NOTES for Eze 4:1-17

¹Thou also, son of man, take thee a tile, and lay it before thee, and pourtray upon it the city, even Jerusalem:

²And lay siege against it, and build a fort against it, and cast a mount against it; set the camp also against it, and set battering rams against it round about.

³Moreover take thou unto thee an iron pan, and set it for a wall of iron between thee and the city: and set thy face against it, and it shall be besieged, and thou shalt lay siege against it. This shall be a sign to the house of Israel.

⁴Lie thou also upon thy left side, and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel upon it: according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon it thou shalt bear their iniquity.

⁵For I have laid upon thee the years of their iniquity, according to the number of the days, three hundred and ninety days: so shalt thou bear the iniquity of the house of Israel.

⁶And when thou hast accomplished them, lie again on thy right side, and thou shalt bear the iniquity of the house of Judah forty days: I have appointed thee each day for a year.

⁷Therefore thou shalt set thy face toward the siege of Jerusalem, and thine arm shall be uncovered, and thou shalt prophesy against it.

⁸And, behold, I will lay bands upon thee, and thou shalt not turn thee from one side to another, till thou hast ended the days of thy siege.

⁹Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof, according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon thy side, three hundred and ninety days shalt thou eat thereof.

¹⁰And thy meat which thou shalt eat shall be by weight, twenty shekels a day: from time to time shalt thou eat it.

¹¹Thou shalt drink also water by measure, the sixth part of an hin: from time to time shalt thou drink.

¹²And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight.

¹³And the LORD said, Even thus shall the children of Israel eat their defiled bread among the Gentiles, whither I will drive them.

¹⁴Then said I, Ah Lord GOD! behold, my soul hath not been polluted: for from my youth up even till now have I not eaten of that which dieth of itself, or is torn in pieces; neither came there abominable flesh into my mouth.

¹⁵Then he said unto me, Lo, I have given thee cow's dung for man's dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith.

¹⁶Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, behold, I will break the staff of bread in Jerusalem: and they shall eat bread by weight, and with care; and they shall drink water by measure, and with astonishment:

¹⁷That they may want bread and water, and be astonied one with another, and consume away for their iniquity.

The prophets of the Old Testament sometimes did strange things that shocked their contemporaries. Such prophetic actions can be compared with the parables spoken by the Lord Jesus Christ, but the prophets' parables were visible. In some ways, they resemble the actions of holy fools.

Thus, in chapter 4, the prophet Ezekiel tells of a prophetic action God commanded him to perform in order to say something important about the coming destruction of Jerusalem. To us today, the language of this ‘pantomime’ parable is difficult to understand. It was probably no clearer to the prophet's contemporaries without explanation. Yet the meaning of the revelation is sufficiently clear.

The Lord speaks of the measure of Israel's lawless deeds, to which the duration of the people's captivity corresponds in some mysterious way. The main part of the prophetic action concerns this: instead of the immeasurable gifts of God's mercy, Israel, which has turned away from its Creator, will receive unclean food in very scant measure in captivity. The method of baking flatbreads used at the time caused them to absorb smoke from the fuel on which they were baked. God commands the prophet to bake these flatbreads over excrement, because they symbolise the bread of slavery, bitter and foul.

There are two more important aspects to this parable. In the context of what Ezekiel will say about people's responsibility for their actions, God tells the prophet, ‘you will bear the iniquity of the house of Israel’, and prescribes a very painful way for him to do so. Thus the prophet, even before the revelation of the New Covenant, becomes an image of Christ, who suffered for our iniquities.

We are also struck by the almost childlike way of depicting the siege of Jerusalem: ‘take a brick and draw the city of Jerusalem on it’. A sandpit and toy soldiers immediately come to mind... Yet this expresses the difference in scale between the life of the Creator and His actions in the world, and the people who betray God. This symbol of Jerusalem should be compared with God's dialogue with the prophet Jeremiah about Jerusalem's destruction, which took place five or six years earlier, around 598. After commanding Jeremiah to go to the potter's house, God showed him how the potter crushes a flawed vessel in order to fashion something new from the lump of clay. ‘Can I not do the same with you, house of Israel?’ the Lord asks the prophet (Jer. 18:1–11).

Within the context of the book of the prophet Ezekiel, this little brick representing Jerusalem is set against two measures. On the one hand, there is the vision of the Creator's universal glory and omnipotence described by the prophet in the first chapter—and how small and defenceless the lawless people prove to be before that glory. On the other hand, the prophet sets Jerusalem's insignificance and its ridiculous pride against the mercy of God, of which he will speak in the second half of the book. And this mercy, God's condescension to a pitiful ‘little brick’, is revealed to the prophet as an inexplicable and undeserved gift.

Other notes

For Eze 4:1-17