A Scroll and a Sickle

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Zechariah, Book of,” “Fasting,” “Shinar,” “Teraphim,” “Weights and Measures” (for the ephah).
• Dictionary of the OT: Prophets (IVP) — “Zechariah, Book of,” “Visions,” “Shepherd,” “Fasting.”
• NIDOTTE — מְגִלָּה, אָלָה, אֵיפָה, שָׁמִיר, שָׁרַק.
• Dictionary of NT Use of the OT (Beale & Carson) — on Revelation 14:14–19 and on the divine title in Revelation 4:8. Neither entry claims Zechariah 5 or Zechariah 10 as a source, and neither does this page.

Zechariah’s offset is real, and it is nowhere near these chapters.

English 1:18–21 = MT and LXX 2:1–4; English 2:1–13 = MT and LXX 2:5–17. The table and the reasoning are on the first half of this study. From chapter 3 through 14:21 all three columns agree on every number, so no reference on this page needs converting. It is worth saying out loud even though the answer is nothing: a page that does not state its offset has not checked it.

Nothing in the Torah commands a fast in the fifth month or the seventh. The only fast the law commands is the Day of Atonement in the seventh month, and that is not what 7:5 is about.

These are memorial fasts, kept by the exiles for the disasters of 587 BC. Zechariah 8:19 — on the first half of this study — lists four of them, of the fourth, fifth, seventh and tenth months. The fifth is for the burning of the temple (2 Kings 25:8–9); the seventh is generally taken as the murder of Gedaliah (2 Kings 25:25; Jeremiah 41). So the delegation in 7:2–3 is asking about a custom the community invented in exile, now that the reason for it is being rebuilt.

⚠️ What was not checked. No Second-Temple liturgical source, no Mishnah tractate on fasts, no Qumran calendar text was consulted. The identification of the seventh-month fast with Gedaliah is the standard one and it is not measurable from the corpora on this disk. It is reported as an inference others have drawn.

The container in 5:6–11 is an אֵיפָה — a dry measure of roughly 22 litres, the unit grain was sold in.

The row does not translate it as a container at all: it has τὸ μέτρον, the measure. The vision is therefore about a shop weight, and it follows a vision about thieves and perjurers — which is why commentators connect it to the false measures of Amos 8:5, Micah 6:10–11 and Deuteronomy 25:13–15. And the lid is a talent of lead — the Hebrew has כִּכַּר עֹפֶרֶת and the row τάλαντον μολίβου: the largest weight in the system, dropped on the mouth of a grain measure to keep what is inside from getting out.

Whether the woman in the ephah is a goddess figure, a personification of the community’s guilt, or something else is argued at length in the commentaries. The text calls her הָרִשְׁעָה, Wickedness, and the page stops there.

The basket is taken to אֶרֶץ שִׁנְעָר — the land of Shinar — and a house is built for it there.

Shinar is Genesis’ name for southern Mesopotamia. The word stands in eight verses of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 10:10 (Nimrod’s kingdom, beginning with Babel), Genesis 11:2 (the plain where the tower was built), Genesis 14:1 and 14:9, Joshua 7:21, Isaiah 11:11, Daniel 1:2 and Zechariah 5:11. To send Wickedness to Shinar and build her a house on a pedestal is to send her back to the tower and give her a temple.

And here the two columns say different things. The transliteration Σεννααρ stands in six CATSS verse units held here — Genesis 10:10, 11:2, 14:1, 14:9 and Theodotion Daniel 1:2 for the country, and Genesis 14:2 for a king of that name — and Zechariah 5:11 is not among them, because the row there reads ἐν γῇ Βαβυλῶνος, in the land of Babylon. Of the eight Hebrew verses with Shinar, three do not carry the transliteration into the Greek column: Joshua 7:21, where the Greek has no place-name at all and Achan simply steals a fine embroidered mantle; Isaiah 11:11, which has Βαβυλωνίας; and this verse. Daniel 1:2 is held here in two Greek columns and they do not agree: Theodotion has Σεννααρ, the Old Greek has Βαβυλῶνα. ⚠️ The page does not say the Greek column is interpreting, or guessing, or reading a different Hebrew. It says the two columns differ, and it says where.

