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3. The Structure of Individual Sections of Zechariah 131
occurrence is near the beginning of vv. 7-8. In this pericope a new
subsection seems always to start with a lifting up. In 9b Kfo3 helps to
form an inclusio for v. 9 and indeed for the whole of the vision
proper, vv. 5b-9.
•pi) occurs in the phrase 'lift up the eyes' (vv. 5, 9) but also in v. 6,
'this is their eye in all the earth', referring to the ephah. If it can be
established that this makes sense then the correspondence with 4.10b
('the eyes of Yahweh which range through the whole earth/land') is
striking. The arguments, however, for emendation are strong: D}ii>
involves a small change, is found in one manuscript and is supported
by LXX and Syr. 1
The best analogies for the meaning 'appearance' seem to be
Lev. 13.55, '(if) the diseased spot has not changed its eye' (BOB also
suggests emendations in vv. 5 and 37), Num. 11.7 (2x), 'its appearance
was as the appearance of nbinn' and 1 Sam. 16.7 'man sees
DTP 1 ?'. If we adopt this reading in Zechariah 5 it is not certain what
'their' refers to. The most likely explanation seems to be that it is an
indefinite third person plural, referring to the inhabitants of the land.
Another possibility worth exploring is whether we might translate
as 'This is what they see', meaning that the only thing that the
inhabitants of the world (or land) can see is the ephah. 2
It is not an easy task to decide between these alternatives. It seems to
me that 'this is their iniquity...' is not as obvious as it might seem,
since 'wickedness' is explicitly applied to the woman in the ephah,
rather than to both of them together. The best plan seems to be to
keep the MT, as the most difficult alternative, and to understand it to
mean that this is how Yahweh sees the inhabitants of Judah and
Jerusalem: an ephah with wickedness in. The demand for a just ephah
(eg. Deut. 25.14-15; Amos 8.5; Prov. 20.10; Lev. 19.36; Ezek. 45.10;
Mic. 6.11) may be in the background. The meaning of the vision does
not seem to be greatly affected by which emendation is adopted but
or a would make for a closer link with 4.1 Ob: the eyes of Yahweh
range over all the earth and this is what they see. We need also to bear
1. See, e.g., Rudolph, Haggai, p. 118.
2. The emendation afts from the verb ]'i> might even be suggested, although it
occurs otherwise only in the qere of 1 Sam. 18.9. We should not, of course, be able
to make use of this proposal to decide on the intended structure of the passage.