Zechariah 5:1-4
New English Translation
Vision Six: The Flying Scroll
5 Then I turned to look, and there was a flying scroll! 2 Someone asked me, “What do you see?” I replied, “I see a flying scroll 30 feet long and 15 feet wide.”[a] 3 The speaker went on to say, “This is a curse[b] traveling across the whole earth. For example, according to the curse whoever steals[c] will be removed from the community; or on the other hand (according to the curse) whoever swears falsely will suffer the same fate.” 4 “I will send it out,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, “and it will enter the house of the thief and of the person who swears falsely in my name. It will land in the middle of his house and destroy both timber and stones.”
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- Zechariah 5:2 tn Heb “20 cubits…10 cubits” (so NAB, NRSV). These dimensions (“30 feet long and 15 feet wide”) can hardly be referring to the scroll when unrolled since that would be all out of proportion to the normal ratio, in which the scroll would be 10 to 15 times as long as it was wide. More likely, the scroll is 15 feet thick when rolled, a hyperbole expressing the enormous amount and the profound significance of the information it contains.
- Zechariah 5:3 tn The Hebrew word translated “curse” (אָלָה, ʾalah) alludes to the covenant sanctions that attend the violation of God’s covenant with Israel (cf. Deut 29:12, 14, 20-21).
- Zechariah 5:3 sn Stealing and swearing falsely (mentioned later in this verse) are sins against mankind and God respectively and are thus violations of the two major parts of the Ten Commandments. These two stipulations (commandments 8 and 3) represent the whole law.
Zechariah 5:1-4
Christian Standard Bible
Sixth Vision: Flying Scroll
5 I looked up again and saw a flying scroll.(A) 2 “What do you see?” he asked me.
“I see a flying scroll,” I replied, “thirty feet[a] long and fifteen feet[b] wide.”(B)
3 Then he said to me, “This is the curse(C) that is going out over the whole land, for everyone who is a thief, contrary to what is written on one side, has gone unpunished,[c] and everyone who swears falsely, contrary to what is written on the other side, has gone unpunished. 4 I will send it out,”(D)—this is the declaration of the Lord of Armies—“and it will enter the house of the thief and the house of the one who swears falsely by my name. It will stay inside his house and destroy it along with its timbers and stones.”(E)
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