil is represented as a person, allowing Zechariah to see it exposed, restrained, and moved. Proverbs 9 uses a comparable form of expression when Wisdom and Folly are presented as women inviting people to come to them. We understand the invitation by recognizing what each woman represents.
Here the angel has already supplied the identification. I do not need to search history for a particular woman who must fit the basket, and the image does not make a statement that women as a group are wicked. If I use it to vilify a woman I resent, I have replaced the angel’s explanation with my own grievance. The figure represents the wickedness God is dealing with.
Pay attention to what happens after she is identified. The angel thrusts her down and closes the basket with the lead cover. I understand that heavy lid as a restraint, because its function in the vision is to keep Wickedness confined while the basket is carried away. She is not shown deciding for herself where she will go.
The order also helps us avoid confusing this covering with a sinner hiding what he has done. Wickedness has already been exposed and named before the cover goes on. In the preceding vision, God’s judgment reached into the offender’s house; in this one, Wickedness is restrained and removed. I see the two visions developing the same concern about sin that cannot remain unchallenged among His people.
Zechariah then looks up and sees the figures who will carry the basket. He describes two women with the wind in their wings, and he compares their wings to those of a stork:
Then I raised my eyes and looked, and there were two women, coming with the wind in their wings; for they had wings like the wings of a stork, and they lifted up the basket between earth and heaven.
The stork appears in Leviticus 11:19 among the birds Israel was forbidden to eat. Its ceremonial uncleanness gives the image an association with impurity, but a dietary classification does not make the bird morally evil. Nor does the comparison tell us that the two women are demons. The passage describes what they look like and what they carry, but it does not identify them as demons or call them angels.
I would leave their precise identity where Zechariah leaves it. We can understand their part in the vision without giving them a name the text does not give. They lift the basket between earth and heaven, taking the confined Wickedness away. When Zechariah asks where they are going, the angel answers that question directly.
Why Shinar Is Important
So I said to the angel who talked with me, “Where are they carrying the basket?” And he said to me, “To build a house for it in the land of Shinar; when it is ready, the basket will be set there on its base.”
Shinar was the Mesopotamian region associated with Babel and later Babylon. The connection begins with the people who repopulated the earth after the Flood. Noah and his family had survived that judgment, and God told Noah and his sons to multiply and fill the earth in Genesis 9:1. By Genesis 11, their descendants had settled on a plain in Shinar and begun building a city and a tower. They explained what they wanted to accomplish:
And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves.”
The rest of their statement says that they wanted to avoid being scattered across the earth. Their determination to remain together and make a name for themselves resisted the command God had given. The Lord confused their language and scattered them, stopping the project. That earlier account associates Shinar with people organizing themselves around a purpose that defied Him.
That background gives the basket’s destination a meaning beyond its location on a map. A house is to be built for it there, and the basket will be placed on its base when the house is ready. Wickedness is being removed from the land in Zechariah’s vision, but it is not being shown as having ceased to exist. It is being given a settled place in the region already associated with organized rebellion.
For the people rebuilding the Lord’s house in Jerusalem, I believe that offered both encouragement and correction. God had the power to remove the evil among them, so they were not left helpless before it. Yet they could not welcome the promise of a restored temple while making room for wickedness in their own homes. The vision exposed something they needed to reject as they returned to worship Him.
The destination in Shinar helps explain the wider association with rebellion, while the ephah brings the question back to everyday conduct. What does wickedness look like when it is part of buying and selling? Other passages answer that without requiring us to guess at hidden meanings in the basket. Proverbs gives a direct judgment about a merchant’s scales:
Dishonest scales are an abomination to the LORD, But a just weight is His delight.
A balance depended on an honest weight to measure what was being exchanged. If a merchant altered the weight or manipulated the scale, he could take more from the customer than the agreed price or give less than the amount promised. The transaction might look orderly, but the Lord knew that the merchant was stealing from the person across from him.
Amos 8 describes people who were waiting impatiently for religious observances to end so they could get back to selling grain. The New Moon marked the beginning of the month, and the Sabbath was the weekly day of rest. These merchants resented the interruption because they wanted to resume a trade they intended to conduct dishonestly. Amos describes their plan:
Making the ephah small and the shekel large, Falsifying the scales by deceit, That we may buy the poor for silver, And the needy for a pair of sandals.
