8. This is wickedness] This woman that thou seest sitting in the ephah represents the wickedness of the whole land, gathered up, as it were, into one and personified.

the weight of lead] Lit. the stone of lead; so called, either because stones were used as weights (comp. our English word “stone”), or because the leaden lid on the mouth of the ephah suggested by its size and weight the stone cover of a well. Genesis 29:2.

upon the mouth thereof] Lit. upon her mouth; but rightly rendered thereof, as the reference seems plainly to be to the ephah, on which the angel firmly fixed the lid, when he had cast down the woman into it.

A different, but less satisfactory, view of the vision has been taken. According to this the woman is seen “having in her hand the leaden weight with which she was wont to traffic, and sitting crouched down in an empty bushel or ephah, as if that were her true seat and throne.… It was a special form of wickedness that was here pourtrayed, namely, unrighteousness as it manifests itself in matters of weight and measure, or, to designate it in our Lord’s own words, ‘unfaithfulness as regards the unrighteous mammon’ … But ‘with the same measure that ye mete withal, shall it be measured to you again.’ The very instrument which the woman used for her unholy work was to be the means of her confusion. The ephah in which she sat was made the chariot in which she was removed from the land; and the angel, with righteous indignation, seized the woman herself, dashed her down into the ephah as she was about to rise from her sitting posture, and taking hold of the leaden weight, flung the heavy ‘stone of lead’ upon her mouth. Thus did the angel indicate that ‘wickedness’ would be a subject of Divine wrath. He smote her in the mouth wherewith she had so often uttered words of lying and fraud; and did so with the very instrument with which she was wont to measure her ungodly gain. Thus was her mouth stopped (Psalm 107:42; Job 5:16), and the instrument of sin was made the instrument of her punishment.” (Rev. C. H. H. Wright.) The moral of the vision, however, is not the destruction, nor even the punishment of wickedness, but its expulsion from the holy land, that it may go to its own place.

Verse 8. - 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.). 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 (comp. Genesis 29:2, which passage may explain why the cover is called "a stone"). 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. Zechariah 5:8To this there is appended in Zechariah 5:5-11 a new view, which exhibits the further fate of the sinners who have been separated from the congregation of the saints. Zechariah 5:5. "And the angel that talked with me went forth, and said to me, Lift up now thine eyes, and see, what is this that goeth out there? Zechariah 5:6. And I said, What is it? And he said, This is the ephah going out. And He said, This is their aspect in all the land. Zechariah 5:7. And behold a disk of lead was lifted up, and there was a woman sitting in the midst of the ephah. Zechariah 5:8. And he said, This is wickedness; and he cast it into the midst of the ephah, and cast the leaden weight upon its mouth." With the disappearing of the previous vision, the angelus interpres had also vanished from the eyes of the prophet. After a short pause he comes out again, calls the prophet's attention to a new figure which emerges out of the cloud, and so comes within the range of vision (היּוצאת הזּאת), and informs him with regard to it: "This is the ephah which goeth out." יצא, to go out, in other words, to come to view. The ephah was the greatest measure of capacity which really existed among the Hebrews for dry goods, and was about the size of a cubic foot; for the chōmer, which contained ten ephahs, appears to have had only an ideal existence, viz., for the purpose of calculation. The meaning of this figure is indicated generally in the words זאת עינם כב, the meaning of which depends upon the interpretation to be given to עינם. The suffix of this word can only refer to the sinners mentioned before, viz., the thieves and perjurers; for it is contrary to the Hebrew usage to suppose that the words refer to the expression appended, בּכל־הארץ, in the sense of "all those who are in the whole land" (Koehler). Consequently עין does not mean the eye, but adspectus, appearance, or shape, as in Leviticus 13:55; Ezekiel 1:4.; and the words have this meaning: The ephah (bushel) is the shape, i.e., represents the figure displayed by the sinners in all the land, after the roll of the curse has gone forth over the land, i.e., it shows into what condition they have come through that anathema (Kliefoth). The point of comparison between the ephah and the state into which sinners have come in consequence of the curse, does not consist in the fact that the ephah is carried away, and the sinners likewise (Maurer), nor in the fact that the sin now reaches its full measure (Hofm., Hengstenberg); for "the carrying away of the sinners does not come into consideration yet, and there is nothing at all here about the sin becoming full." It is true that, according to what follows, sin sits in the ephah as a woman, but there is nothing to indicate that the ephah is completely filled by it, so that there is no further room in it; and this thought would be generally out of keeping here. The point of comparison is rather to be found in the explanation given by Kliefoth: "Just as in a bushel the separate grains are all collected together, so will the individual sinners over the whole earth be brought into a heap, when the curse of the end goes forth over the whole earth." We have no hesitation in appropriating this explanation, although we have not rendered הארץ "the earth," inasmuch as at the final fulfilment of the vision the holy land will extend over all the earth. Immediately afterwards the prophet is shown still more clearly what is in the ephah. A covering of lead (kikkâr, a circle, a rounding or a circular plate) rises up, or is lifted up, and then he sees a woman sitting in the ephah ('achath does not stand for the indefinite article, but is a numeral, the sinners brought into a heap appearing as a unity, i.e., as one living personality, instead of forming an atomistic heap of individuals). This woman, who had not come into the ephah now for the first time, but was already sitting there, and was only seen now that the lid was raised, is described by the angel as mirsha‛ath, ungodliness, as being wickedness embodied, just as in 2 Chronicles 24:7 this name is given to godless Jezebel. Thereupon he throws her into the ephah, out of which she had risen up, and shuts it with the leaden lid, to carry her away, as the following vision shows, out of the holy land. Zechariah 5:8 Interlinear
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