Kommentar zu Zechariah 5:11

and it will be prepared, and they shall place it there And the house shall be prepared, and the ephah shall be placed there with the wicked that are within it.

there In that house.

on its base On its permanence and on its base. Here He hinted [to Zechariah] that, because of the iniquity of Israel, who measured out [so to speak] with the measure of sins and wickedness, they were punished with the same measure. And there came two nations that ruled together; they were Babylon and the Chaldeans - the army of Nebuchadnezzar - and exiled [Israel] to Babylon where [Israel] stayed fixed on a base, a base that was established for them. That is according to the completion of the seventy years until now, when they returned. This interpretation leans partially toward that of Jonathan. This [phrase] is interpreted in many [other] ways, but they are not satisfactory to me. Our Sages, however, explained and learned from here that the evil inclination was given into the hands of the men of the Great Assembly, and they cast it into a leaden cauldron and covered it with lead, because lead absorbs the sound, as is stated in tractate Sanhedrin (24a) and in tractate Yoma (69b). My interpretation of the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar as doubled - composed of two nations - I saw in Midrash Psalms (6:2, 18: 10), that the following four kingdoms that subjugated Israel were double: Babylon and the Chaldeans, Media and Persia, Greece and Macedon, Edom and Ishmael, and for this reason the Kalir composed (in Piyutim for Shemini Azereth), “It is the fourth; it is the eighth,” concerning Edom.