Making the ephah small meant giving the buyer less grain than the stated measure required. Making the shekel large meant demanding more silver, because the shekel was a unit of weight used in payment. Falsifying the scales helped them carry out the fraud. Amos also describes their willingness to buy the poor for silver and the needy for the price of sandals. They treated vulnerable people as something to acquire and profit from.
Those details show why keeping the religious calendar did not make their conduct acceptable. While they waited for the observance to end, they were planning how to cheat their customers and exploit the poor. I can recognize the same problem whenever I separate what I do in worship from what I intend to do afterward. God sees the intention as well as the public observance.
The angel’s name for the woman also challenges the excuses I might use for a dishonest practice. Pressure can help explain why someone was tempted to cheat, but it cannot make the cheating honest. I can take his hardship seriously and still call the action wrong. If I describe deliberate fraud as a misunderstanding simply because I do not want an uncomfortable conversation, I am giving him a way to defend what he ought to repent of.
I need to begin that examination with my own dealings. Suppose I hide an expensive fee in paperwork because I expect the customer to overlook it. I may be able to say that the fee was technically disclosed, but I deliberately arranged the transaction so he would agree before understanding the cost. Calling it standard practice would not change what I had done. An entire industry can accept a dishonest method, and an institution can write it into its policies, without making it right before God.
The vision also reaches beyond an individual transaction through the house being prepared in Shinar. That place had another connection to the people listening to Zechariah. Before Jerusalem’s final destruction, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, had besieged the city during the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah. Daniel records what happened to some of the articles used in the temple:
And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the articles of the house of God, which he carried into the land of Shinar to the house of his god.
Nebuchadnezzar carried those sacred vessels from the house of God to the house of his own god in Shinar. Now Zechariah sees a house being prepared in that land for Wickedness. I see a connection in the setting: the region associated with Babel’s defiance had also become the seat of the empire that conquered Judah and took the temple vessels. The destination would have carried a history of rebellion and idolatry for the returned people.
Revelation 17 and 18 develop the Babylon theme further. John sees a woman identified with Babylon who is richly adorned, holds a cup filled with abominations, and is associated with the blood of God’s people who have been killed. The following chapter describes the kings and merchants who have enjoyed her luxury and then mourn when her wealth is destroyed. Their prosperity had been bound up with a system marked by deception and violence.
I understand this Babylon as a final world system in which false religion and the attraction of wealth work together with hostility toward God’s people. That gives us a connection with the Wickedness established in Shinar, but it does not make every detail of John’s vision interchangeable with Zechariah’s. Each passage contributes its own explanation. Revelation also gives God’s people a direct command concerning their involvement:
And I heard another voice from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues.”
The call is to separate from her sins rather than become participants in them. I may find that difficult if the arrangement benefits me. If refusing it would cost me income, influence, or the approval of people I want to please, I can begin defending it before I have honestly examined what it requires. God’s Word has to govern that judgment even when the system is profitable and widely admired.
I also need to use Babylon’s name carefully. It is not a label Scripture gives me to attach to whichever nation, church, or political movement I happen to dislike. The passages identify conduct: people rebel against God, promote idolatry, deceive others, exploit them, and shed innocent blood. If I apply those warnings to an institution around me, I need to show how its actual conduct fits the biblical warning. Disliking it does not establish that connection.
The unusual appearance of the carriers has led some readers in another direction, connecting the flying basket with UFOs or theories about aliens. I do not find that identification in what Zechariah saw or in what the angel explained. There is no reference here to visitors from another planet, modern aircraft, or secret programs. The action the passage explains is that Wickedness is confined and carried to Shinar. Adding an account of modern phenomena would take the explanation beyond the vision we have been given.
That does not leave us without anything to say about spiritual deception. The New Testament addresses it directly. Paul tells believers that the opposition they face includes evil spiritual powers, not only the human beings involved:
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age.
In Ephesians 6, Paul responds to that danger by telling believers to put on the armor God supplies. He uses a soldier’s equipment to explain how we are to stand against the devil’s schemes. Truth is part of that protection, God’s Word is identified as the sword of the Spirit, and believers are also told to pray. His instruction gives us something to do when confronted by deception. We are to depend on the Lord and hold to what He has revealed.
