“a flying roll”
Is this a Pastafarian thread?
Thanks for the interesting analysis! This passage had previously left me wondering what was going on.
It's not like a modern “smart missile”, it IS ONE, and there's not a woman in the basket, it's a nuclear warhead!
While the smart missile analogy is decent, it may also be thought of as the counterpart of the blood on the door posts and lintels in the Passover.
In the Passover the people applied the blood and when it was seen God’s wrath passed it by. This was an act of faith and the protection it brought was on account of obedience, applying the blood, rather than the character of those protected.
With the flying scroll God marks out those set aside for wrath based on their actual character and if their “obedience” is false. These people have no external defense to keep the destroyer out of their midst.
The blood of the Passover was applied by obeying, the scroll seeks out those NOT obeying.
In our day we might observe that “houses” — congregations for this bit, though more than just congregation would be included — that have rejected God, though they may seem to have a name like they are alive, are instead acting very much like those in Romans 1:18-32 and those very same houses are withering, collapsing.
Now, about the ephah.
Notice that it says that this is their resemblance, not its? Here I will maintain that it is not unreasonable that we may be dealing with a particular “ephah” out of a class of similar objects having similar appearance “through all the earth”.
They are black (the color of lead), associated with fire, and they arrive from the skies. They are also “set up” by men on bases, even have houses built for them. This is described as wickedness.
There was apparently a long history of men venerating, even worshipping, meteorites, not just in the Near East. At least one remains till this very day in Mecca. Could it be that this ephah in Shinar was just such a thing?
How does this tie into the passage? Well, in contrast to faithful Israel we have those who are thieves and who swear falsely against whom the scroll proceeds. Yet what ancient nations knew enough about God to swear falsely by Him? Could the ephah then refer to the the false religions of rest of the nations through these objects so many venerated?