Zechariah

Zechariah was a prophet in Jerusalem in the early Persian period. His book dates his first messages to 520 BCE, when the Jews who had returned from Babylon were rebuilding the Temple, and he worked alongside the prophet Haggai.

Chapters 1–6 record eight night visions explained by an angel. In Zechariah 5 he sees a flying scroll twenty cubits long and ten cubits wide; the angel says it is the curse going out over the whole land, entering the houses of thieves and false swearers and consuming them. In the same chapter two women with wings like a stork carry a basket containing a woman called Wickedness away to the land of Shinar. Other visions include horsemen patrolling the earth, a golden lampstand, and four chariots coming out from between two bronze mountains.

Scholars generally treat chapters 9–14 as later additions by other hands. Ancient-astronaut writers have read the flying scroll as a craft; the text itself presents it as a symbolic vision of a curse.