Zechariah 5:8 - Exposition

This is wickedness. This woman is the personification of wickedness. It is very common to find backsliding Israel represented as a faithless and adulterous woman (comp. Isaiah 1:21 ; Jeremiah 2:20 ; Hosea 2:5 ; and the parable of the two women in Ezekiel 23:1-49 .). He cast it; her— the woman. As the woman rose, or tried to rise, from the ephah, the angel flung her down into it. It is possible, as some commentators suppose, that the ephah into which wickedness is thrust represents the measure of iniquity which, being reached, constrains God to punish (see Genesis 15:16 , where the dispossession of the Amorites is postponed till their iniquity is full). The weight of lead; literally, as the LXX ; the stone of lead; Vulgate , massam plumbeam. This is the cover of the ephah, that which is called the "talent of lead" in the preceding verse. This heavy cover the angel cast upon the mouth of the ephah, in order to confine the woman therein. Dr. Wright and some other commentators, referring the passage to theft and perjury alone, consider that the woman held in her hand the leaden weight with which she weighed her gains, and was sitting in the ephah which she used in her traffic; so that she represents dishonesty in the matter of weight and measure. She is punished by the means of the instruments she had used unrighteously; the weight is dashed upon her lying mouth, and the ephah, her throne, is made the vehicle that carries her out of the land. But it seems a mistake to confine the iniquity mentioned to the two special sins of theft and perjury; nor would the talent and the ephah be natural instruments of stealing and false swearing; and the point of the vision is not the punishment of wickedness, but its expulsion from the land. It is true that the pronominal suffix in the mouth thereof is feminine, and that the LXX . makes it refer to the woman, τὸ στόμα αὐτῆς . But it may equally refer to ephah, which is also feminine.