Mining the Minors: Zechariah (9)

There’s no getting around the fact that the Bible’s pictures of wickedness are frequently female. We’re going to study one today.

Commentators occasionally feel the need to apologize for this, as if maybe the Holy Spirit might be a tad misogynistic, or perhaps the prophets of God went off the reservation and used imagery consistent with their patriarchal biases that he might not have personally approved.

Hey, we all know the Lord Jesus loved women …

Get Over It

My attitude to such political posturing is a big shrug and a “Get over it.” Nobody even notices when the Bible’s illustrations of evil are male, let alone becomes offended. In Christ’s parables, for example, it was a prodigal son, not a prodigal daughter. It was a rich man in Hades who despised Lazarus, not a rich woman. The unforgiving servant was a man, the guy who got tossed out of the wedding feast was a man and the dishonest manager was a man, as were the rich fool, the rebellious tenants and the citizens who refused to come to the wedding feast. And if we want to talk about personifying evil, Satan is always portrayed as male, while the personification of wisdom is a woman.

The depiction of the sexes is all pretty even-handed in scripture, but people want to find something to carp about. It’s almost as if all that comparing and competing is totally irrelevant to the Lord …

I. Eight Visions and Explanations (continued)

7/ A Woman in a Basket

Zechariah 5:5-8 – The Vision

“Then the angel who talked with me came forward and said to me, ‘Lift your eyes and see what this is that is going out.’ And I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘This is the basket that is going out.’ And he said, ‘This is their iniquity in all the land.’ And behold, the leaden cover was lifted, and there was a woman sitting in the basket! And he said, ‘This is Wickedness.’ And he thrust her back into the basket, and thrust down the leaden weight on its opening.”

Wickedness as a Woman

So then, why did Zechariah see wickedness depicted as a woman? It probably has more to do with the besetting sins of that particular period than with pointless competition between the sexes. Consider that, like Zechariah’s sixth vision, the seventh probably depicts a particular sort of wickedness, rather than wickedness in all its forms. In this case, I believe the sin is idolatry, a case I will make shortly. In this period of Judean history, portraying idolatrous wickedness as peculiarly feminine turns out to be a perfect fit.

As far as foreign gods go, idolatrous Judeans worshiped many male pseudo-deities, most famously Baal. But the hot little foreign deity among Judeans during the exilic period was portrayed as a woman and honored by her worshipers with the title of “the queen of heaven”. Her name was Ishtar or Astarte. In Canaan, she was Ashteroth or Asherah.

Asherah is a little less well known than her male counterpart, but still rates frequent mention from Deuteronomy all the way to the Minor Prophets. Her worship originated in Assyria and continued in Babylon. Jeremiah complained about her from the beginning of his ministry to his enforced exile in Egypt in chapter 44, where he mentions her four times, quoting back the brazen self-justifications of the Jews left in the land by Nebuchadnezzar. They adulterated the worship of YHWH by pouring out drink offerings and baking cakes for her. Their superstitions led them to believe their problem was not being too idolatrous, but not being idolatrous enough!

So, yes, if God wants to depict wickedness as a woman in this chapter, remember, he didn’t start it. The Assyrians did, and the Jews bought into the scam big time. Sending the queen of heaven back to Babylon in a basket was merely packing her up and sending her home. If think you detect an element of mockery in this vision, you may well be on to something.

The Basket

The word “basket” is literally ephah, which was a Hebrew measure, usually of grain. Since it was probably a common measurement used in markets everyday, there may be little to be learned from that. It is interesting, however, that almost everywhere the word is used in the Old Testament, from Exodus through Zechariah, the ephah as a measurement is consistently associated with acts of worship. All grain offerings were measured in relation to the ephah.

Translating the size of an ephah into English turns out to be a dodgy exercise: estimates in commentaries range from five to twelve gallons. Even at the largest possible size, the basket would have been far too small to serve as even a temporary prison for a normal sized woman. This leads some to speculate that the woman Zechariah saw was really a graven or carved image like a household idol, rather than an actual being. This is certainly possible, but the presence of the lead weight to keep her inside strongly suggests the potential for escape. Zechariah probably saw a living being, if a little undersized.

Then again, we’ve just had a vision of a wildly oversized flying scroll, so I’m not sure size is all that relevant to the interpretation. Probably the implicit association of the ephah with worship is more significant than the size of the woman inside it!

Their Iniquity in all the Land

The angel tells Zechariah that the woman in the basket signifies “their iniquity in all the land”. The same enigmatic language issue exists here as in the first vision of chapter 5, which is that the Hebrew word translated “land” in the ESV (meaning Judah) may equally signify the entire earth. Here, I believe “land” is the correct translation. The woman in the basket is “going out”, not off-planet, but from Judah to Shinar.

The word translated “iniquity” is even more nebulous. Perhaps a scribal error is involved, or perhaps there is a bit of Hebrew wordplay going in that we can’t decipher. In any case, it’s a very common word meaning “eye”, “sight” or even “source”. This is the only occasion in the entire Old Testament where it is translated as “iniquity” in English, which probably resulted from the ESV translators reading the angel’s explanation (“This is wickedness”) back into their interpretation. However, if the angel said, “This is their eye in all the land”, he may simply have meant that Judah had a chronic problem with idolatry, which was in fact the case. Idolatry was the fountainhead of all wickedness for them. The nation was fixated on foreign gods, and repeatedly returned to them.