Pursuing occult knowledge would take us away from that provision. A claim to explain the unseen world does not become trustworthy because it is unusual or because the person making it sounds certain. I need to test what is being taught instead of allowing my curiosity to decide what I accept.
Paul gives a particularly serious example in 2 Thessalonians 2. He describes a coming lawless man who opposes God and exalts himself as though he were God. The signs accompanying him will be impressive, but their source and purpose will be evil:
The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish.
When we read the surrounding verses, Paul explains that the deception is connected with people’s refusal to receive the love of the truth and their pleasure in unrighteousness. They are not simply making a neutral mistake about something they have seen. The lie suits the wrong they are willing to embrace. That is why an impressive experience cannot by itself prove that a message comes from God.
John gives believers the same responsibility to examine spiritual claims rather than accept them merely because someone presents them as spiritual:
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God.
In the next two verses, he identifies the confession that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh as a test of the spirits. Christ truly became man; a message denying His genuine humanity fails the test John gives. The wider teaching of the apostles also rules out denying His deity or substituting a gospel that sets aside His shed blood and bodily resurrection. We cannot detach a supposed spiritual message from what it teaches about the Lord who saves us.
The same care applies when a teacher excuses sin or offers secret knowledge as the way to salvation. Something impressive accompanying the teaching cannot make a false gospel true. I can refuse a message that draws people away from the biblical Christ even if I cannot explain the experience someone reports. I do not have to solve every unusual event before I can recognize a contradiction of what God has already said.
That confidence rests in Christ’s authority, not in my ability to explain everything about the spiritual realm. The evil powers Scripture warns us about are created beings who have rebelled. They have not become equal to their Creator. Paul explains the extent of the Son’s creative work in Colossians:
For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible.
The verse continues by naming ranks of authority and saying that all things were created through Him and for Him. Whatever power a fallen being exercises, it remains a creature accountable to Christ. Zechariah’s vision shows Wickedness confined and moved, and the New Testament gives us reason to trust the Lord whose authority reaches over the entire unseen realm.
Money or political influence can make corruption difficult for us to confront. That difficulty does not place the institution beyond His judgment, any more than the strength of an evil spirit puts it beyond His reach. I should not speak or live as though those powers possess the final authority that belongs to Him.
The Lord who rules over them has also dealt with our need for salvation. Jesus is the eternal Son, fully God and fully man. He lived without sin and willingly gave Himself to be slain as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. Wicked men tortured and crucified Him, but the Father did not punish or abandon the Son. Father and Son acted together to provide our salvation, and Christ’s shed blood and death completed His saving sacrifice before His burial and bodily resurrection.
That means I need more than an explanation of the corruption around me. Exposing it or improving a law may be right, but neither action can cleanse my own sin. I could explain Babylon at length while rationalizing dishonesty at work or protecting something I do in private. Knowing the meaning of the vision would not make that conduct acceptable.
I need to acknowledge the wrong and turn from it, whether it concerns how I treat another person, what I do online, or the thoughts I choose to entertain. The Lord who exposes sin also offers mercy to the person who repents and trusts His shed blood. I do not have to disguise my wrongdoing in order to come to Him for forgiveness.
Christ died for the whole world, so the offer of salvation is genuine for every person. People can resist His grace and finally reject Him, but everyone who repents and believes in Christ is forgiven and born again. No religious performance or program of self-improvement can earn the life He gives by grace.
By regeneration, or being born again, I mean that God truly makes a person a new creation. The Holy Spirit comes to live in that person and seals him as God’s own, so he is eternally secure in Christ. His conduct should show the evidence of that new life. Obedience does not earn or maintain salvation, but a person defending a settled life of lawlessness gives us no reason to assume that he has been born again merely because he calls himself a Christian.
My Final Thoughts
Zechariah’s vision shows Wickedness exposed, confined, and carried away to a prepared place in Shinar. The angel gives enough explanation for us to understand that action even though he does not identify the two carriers. I understand it as God’s assurance that He can remove evil from among His people, together with a warning about the rebellion that finds a home where people resist Him.
For me, that warning reaches into ordinary conduct. It is possible to recognize a corrupt system and still defend the dishonesty from which I benefit. I want to be as willing to name the sin in my own dealings as I am to discuss Babylon. Christ will judge every rebellious power, and He has provided forgiveness through His own sacrifice. Following Him now means responding honestly to what He exposes while I wait for His righteous kingdom.