Zechariah 10:2 is the last of the fifteen verses in the Hebrew Bible that mention תְּרָפִים.

They are household objects: Rachel steals her father’s and sits on them (Genesis 31:19, 34–35); Michal puts one in a bed to look like David (1 Samuel 19:13, 16); Josiah burns them (2 Kings 23:24); Samuel puts them beside divination as the equivalent of idolatry (1 Samuel 15:23); Hosea 3:4 says Israel will be without them for a long time. By the time Zechariah names them the household gods are a byword rather than a live practice, and the verse’s complaint is that they talk.

Zechariah 10:4 is the cornerstone verse that later readers set beside Isaiah 28:16 and Psalm 118:22. The cornerstone is not in the Greek column. The page notes that and asserts nothing about why. No New Testament verse quotes Zechariah 10:4, and its deepest run into the Greek New Testament is three words — ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ — with a tie band of four.

All 37 CATSS rows of Zechariah 5, 7 and 10 were screened against all 7,927 verses of the Greek New Testament. All 37 reach two, 31 reach three, 14 reach four, 2 reach five, and nothing reaches six.

Nothing in these three chapters is a New Testament citation. No evangelist and no apostle quotes Zechariah 5, 7 or 10, and the screen agrees with that: the two deepest runs are a divine title and a stock phrase.

The most attractive connection on this page is one the measurement will not support, and it would be dishonest to leave it out.

Both sentences say and I saw, and behold, and both of them have a δρέπανον in them. It is very tempting and the numbers say no. The run is four — καὶ εἶδον καὶ ἰδού — with a tie band of five, and the other four ties are Revelation 6:2, 6:5, 6:8 and 14:1, which have no sickle in them at all. The shared word δρέπανον is not part of the run; it sits one word after the run in the Zechariah row and twenty-two words after it in Revelation 14:14, and taken by itself it is a run of one. Zechariah 5:1 against Mark 4:29, the other New Testament sickle, measures 1.

So what does the page say about the scroll and the sickle? Only this. The Hebrew column of Zechariah 5:1–2 has a scroll and the Greek column has a sickle. The two Hebrew nouns differ by one consonant. Revelation 14 has a sharp sickle for a harvest, and the harvest text readers set beside it is Joel 4:13 = English 3:13, not Zechariah — and no citation is claimed there either: against the CATSS row of Joel 4:13 the six sickle verses of Revelation 14:14–19 measure a run of one at most. The page does not say the Greek column misread anything, does not say Revelation is reading Zechariah’s Greek, and does not say which reading is older. It says what stands in each column and prints the run that fails.

The Hebrew-side screen puts the strongest ties not in the New Testament but a few chapters away.

Every one of those deepest partners is Zechariah itself. The vision-formula — and I said to the angel who talked with me, and he said to me, what do you see — is what holds the night visions together, and it is measurable: a run of six with a tie band of one, twice, both times inside the book. This is what internal composition looks like on a screen, and it is a good deal clearer here than any external connection is.

Zechariah 10:8 was screened against the other 23,203 verse units of the Masoretic corpus held here. It shares no two consecutive words with any of them.

אֶשְׁרְקָה לָהֶם וַאֲקַבְּצֵם כִּי פְדִיתִים וְרָבוּ כְּמוֹ רָבוּ
“I will whistle for them and gather them in, for I have redeemed them, and they shall be as many as they were before.”Zechariah 10:8 — Masoretic text; ESV

Eight words. Every one of them is common; not one adjacent pair of them occurs anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible. ⚠️ Say what the zero means. This is the Hebrew-side screen, which does not fall back to single words — so nought here means no two consecutive words shared, not no word shared. Against the Greek New Testament the same verse reaches a run of two with a tie band of sixty-one, which is what an ordinary sentence looks like.

The same verse is the only place in the Hebrew Bible where God whistles for his own people. The two facts are independent and the page is not fusing them — a verse can be lexically unique and unremarkable, and a rare verb can sit in a formulaic sentence. Here both happen to be true of the same eight words.