Perhaps the significance of the vision is that God intended to change that for good. He had been restraining idolatry in Judah, as suggested by the lead cover on the basket. Now he was getting rid of it for the foreseeable future. Metaphorical idols such as greed might still be a problem for individual Jews, but national, literal idol worship involving high places, groves, icons and poles was going to exit the land. In fact, this is precisely what occurred. The final prophet of the Old Testament period, Malachi, mentions religion repeatedly throughout his four chapters, but never once does idol worship come up in association with Israel. And the only times non-metaphorical idolatry is mentioned in the Gospels and Epistles is in a Gentile context. After Zechariah’s vision, literal idolatry would not remain a Jewish problem much longer.

Zechariah 5:9-11 – The Explanation

“Then I lifted my eyes and saw, and behold, two women coming forward! The wind was in their wings. They had wings like the wings of a stork, and they lifted up the basket between earth and heaven. Then I said to the angel who talked with me, “Where are they taking the basket?’ He said to me, ‘To the land of Shinar, to build a house for it. And when this is prepared, they will set the basket down there on its base.’ ”

The Land of Shinar

I will pass on the question of what the two women with stork wings signify. Commentators are split on whether these are agents of heaven or servants of Satan, and I’m not sure much turns on the answer. Sometimes God works through angelic powers, sometimes he works through people, and sometimes he glorifies himself and accomplishes his purposes through the most unlikely agents, very much against their expectations. What is evident is that the Lord is behind the removal of institutionalized idolatry from Judah to the land of Shinar, and at very least allows it to have a home there. The woman in the basket will have a house built for her far away from the people of God. She is still a spiritual threat to the world, but one we will not see directly affecting the nation of Israel again until the time of the end.

The term Shinar is relatively rare in the OT compared to Babylon or Babylonia. It goes all the way back to the table of nations in Genesis 10, where Nimrod made his kingdom, and again in Genesis 11, where construction on the Tower of Babel began. The robe that so successfully tempted Achan was from Shinar. It’s also the millennial designation for the area, at which point Babylon the great will be no more. We must remember that Chaldean Babylon had already fallen to Persia, and the Spirit of God through Zechariah may have wanted to avoid any potential confusion with one of the two contemporary Persian seats of power. The vision has nothing to do with empiric Persia. Its significance is spiritual, not political.

Referring to the land of Shinar suggests, perhaps, that the Lord is having false religion taken out of Judah and tucked quietly away in a far-off place, to reappear as a major player in Israel’s storyline at a future date. While Christ is building his church, Satan is hard at work extending the influence of his own.

A House on a Base

The winged women were going to build a house for the woman and set the basket down on its base. The word translated “house” is a very common one in Hebrew, but frequently refers to a temple, and this is how we should probably think of it. The word translated “base” is yet another religious term, used frequently in the chapters that detail the construction of Solomon’s temple. Altars, pillars and lavers all had “bases”. As I hinted earlier, this plethora of blatantly religious terminology makes it extremely difficult to identify the “wickedness” of the woman in the basket with any sin other than idolatry. This woman symbolizing false religion will have her place in the years to follow Zechariah’s visions, but it will not be in Israel. Moreover, she will not be associated with literal, empiric Babylon of the recent past, but rather with mystery Babylon of the future.

Let’s cut to the chase. I think we are seeing a spiritual allegory for the rise of mystery Babylon, the great whore whose fall Revelation 17-19 depicts. By the time we find her in Revelation, her sphere of influence has greatly expanded: from her origins in Assyria and her corruption of God’s people, to being spirited away to Shinar, and from there, teaching all nations to drink the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality. To me at least, this suggests something much more pervasive than merely the ungodly aspects of Catholicism (the fact that some call Mary “the queen of heaven” is unfortunate but not conclusive), or even Islam. A false religious system that corrupts all nations and that is responsible for shedding the blood of God’s servants is something we have yet to see explicitly revealed in the world in its final form, where its ultimate object of worship will be indisputably male. Or perhaps bestial.

Mystery Babylon’s Judean Origins

What should not be lost in all this imagery is the intimation that mystery Babylon will have a strong Jewish influence. That is what I think Zechariah is telling us. In Revelation, we see this in the person of the second beast, who rises “out of the earth”. (As in the Zechariah passage, I believe that is better translated “land”, meaning Israel, in contrast to the first beast, who rises “out of the sea”, meaning the nations or rest of the earth. In Greek, gē has the same ambiguity as its Hebrew equivalent.)

This beast is a false prophet, the religious energy behind the first beast’s political power. He has two horns like a lamb, but speaks like a dragon. All this suggests a Jewish connection to the worship of the beast, who starts as a political figure and ends as a religious one. In 2 Thessalonians 2, we discover this man of lawlessness takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.

This will be the ultimate idolatrous temptation for the Jews of the future: bow to the man of sin and acknowledge him as God, or take your chances with the persecuted and occupied remnant of faithful Israel praying for the return of Messiah. It will be the dividing line between spiritual life and death, between who is Christ’s in future Israel and who belongs to Satan and his agents.

And it’s all been in the works for 2,500 years or so, since God took idolatry out of Israel and gave it a house in Shinar.