The Woman in the Ephah: What Zechariah 5 Means
Zechariah saw a woman confined inside a measuring basket, then watched two winged women carry it away. The angel identified the woman as Wickedness and named the destination as Shinar. To understand why God showed him such an unusual vision, we need to begin with the Jewish people rebuilding Jerusalem after their return from exile.
Zechariah’s Setting
Zechariah ministered among Jews who had returned from the Babylonian exile. Babylon had conquered Judah, destroyed Jerusalem and Solomon’s temple, and carried many people into captivity. After Persia defeated Babylon, Cyrus permitted exiles to return and rebuild the Lord’s house. Calling Zechariah a post-exilic prophet simply places his ministry after the exile, among the remnant who had come home.
The people who returned faced opposition and limited resources, and the temple remained unfinished. Their circumstances were far removed from the prosperous kingdom David and Solomon had ruled. Ezra 4:24-5:2 records how Haggai and Zechariah prophesied among them before the building work resumed under Zerubbabel and Jeshua. The prophets then helped the people as they rebuilt the Lord’s house.
Zechariah’s connected night visions brought encouragement to that community while also confronting its sin. God comforted Jerusalem, addressed the powers opposing her, and spoke about the priesthood and temple work. His concern for the returned people included how they lived before Him. They needed to rebuild His house and obey Him in their own homes and dealings with one another.
In Zechariah 5, the prophet first sees a flying scroll. The angel explains that it carries a curse against thieves and people who swear falsely by the Lord’s name.
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.”
The Lord says this curse will enter an offender’s house and consume its timber and stones. Theft injured a neighbor, and a false oath used God’s own name to support a lie. These were not minor private flaws that He would overlook because the offenders belonged to the returned remnant. Public worship gave them no exemption from His concern about what they did at home or how they treated other people.
The vision that follows carries the judgment further by showing Wickedness confined and removed. Reading it after the scroll keeps us from treating the chapter only as a condemnation of the nations around Israel. God was dealing with the sin of His own covenant people.
The Ephah
The angel calls Zechariah’s attention to something going forth. When the prophet asks what he is seeing, the answer names a familiar object:
Then the angel who talked with me came out and said to me, “Lift your eyes now, and see what this is that goes forth.” So I asked, “What is it?” And he said, “It is a basket that is going forth.”
The Hebrew word translated basket is ephah. It names a dry measure for grain and can also refer to a container of that capacity. People used such measures in buying and selling, so I believe the choice of an ephah directs our attention to ordinary economic life. Wickedness could be at work in a transaction that looked perfectly routine.
The wording in the rest of verse 6 is difficult. The NKJV’s reference to the people’s resemblance reflects the Masoretic Hebrew wording. Some translations use iniquity instead, 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 one person’s isolated wrongdoing. The angel’s identification of the woman as Wickedness also prevents us from limiting the vision to dishonest commerce alone.
The Woman Named Wickedness
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 personifies wickedness: moral evil is represented as a person so that Zechariah can see it exposed and confined. Proverbs uses comparable imagery when Wisdom and Folly appear as women calling to people in public. The angel identifies what the figure represents, so I have no reason to make her a particular woman from history or use her to accuse women in general. Using this passage to vilify a woman I resent would disregard the explanation already given.
The angel thrusts Wickedness back into the basket and shuts it with the heavy lead cover, confining her so she can be carried away. I therefore understand the lid as restraint. The preceding scroll has already shown that sin hidden in someone’s house cannot escape God’s judgment. In this vision, the angel has exposed Wickedness before putting on the cover; the emphasis is on removing her from the land, rather than a sinner’s attempt to conceal wrongdoing.
Zechariah raises his eyes again and sees two women lifting the basket. They have the wind in their wings, which resemble 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.
