Eight: The Woman in a Basket (the Seventh Vision) - Zech 5: 5-11
- Nov 9, 2024
- 6 min read
5 Then the angel who was speaking to me came forward and said to me, ‘Look up and see what is appearing.’
6 I asked, ‘What is it?’
He replied, ‘It is a basket.’ And he added, ‘This is the iniquity [or appearance] of the people throughout the land.’
7 Then the cover of lead was raised, and there in the basket sat a woman! 8 He said, ‘This is wickedness,’ and he pushed her back into the basket and pushed its lead cover down on it.
9 Then I looked up – and there before me were two women, with the wind in their wings! They had wings like those of a stork, and they lifted up the basket between heaven and earth.
10 ‘Where are they taking the basket?’ I asked the angel who was speaking to me.
11 He replied, ‘To the country of Babylonia [Hebrew: Shinar] to build a house for it. When the house is ready, the basket will be set there in its place.’
Every now and then in the UK there is a debate about the weights and measures we use, and whether we should stick with the metric system or go back to the imperial units of our forebears. At the moment we have something of a hybrid arrangement. Most of the things we buy in the shops are measured in grams and metres. But for long distances we use miles and in pubs we buy beer by the pint – although a measure of spirits is 25 ml or 35 ml! Very few, however, are calling for a wholesale return to the delights of the chain (22 yards), the ell (45 inches), the peck (2 gallons) or the bushel (8 gallons).
In ancient Israel the standard measure of volume for dry goods such as flour or grain was the ephah. No one quite knows how big this was. The best estimate is that it was about 5 gallons or 22 litres, although it could have been nearly twice that. The word ‘ephah’ described both the measuring basket itself and the volume it contained. To picture it, think of a standard household bucket (2 gallons or 10 litres). The ephah would be about 2 ½ to 5 times bigger than that.
In Zechariah’s seventh vision he sees a woman, personifying wickedness, in an ephah basket. Given the measurements we’ve just been describing, she must have been a tiny woman! Or it was a supersized ephah. This is a vision, however, so we shouldn’t be surprised at things being odd sizes; after all, we’ve just been contending with a scroll the size of an advertising hoarding.
There is a translation difficulty in v6. The word translated ‘iniquity’ in the Hebrew text is ‘yn which means ‘eye’ or ‘appearance’. Early translators, assuming there had been a copying error, changed ‘yn to ‘wn giving ‘iniquity’ or ‘wickedness’ as a much more likely meaning instead. It is just possible that a pun was intended, and we should read ‘appearance’ and ‘iniquity’ at the same time – ‘this is what evil looks like!’
The ephah has a lead lid which is raised so that Zechariah can see in. Then the angel pushes the woman of wickedness back in and slams the lid down.
Commentator Joyce Baldwin (p128) points out that the woman, like evil, is mostly hidden from sight. The apostle Paul may have had this in mind when he likens evil to yeast working through a whole batch of dough (1Cor 5: 6-8). Its effects are insidious and widespread.
Two more angels appear – at least I think they’re angels – women with wings like storks, with the wind in their wings. And they take this basket of wickedness, lift it up between heaven and earth, and set it down in Babylon, the city which was always a symbol of wickedness ever since the days of the Tower of Babel (Gen 11: 1-9).
So, this vision has links with the last one. There God destroys the wicked person and his dwelling, thoroughly rooting out evil from the land. Here evil is concentrated in a wicker ephah basket, and is taken far away.
So why is there a woman, and why a basket? It could just be that ‘wickedness’ is a feminine noun. There could be other reasons too. In the bad old days before the Exile one of the false goddesses that the people of Judah used to worship was called Asherah. We know from 2 Kings 23:7 that women used to do weaving for Asherah – in the Lord’s Temple, of all places. Maybe the wicker basket is a reminder of that – take Asherah and all the false gods like her and add her to the idols of Babylon.
Or (and this is a bit more far-fetched) the image could hint at the tribute now paid by the Jewish people to their Persian overlords – ephahs of flour and ingots of silver (the word for the basket’s lid is the same as that for ingot). The message might then be that people should not see the tax as wasted resources but instead as symbolising evil and be glad to get rid of it. This I think is reminiscent of Jesus’ words in Luke 20:25, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
In Amos 8:5 and Mic 6:10, the prophets rail against market-traders who skimp on the ephah, cheating their customers. Perhaps it is appropriate that the ephah basket features in this vision of carrying away wickedness.
Whatever the subtleties, the hard-pressed people who were slowly rebuilding the Temple, upon hearing Zechariah, could be reassured that their sin was dealt with – their sin – not just that of the high priest in his God-given new clothes (Zech 3:4), but of the whole land.
We should note that this passage is what many would call problematic. Evil is personified as a woman. Then a male angel treats her quite violently. What should we make of this?
Every now and then Hollywood depicts the devil as female. This is not new; it plays into a very old stereotype of women as evil, temptresses, the reason for Adam’s downfall. And that way of thinking is a very murky breeding ground for justifying violence against women. But it is not at all Biblical and not at all Christian. However literally you take Gen 3, both Adam and Eve ate the fruit and both were punished by God. This passage from Zechariah is the only place in the OT that evil is personified as a woman. By way of contrast, think of the female figure in Proverbs 3:13-20 and 8:1-36, often called Lady Wisdom. Her description is thoroughly good and attractive, and points towards Jesus himself. Moreover, in the present passage not only is wickedness a feminine noun, as already pointed out, but the other two characters in the vision, who are clearly doing the Lord’s will, are women too.
These two women seem to be angelic creatures with wings like storks and the wind in their wings. Now the word that means ‘stork’ is quite similar to hesed, God’s covenant mercy. And the word for wind is ruach, which is often used for God’s Spirit. In other words, this is God carrying out the removal. I’m reminded of Ps 103:12 “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.”
The woman in the basket is to be set in place in Babylon, to be dealt with in due course, perhaps. Once again, we think of the book of Revelation, whose author draws frequently on the imagery in Zechariah. There is a final showdown between good and evil towards the end of the book (Rev 16-20), where evil is concentrated in Babylon, which is personified by a wicked woman on a scarlet beast (Rev 17:3-6) and is ‘a home for demons and a haunt for every evil spirit’ (Rev 18:2). By the end of Revelation, Babylon – wickedness – is defeated once and for all.
I quite like the idea that you can fit all evil in a 5-gallon basket. I’m aware this could sound quite glib. When we think of the appalling human-caused suffering that some people go through – perhaps including some of the readers of this blog – it’s hard to think of evil as being anything less than overwhelming. Accumulate wickedness across the nations and throughout history – if one could do such a thing – and it is surely immense. The devil, who at the very least has a hand in inciting and promoting the wrongs that we do to each other, would like us to think that his power is so far beyond anything we can comprehend we might as well give up now. But compare all that power, all that evil, with the inexhaustible riches of God’s might and then perhaps the 5-gallon basket begins to make sense.
One of my favourite stories (possibly apocryphal) is of the eccentric Yorkshire-born plumber and evangelist Smith Wigglesworth (1859-1947). One night he woke up to find the devil sitting at the end of his bed. “Oh, it’s only you,” he said, and went back to sleep.
But the reason, of course, why evil is ultimately puny is that it has been defeated by Jesus, the incarnation of good. On the cross he, like the basket, was ‘lifted up between heaven and earth.’[1] He died to destroy all the works of the evil one. Evil is now in its death throes, and will one day disappear for ever.
[1]See also Num 21: 8-9, John 3: 14-15 and John 8: 28
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