Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Scroll and the Basket
Zechariah 5:1-11
1 Then again I lifted up my eyes and saw, and behold, a flying scroll. · WEB
Two visions remove wrongdoing from the land in opposite ways — one hunts the guilty down, the other carries guilt itself away.
A scroll flies, and it is measured: twenty cubits by ten cubits. Those are the dimensions given for the porch of the first temple, which puts a document the size of a sanctuary entrance in the air over the country.
It is identified as the curse that goes out over the surface of the whole land, and it names two offenses: theft, and swearing falsely by God's name. One is against a neighbor and one is against God — a sample from each half of the commandments, standing in for the whole.
What the scroll does is unusual. It does not announce; it travels. It will enter into the house of the thief... and it will remain in the middle of his house, and will destroy it with its timber and its stones. A curse that takes up residence and works outward through the structure. Nothing is said about detection, because a written verdict that goes looking for its subject does not need a court.
The second vision reverses the direction. An ephah basket appears — a dry measure, the standard container of ordinary commerce — with a lead cover weighing one talent on it and a woman sitting in the middle.
She is not a person but a label: he said, This is Wickedness. And she is pushed back down and the lead weight thrown on the mouth, which is the only way the vision describes handling her. The container is a market measure and the sin is sealed inside it under a hundredweight of lead.
Then two winged women lift the basket between earth and the sky and carry it to the land of Shinar — the name used for the plain of Babel and Babylon. Wickedness is not destroyed. It is deported, and given an address: to build her a house in the land of Shinar.
So the pair works as a complement. The scroll pursues individual offenders inside the land; the basket removes the thing itself, and returns it where the exile came from.
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