Leviticus 11:19 includes the stork among the birds Israel was forbidden to eat. That ceremonial uncleanness gives the wings an association with impurity, but it does not make the bird morally evil. Nor does the resemblance establish that these carriers are demons. Zechariah does not call them demons or ordinary angels; he describes their appearance and the work they do. I would leave their precise identity unexplained, as the passage does.
Why Shinar Is Important
The destination receives a much more definite answer. Zechariah asks where the women are taking the basket:
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 is the Mesopotamian land associated with Babel and later Babylon. Genesis 11 places the builders of the city and tower on a plain there. They stated that they wanted to avoid being scattered and make a name for themselves.
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.”
Their determination to avoid scattering ran against God’s command to fill the earth. By naming Shinar as the basket’s destination, the angel directs us to a place already associated with people organizing themselves in defiance of God.
The house to be prepared in Shinar will give the basket a settled place on its base. Wickedness is removed from the land in this vision, but it has not ceased to exist. For the remnant rebuilding the Lord’s house, the vision gave reason to trust His power to remove evil from among them. It also confronted them with the need to reject the wickedness they might otherwise tolerate in their own homes.
Shinar connects the vision with organized rebellion, while the grain measure brings us back to the ordinary dealings in which wickedness can take hold. Other passages explicitly condemn dishonest measures. A merchant could appear respectable while arranging a transaction to defraud his neighbor, but God knew both what the seller had done and what it had cost the person buying from him.
Dishonest scales are an abomination to the LORD, But a just weight is His delight.
Amos describes merchants impatient for the New Moon and Sabbath to end so they can resume selling grain. They planned to make the grain measure smaller and demand a larger weight of silver, then use falsified scales to carry out the fraud:
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.
Those merchants observed the religious calendar while resenting the interruption to their business. They intended to cheat their customers and exploit the poor as soon as trading resumed. Keeping a religious occasion could not excuse what they planned to do when it ended.
The angel’s plain identification of Wickedness also challenges the milder terms we can use when we do not want to confront sin. Pressure may explain why someone was tempted to cheat, but it cannot make the cheating honest. I can acknowledge a person’s hardship and still call him to repent of a clear wrong. If I insist on calling deliberate wrongdoing a misunderstanding, I am helping him defend it instead of helping him turn from it.
I need to examine my own dealings before applying this passage to a distant institution. If I conceal a costly fee in paperwork because I expect a customer to miss it, I should not congratulate myself merely because the transaction is technically legal. I am using his failure to notice the fee to get his agreement before he understands the cost. Nor does a dishonest practice become acceptable because an entire industry uses it or an institution has made it policy.
The house prepared in Shinar points beyond an individual merchant’s fraud. At an earlier stage of Judah’s defeat, long before Zechariah’s ministry, Nebuchadnezzar had carried articles from God’s temple to the house of his god in that same land.
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.
Daniel records sacred vessels placed in the house of a pagan god in Shinar; Zechariah sees a house being prepared there for Wickedness. Their common setting connects the vision with the region’s earlier rebellion. The land associated with Babel had become the seat of the empire that conquered Judah and carried away the temple vessels.
Revelation develops that Babylon theme further. Chapter 17 depicts a corrupt woman associated with blasphemy and abomination, while chapter 18 exposes the luxury enjoyed by kings and merchants and the violence and deception beneath it. I understand Babylon there as a final world system in which false religion and the appeal of wealth work together with hostility toward God’s people. We can recognize that connection without making every feature of Revelation’s Babylon interchangeable with Zechariah’s basket.
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.”
God’s people are called to separate from Babylon’s sins. If I benefit from a system, I may be reluctant to examine how it operates or what it encourages. I could begin defending the arrangement because refusing it would cost me money, influence, or the approval of people I want to please. We need to judge what it offers by God’s Word, even when it is profitable or culturally admired.
The biblical warnings about Babylon do not give me permission to use its name as an insult for a nation, church, or political movement I dislike. Scripture exposes rebellion against God, idolatry, deception, exploitation, and violence. If I apply its warnings to an institution around me, I need to show how its actual conduct fits what the passages condemn.