The scroll-and-sickle divergence is reported and not explained, and that is the biggest hole on the page. Three explanations are standard in the literature — a different Hebrew text in front of the translator, a translator reading מגלה as מגל, or a deliberate rendering — and this page cannot distinguish them and does not try. Settling it needs a critical apparatus, Hebrew manuscript evidence and Septuagint text-critical work, none of which is on this disk.

No Qumran material was consulted. Zechariah is present in the Minor Prophets scrolls from Murabba‘at and in the Greek Minor Prophets scroll from Naḥal Ḥever, and the Greek scroll is exactly the kind of witness that would bear on the readings printed here. None of it was examined.

No Aquila, Symmachus or Theodotion of Zechariah is held here. The shelf carries the Theodotionic Greek of Daniel and nothing else from the later versions, so every divergence on this page — the sickle, the hoopoe, Babylon for Shinar, healing for shepherd — was compared against one Greek column only.

The date of chapters 9–14 is not addressed. Chapter 10 sits inside the most argued-over section of this book, and the page quotes it without entering the question. That is a real limitation on anything said about chapter 10 as Zechariah’s.

The Greek Old Testament figures on this page were run over all 64 CATSS files held here, but the screening corpus is 30,348 verse units, not the 30,637 the files contain. The Odes are excluded from run screens, and they should be: Ode 9 is Luke 1 and Ode 13 is Luke 2 copied into a Greek Old Testament manuscript, and ten further Odes are second copies of Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 32, 1 Samuel 2, Habakkuk 3, Isaiah 26, Jonah 2, Daniel 3, Isaiah 5 and Isaiah 38. Leaving them in would have counted the same text twice and, worse, would have produced Greek-Old-Testament ‘matches’ for Luke that are Luke. Every “stands in N verse units” figure on this page is against 30,348.

Twenty of the sixty-four files are deuterocanonical — witnesses, not Scripture on this shelf, and named as such wherever one carries a hit. None of the counts printed on this page depends on one.

Nothing here is an argument from silence about Hebrew or Greek outside these corpora. “The only verse in the Hebrew Bible” means the 23,204 verse units of Sefaria’s Miqra according to the Masorah held on this disk, and nothing more.

• Carol L. Meyers and Eric M. Meyers, Haggai, Zechariah 1–8 (Anchor Bible 25B) and Zechariah 9–14 (Anchor Bible 25C).
• Mark J. Boda, The Book of Zechariah (NICOT).
• Joyce G. Baldwin, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi (Tyndale OT Commentaries).
• Al Wolters, Zechariah (Historical Commentary on the Old Testament) — unusually full on the Greek of chapter 5.
• None of these were consulted for the measurements on this page, which were run on the text files named in the footer.

A delegation walks up to the half-built temple in December 518 BC with a reasonable administrative question. We have been fasting in the fifth month for seventy years because the temple burned. The temple is going back up. Do we stop?

The answer is a counter-question — was it for me that you fasted? — and then a list: render true judgements, show kindness and mercy, and do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner and the poor. Screened across the whole Hebrew Bible, that four-item list occurs in one verse and one verse only. Eighteen verses name three of the four; Zechariah 7:10 names all four. The question was about the calendar and the answer was about who was being crushed while the calendar was being kept.

And then chapter 7 says what happened the last time: they made their hearts as hard as the hardest stone anyone could name, and the hearing stopped, and the scattering followed. Two chapters earlier a written thing had flown out over the whole land looking for houses to lodge in. A text going out, and hearts made of shāmîr so that it cannot get in — the same book, four chapters apart.

And then the whistle. Everywhere else in the Hebrew Bible the verb שָׁרַק is what passers-by do at a ruin, or what God does to summon an army against you. Once, at Zechariah 10:8, it is what a shepherd does to bring the flock in. Eight Hebrew words that share no adjacent pair with any other verse in the Bible — I will whistle for them and gather them in, for I have redeemed them.

⭐ This page closes Zechariah on this shelf. Chapters 5, 7 and 10 were the last three no page had quoted; with them the book stands complete alongside the other eleven Minor Prophets.