God’s Word for You

Zechariah 5:1-2 Interpreting the Bible

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Tuesday, July 12, 2022

The Sixth Vision

5 Again I lifted my eyes and saw, behold, a flying scroll! 2 He asked me, “What do you see?” and I answered, “I see a flying scroll. It is twenty cubits long and ten cubits wide.”

The first thing we need to do with any passage of the Bible is determine what the words mean, and then take them at face value. If we need help with the meaning, we look to the rest of Scripture. If we need help with grammar or with the dictionary meaning of a certain word, then it can be useful to look at similar writings, such as the apocrypha or the early Church Fathers, but in this case Scripture alone is sufficient.

Here we have two things we need to establish: What does the Bible mean by “cubit,” and what might Zechariah mean by “a flying scroll?”

In the Bible, we first encounter the word cubit in the account of Noah’s ark. In Hebrew, a cubit is an ammah in Hebrew or pēchys (πῆχυς) in Greek. Our word cubit comes from the Latin word cubitum which is the word for the ulna, the longer and larger of the bones in your forearm.

A cubit is the length of a man’s arm from the elbow to the fingertip, usually a foot and a half. Any ancient carpenter would probably have used his own forearm as his cubit. Standing with your arms outstretched, your wingspan (if I can use that word) is four cubits from fingertip to fingertip, and it’s two cubits from the center of your chest to your fingertip, or two cubits from outstretched elbow to outstretched elbow, the way wedding guests stand when they go to the second position in the chicken dance.

So twenty cubits is twenty feet plus half that, or thirty feet, and ten cubits is fifteen feet. My car is a Dodge Grand Caravan, which is almost exactly fifteen feet long and about 7 feet wide. So this flying scroll was two mini vans long, and it was the width of one mini van (the long way) or two vans side-by-side. In other words, it was the size of two double-stalls in a big parking lot. There have been attempts to equate the size of this scroll with the dimensions of the original sanctuary (Exodus 26:15-28), but we don’t need to make any assumptions about that.

Zechariah says that the scroll was flying. There are two ways of understanding this, and both fit the text without contradicting anything.

One way is that this means that the scroll was unrolled and flying, either suspended in the vision the way things defy the laws of gravity and physics in our dreams, or attached to a stand or flagpole. Ancient banners and flags are not reported on this scale, but a hanging banner (gonfalon) with multiple supporting poles could have held such a large scroll. So “flying” could simply mean “waving” in the breeze.

Another way to understand “flying” here is that it was hovering or flying like a fabled magic carpet. One Lutheran commentator, Leupold, thinks that it was flying “like some bird of prey, winging its flight to light on its victim,” and refers to Matthew 24:28, “Where there is a carcass, there the vultures will gather,” p. 98. But we know it was unrolled because Zechariah will tell us what was written on both sides of the scroll.

Most scrolls were made of papyrus. Papyrus reeds have a sticky, gluelike pith, so that when they are slit open, they make a thin strip of organic material that dries into a pleasant and useful texture not unlike the construction paper we still use in elementary schools. Scrolls made of papyrus were fashioned a little like plywood, with the grain of the plant running horizontally on one side and vertically on the other. It was not uncommon for a scribe to use only the side with the horizontal grain (the good side), but many Bible scrolls made of papyrus used both sides. We are told about scrolls with writing on both sides like this in Ezekiel 2:9-10 and Revelation 5:1.

We have learned how big this scroll was, and we have taken a valuable look at what Zechariah means by flying. We are not going to dig into any more details because they are presented in later verses of the chapter. This is how Bible interpretation is accomplished:

1, The only books that are God’s Word are the 66 canonical books of the Bible.

2, The only worldview of Scripture (including miracles, inspiration, etc.), is the supernatural.

3, The only text that is determinative is the original text (Hebrew Old Testament, Greek New Testament).

4, The only literary criticism to be done is the external kind: the historical setting.

5, The only meaning of the words is the simple, plain meaning: the grammatical setting.

6, The only safe and true interpreter of Scripture is Scripture itself: the Scriptural setting.

When people try to say, “It’s all just a matter of interpretation,” they are trying to explain how different Christian churches can take the same passage, perhaps even from the same translation, and come up with different meanings. Saying “It’s just a matter of interpretation” is, in the words of Professor David Kuske, “a lie by which Satan leads many souls to eternal destruction. This lie asserts that the problem is really with the Bible. The Bible can be understood in many ways, the devil whispers, so no one ought to insist that his understanding is the only right one” (Kuske, David, Biblical Interpretation: The Only Right Way, NPH 1995, p. 9). When someone tells me that many points of view about the Bible are valid, it is not the same as saying that my opinion of a novel or a poem is a matter of my own interpretation. If I read a classic Haiku by Matsuo Bashō:

  An old silent pond
  A frog jumps into the pond—
  Splash! Silence again.

I am free to understand this poem in many ways, not only the point that the great Bashō was trying to make about man’s relationship with nature.

When someone tells me that many points of view are valid, they are the mouthpiece for the devil who really wants to say that my interpretation is not valid at all; that I am wrong. The more points of view the devil can stir into the pot, the less the word of God says or means, because the soup is a cloudy mess of opinion with no truth. The Bible is not an opinion soup. The Bible is a clear, pure running stream. Here, the text says Zechariah saw a flying scroll the size of four mini vans, and that’s what the text means. We will be told more about it in the verses to come.

The Word of God is “a pure fountain, a well of flowing water streaming down” (Song of Solomon 4:15). “To him who is thirsty,” Jesus says, “I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life” (Revelation 21:6). Trust in God’s Word. It is the message of forgiveness for the rescue of your soul. Do not let it be mixed with poison or useless dust or ashes or any other thing, but let it fill you with God’s grace and salvation.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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