Some readers turn from the basket’s destination to its flying carriers and associate them with UFOs or alien theories. I do not find that identification in Zechariah’s description or the angel’s explanation. The passage says nothing about beings from another planet, modern aircraft, or secret programs. Those ideas do not explain the action the angel does describe: Wickedness is confined and taken to Shinar.
We do not have to invent that identification to take spiritual deception seriously. Paul describes a conflict involving powers beyond the human beings who oppose us:
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age.
Paul directs believers to stand in the armor God provides, holding to His truth as they face spiritual opposition. Scripture gives us the standard for testing spiritual claims; pursuing occult knowledge cannot give us the protection we need. Recognizing demonic deception should lead us to depend on God’s provision, rather than chase every report that claims to explain the unseen world.
Paul also warns about the coming lawless one, whose impressive signs will serve a lie. The power behind those signs is satanic:
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.
In the surrounding verses, Paul connects this deception with refusing the love of the truth and taking pleasure in unrighteousness. A lie can appeal to us because it accommodates what we want to believe. We cannot therefore judge a spiritual claim merely by how dramatic the experience appears. John gives believers a responsibility to examine such claims:
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God.
In the next two verses, John identifies the confession that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh as a test of the spirits. A message denying His genuine humanity fails that test. The apostles’ teaching also rules out a message denying His deity or a substitute gospel that sets aside His shed blood and bodily resurrection. A teacher who excuses sin or offers secret knowledge as the way of salvation does not become trustworthy because something impressive accompanies his teaching.
I can apply that test even when I cannot explain an experience someone reports. If the message draws people away from the biblical Christ, I have a reason to refuse it without solving the phenomenon first. We should not let our curiosity about an unusual event make us disregard what we already know about the Lord.
The spiritual powers Scripture warns us about remain creatures. Zechariah saw Wickedness confined and carried away; the New Testament identifies the Lord whose authority extends over the whole unseen realm:
For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible.
Every rank of power was created through Christ and for Him. Fallen powers have rebelled against their Creator, but they have neither become His equals nor escaped His judgment. Money and political influence can make corruption difficult for us to oppose. Yet no institution or evil spirit can place itself beyond Christ’s reach, and we should not give it the authority that belongs only to Him.
The Lord who rules over those powers has also provided the salvation we need. Jesus is the eternal Son, fully God and fully man. He lived without sin and voluntarily gave Himself to be slain as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. Wicked men tortured and crucified Him. The Father did not punish or abandon the Son; Father and Son acted in unity to provide our salvation. Christ’s shed blood and death completed His saving sacrifice before His burial and bodily resurrection. Exposing corruption or improving a law may be right, but neither can cleanse me of my own sin.
I could discuss Babylon at length while rationalizing dishonesty in my work or refusing to repent of something I do in private. Understanding the vision would not make that conduct any more acceptable. I need to confess the wrongdoing plainly and turn from it, whether it concerns my dealings with another person, what I do online, or the thoughts I choose to entertain. The Lord who exposes sin is merciful to those who repent and trust His shed blood.
Christ died for the whole world, so God’s 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 personal improvement can earn what He gives by grace.
When I speak of regeneration, I mean that God has genuinely made someone a new creation. The Holy Spirit lives in and seals that person, who is eternally secure in Christ. His conduct should show evidence of that new life, although obedience neither earns nor keeps his salvation. If he claims to be a Christian while defending a settled life of lawlessness, the claim alone gives us no grounds to assume he has been born again.
My Final Thoughts
I do not need to identify the winged carriers to understand the angel’s name for what is inside the basket. He calls it Wickedness, confines it, and announces its removal to Shinar. I want to carry that same honesty into the way I examine my own conduct, because knowing how to explain Babylon will be of little use if I refuse to repent of dishonesty in my own life. Christ will judge every rebellious system, and He calls us to follow Him now while we wait for His righteous kingdom.