Then I lifted my eyes and saw, and behold: Compare the comments on verse 1. In the previous verse Zechariah was gazing at the barrel that was apparently near him. Now it seems that he looks up to the sky. So translators may render as Good News Translation does, “I looked up and saw.”
Two women coming forward!: It is impossible to identify any special significance in the number two, or in the fact that these figures were female. For translators who must indicate a direction of movement, it was presumably toward Zechariah.
The wind was in their wings; they had wings like the wings of a stork: The expression the wind was in their wings means much the same as “they were flying.” New Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh tries to catch something of the emotive effect of the unusual Hebrew expression by translating, “I … saw two women come soaring with the wind in their wings.” Contemporary English Version is also helpful with “I saw two women coming through the sky like storks with wings outstretched in the wind.” A stork is a large bird with a wing span of about two meters (between six and seven feet). Good News Translation tries to give some indication of its size by saying “powerful wings like those of a stork.” In areas where storks are not known, translators could say “powerful wings like those of a large bird” or just “large and powerful wings.” The Hebrew word for stork sounds like another word that can mean “loyalty.” This wordplay may be intended to suggest that it is those who are loyal to God who remove evil from among his people.
In these two clauses, Revised Standard Version follows the Hebrew order, which is clumsy in English. Many translators will need to restructure the first part of the verse so as to mention the wings earlier. One possibility would be “I saw two women with powerful wings like storks’ wings [or, like the wings of a large bird] come flying toward me.”
They lifted up the ephah between earth and heaven: Storks are birds that fly high (compare Jer 8.7) and the expression between earth and heaven probably suggests high flight. The next verse makes it clear that the two women took the barrel away, but in many languages it would be good to make that information clear at this point (compare Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch). Translators could say something like “They lifted the barrel high in the air and flew away with it.”
Quoted with permission from Clark, David J. & Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on Zechariah. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2002. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .