NOW, SON OF MAN, take a clay tablet, put it in front of you and draw the city of Jerusalem on it. 2Then lay siege to it: Erect siege works against it, build a ramp up to it, set up camps against it and put battering rams around it. 3Then take an iron pan, place it as an iron wall between you and the city and turn your face toward it. It will be under siege, and you shall besiege it. This will be a sign to the house of Israel.
4“Then lie on your left side and put the sin of the house of Israel upon yourself. You are to bear their sin for the number of days you lie on your side. 5I have assigned you the same number of days as the years of their sin. So for 390 days you will bear the sin of the house of Israel.
6“After you have finished this, lie down again, this time on your right side, and bear the sin of the house of Judah. I have assigned you 40 days, a day for each year. 7Turn your face toward the siege of Jerusalem and with bared arm prophesy against her. 8I will tie you up with ropes so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have finished the days of your siege.
9“Take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them in a storage jar and use them to make bread for yourself. You are to eat it during the 390 days you lie on your side. 10Weigh out twenty shekels of food to eat each day and eat it at set times. 11Also measure out a sixth of a hin of water and drink it at set times. 12Eat the food as you would a barley cake; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel.” 13The LORD said, “In this way the people of Israel will eat defiled food among the nations where I will drive them.”
14Then I said, “Not so, Sovereign LORD! I have never defiled myself. From my youth until now I have never eaten anything found dead or torn by wild animals. No unclean meat has ever entered my mouth.”
15“Very well,” he said, “I will let you bake your bread over cow manure instead of human excrement.”
16He then said to me: “Son of man, I will cut off the supply of food in Jerusalem. The people will eat rationed food in anxiety and drink rationed water in despair, 17for food and water will be scarce. They will be appalled at the sight of each other and will waste away because of their sin.
Original Meaning
IN EZEKIEL 1–3, we saw how the prophet was called and commissioned to bring a message to his people. There were hints throughout that the message, when it came, would not be good news. The Lord appeared in the form of the divine warrior, ready to deliver judgment, and he came from the north, like Israel’s traditional enemies. In the face of this impending danger, Ezekiel was appointed as a watchman, to cry out a warning of the wrath to come. But just how bad is the bad news? The full extent of the bad news begins to become clear in the first message Ezekiel is given to deliver to the exiles (chs. 4–5), which is made up of a series of related symbolic actions, or “sign-acts,” along with their explanation.
The first of Ezekiel’s sign-acts symbolizes the siege of the city of Jerusalem and the reason for it. He is to take a clay brick (perhaps the size of one or two sheets of standard 8–1/2” x 11” paper),1 and draw on it a map or picture of Jerusalem. Having created this visual model, he was to “lay siege to it” (4:1–2). The extent of the depiction of the siege with its accompanying siege works, ramps, army camps, and battering rams seems to have a deliberate element of overkill in it; clearly this was no halfhearted effort but the extension of the entire might of the Babylonian army to crush errant Jerusalem.
Yet something more is at work in the onslaught than Babylonian imperialism. In Ezekiel’s depiction, the invisible aggressor who stands behind the Babylonians becomes visible. Acting the part of the Lord, Ezekiel is to set up a large iron plate between himself and the city (4:3), symbolizing the cutting off of relationships between God and his people. There is now no channel by which the people can communicate with God, even if they wanted to do so.2
In the previous chapter, the prophet had been told that he would not be able to act as an intercessor for the people; the appeals process had been exhausted. This is now visually depicted. The prophet is told to “turn [his] face toward” Jerusalem (4:3), adopting an implacable attitude toward it. The iron wall and Ezekiel’s expression communicate God’s abandonment of the city (cf. chs. 8–11), and the dual agency of destruction (human and divine) emerges in 4:3: “It will be under siege, and you shall besiege it.” The catastrophe will not simply be an event of human history (“It will be under siege”) but specifically the result of direct divine action (“You [i.e., the prophet, representing the Lord] shall besiege it”). By his pantomime, Ezekiel is to make the invisible aggressor visible.
At this point the sign changes to a new, though related figure, in which the prophet shifts into the role of siege victim. This sign-act is more complex than the previous one, not so much in terms of the act described, which is straightforward enough,3 but of interpretation. The prophet is instructed to lie first on his left side for 390 days, “bear[ing] the sin [tiśśāʾ ʾet-ʿ awōnām] of the house of Israel,” then to lie on his right side for forty days, “bear[ing] the sin of the house of Judah” (4:4–6). While in a prone position, he is to continue to prophesy against Jerusalem (4:7), and he is to subsist on siege rations (4:9–17). The latter is a near-starvation diet, a mere eight ounces per day of an unpalatable mixture of grains and legumes, along with two-thirds quart of water (4:9–11). According to Moshe Greenberg, the strange mixture symbolizes a situation where the scarcity was such that no one kind of grain was plentiful enough on its own to make a whole loaf. He also records an interesting experiment carried out in the third century A.D. that apparently demonstrated that even a dog would not eat Ezekiel’s bread!4
Not only were the rations small and unappetizing, Ezekiel was further instructed (at first) to prepare them by baking them over human excrement, a way that would have rendered him ceremonially unclean—representing the unclean food that the Israelites would eat in exile. This would be particularly abhorrent to a priest like Ezekiel. However, in response to Ezekiel’s protest, the Lord permitted the prophet to substitute animal dung as the fuel.
What are we to make of this strange activity? There are several interconnected exegetical difficulties here. (1) Who is intended by “the house of Israel” and the “house of Judah”? In the context of the remainder of the Old Testament, one thinks immediately of the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah, which split apart during the reign of Rehoboam.5 Is that their meaning here? (2) What does it mean for the prophet to “bear their sin” (nāśāʾ ʿ awōnām)? This can mean either “bear their guilt”—as the priests were said to “bear the iniquity” of Israel and thus atone for them (cf. Ex. 28:38; Lev. 10:17)—or it can mean “undergo punishment” (as in Num. 14:33, where Israel must “suffer for [their] unfaithfulness” [lit., “bear your punishment”] for forty years). (3) Finally, what is the significance of the time periods, 390 days and forty days respectively, which are said to represent periods of years?
In answer to the first question, though Ezekiel can speak of the northern and southern kingdoms in terms of “Israel” and “Judah” (see, e.g., Ezek. 37), this is not his normal practice. Moreover, if we adopt this approach, we run into insuperable difficulties when we attempt to interpret the time periods.6 Rather, for Ezekiel the “house of Israel” is the whole covenant people of God, and their sins are centered in the Jerusalem temple, the heart of the southern kingdom. Their 390-year history of sin, pictured by the prophet’s 390-day prostration on his left side, stretches back in time to around the construction of the first temple.7 Likewise, the “house of Judah” appears here to be a designation for the community of the exiles in Ezekiel.8
When we combine this approach with the dual significance of the phrase “bear their sin,” the following interpretation emerges: Ezekiel is to lie on his left side for 390 days, representing 390 years, bearing the guilt of the entire covenant community of Israel. The iniquity of the community is placed on him (4:4). During this period he symbolizes Israel’s long history of accumulated sin, which culminates in the siege and fall of Jerusalem, concretely depicted by eating siege rations throughout the 390 days (4:9). Then during the period of forty days, he represents the punishment of the Exile, which he depicts in terms of the symbolic figure of forty years.9 Just as Israel’s ancestors in the desert were a lost generation, spending forty years in the desert for their sin (Num. 14:34), so the exilic generation is condemned to a similar fate for the nation’s long history of sin.10
It is clear that Ezekiel’s “bearing sin” for the people has no substitutionary purpose. The siege and destruction of Jerusalem are not averted by his sufferings. Thus, throughout his period of prostration he is to continue prophesying against Jerusalem with bared forearm and set face (Ezek. 4:7). The purpose of his action is to illustrate the accumulation of the people’s sin rather than to be effective in removing that sin. In this respect, his action is comparable to the whole Old Testament sacrificial system, which, according to the writer to the Hebrews, could not effectively remove sin (Heb. 10:1–11), but rather served as “an illustration for the present time” (9:9). By this means, Ezekiel is to communicate graphically to the people the weight of the accumulated burden of their history of sin as the cause for the impending conflagration of Jerusalem and the exile of the people in a land not their own. The punishment for that sin is coming upon them with full force, no matter what the optimistic false prophets may be saying (Jer. 6:14; 8:11).
But, as with the opening vision, at the end of the judgment a glimmer of hope surfaces. Though the tunnel may be long and dark, there is a tiny light at its end. For the total number of days of the sign-act is 430, a number that parallels Israel’s years of sojourn in Egypt (Ex. 12:40). Judgment must come, a judgment that effectively wipes out the entire present generation, just as the desert generation was wiped out. Yet by depicting the total period of sin and judgment in terms of a renewed Egyptian bondage, the prophet invites the hope, even the certainty, that at the end of the appointed time of punishment there will be a new exodus and a new entry into the land.11 Forty years may be a long time—a lifetime—for Ezekiel’s hearers. But God’s abandonment of his people is not forever. The rainbow continues to shine through the gathering gloom.
Ezekiel’s diet during this period has a twofold aspect: As indicated above, the rations are small and poor quality, symbolizing the siege diet of the people of Jerusalem. Moreover, Ezekiel is instructed to cook them in a ceremonially unclean way, symbolizing the defiled food that the Israelites will eat in exile (Ezek. 4:13). By this means, the twofold message of judgment is proclaimed on all Israel, both those who remain in Jerusalem and those who are in exile. Yet another aspect emerges, however, as the prophet protests the divine decree in verse 14. Ezekiel asserts that he has never consumed anything defiled, and the decree is promptly emended by the Lord to allow the prophet to maintain his ceremonial purity. Ezekiel thus stands as a picture of a righteous remnant: Though he is in exile, living among the nations just as the people of Israel will do, he nonetheless has managed to maintain his purity. Though the majority of the people may eat defiled food, through the grace of God and their commitment to him others will not.
Bridging Contexts
SIGN-ACTS OF the prophets. One of the great difficulties for the contemporary reader of Ezekiel is the outlandish nature of his behavior. We are uncomfortable with extreme commitments to religious beliefs, identifying those as typical of the “cults.” If one of our relatives were to behave similarly to Ezekiel under the influence of his or her religious beliefs, we would probably seek some means of “deprogramming” that person. The recent mass suicide of about thirty members of the “Heaven’s Gate” cult, who believed that there was an alien space ship concealed behind the Hale-Bopp comet waiting to take them up to “the next level,” illustrates the presence of such cults within our society. But the problem with the Heaven’s Gate cult was not, as many seem to suppose, the irrationality of their belief that there is something more to existence than this life. Rather, the problem was that what they believed was not true.
Of course, we should not make the mistake of thinking that Ezekiel’s behavior was considered normal in his society either. By their standards too, his behavior was distinctly odd. But, unlike us, they would not have found it hard to believe that someone should be so taken up by the message he had received from God that it became the sole determining reality in his life. “Sign-acts” were a regular part of the way prophets went about their business.
Many of the prophets were instructed by God to perform dramatic actions to accompany their verbal messages. These ranged in content from simple sermon illustrations, such as when Jeremiah publicly smashed a clay jar to depict the coming destruction of Jerusalem (Jer. 19:1–13), to more complex acted-out parables, such as when the unnamed man of God pretended to be a soldier who had abused his trust by failing to guard a prisoner committed to his care (1 Kings 20:35–43).
It has been pointed out that there are basically two possible motivations for such actions: the belief that they have an influence on future events through the process of “sympathetic magic,”12 and the desire to provide a dramatic visual aid to increase the impact of the message.13 These are, of course, not mutually exclusive motivations. However, since the words of the true prophet were nothing less than the word of the Lord and thus certain of coming true (Deut. 18:22), it is not clear how symbolic actions could have been perceived as having any greater power on events than the prophet’s word.
Moreover, the essentially public nature of the symbolic acts of the prophets (whether that public was the general populace or a select group of disciples),14 along with the importance attached to an interpretation of the sign-act, suggest that the second motivation was more significant. “Sympathetic magic” would do its work ex opere operato, regardless of the presence or absence of an audience, but communication only takes place where an audience is present. Word and action support one another to create effective communication. As Leslie Allen comments: “If actions speak louder than words, here they were a megaphone for the prophetic words.”15
The language of “visual aid” is altogether too weak, however. Ezekiel’s sign-acts are not diagrams on overhead projector slides with which he helps the slow-witted capture a difficult theological idea. They are “affective aids,” aimed not at people’s eyes but at their hearts and wills, the seat of their “affections.”16 They are designed not merely to help people see the truth, but to feel the truth. In the same way as the sacraments are not merely visual aids to the gospel but are “signs and seals of the covenant of grace,”17 so also the sign-acts are given not so much to clarify the message of the prophet as to drive it home to the people’s hearts.
Ezekiel’s communication style. Why, though, should the presence of sign-acts be “particularly characteristic of Ezekiel”?18 Why, out of all the prophets, should he have been required to act out his message so frequently? Perhaps it is due to the especially difficult communication task that faced this prophet. Up until the fall of Jerusalem, he had to preach a message of that city’s destruction to a people who believed it inviolable; after its fall, he had to communicate a vision of hope to a people tempted to despair. To a people well supplied with prophets telling them what they wanted to hear, Ezekiel had to say what God wanted them to hear, a task likened to being surrounded by briers and thorns and sitting on scorpions (Ezek. 2:6).
To get his message across, Ezekiel adopted some extreme measures at the Lord’s command, including the performance of an unusually large number of sign-acts, which not only reinforced the content of his message but also underlined the extent of his self-commitment to the message.19 One might think of similarities to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s in the United States. Speeches were all very well, but dramatic actions such as boycotting the buses or breaking the rules against eating at “all-white” lunch counters had more impact on the unconverted. They were much harder to ignore.
Ezekiel’s communication style was as unique as his situation. He had swallowed the word of God, and now that message “took flesh” before the eyes of the exiles in the visible form of the acted-out scene of judgment on Jerusalem. No one could doubt his commitment to communicate that message, even though it would fall on deaf ears. The form of communication was ideal for a potentially hostile audience: a graphic, “in-your-face” message that would not easily be forgotten.
Contemporary Significance
VISUAL AIDS FOR the contemporary church. How do we communicate the message of God’s wrath to a lost and dying world, a message that sinners would much rather suppress than hear? How, in our day and age, do we “make the invisible aggressor visible,” as Ezekiel was called to do? In the past, people used vivid word pictures. Older preachers worked to portray in technicolor vocabulary and dramatic word pictures the pains of hell and the horror of sinners swept away unheedingly into the awful void. Thus, George Whitefield once depicted the sinner as being like an aged and blind beggar. This old man was being led by a little dog on a leash and was feeling his way along by tapping the ground in front of him with a cane. Gradually and unwittingly, he approached a yawning chasm; as he got nearer it, he first lost the dog’s leash, then dropped his cane, and as he stepped forward to retrieve it his foot found only empty air. At that point in the depiction, we are told that Lord Chesterfield leapt to his feet shouting out, “He’s gone! He’s gone!”20 In this case, the message had been effectively communicated.
But word pictures have their limitations in an increasingly visual age. The impact of television and video technology has transformed our time from a “word-centered” to an “image-centered” society.21 In such a visual age, many churches are experimenting with the use of drama and other visual aids in their worship services in a desire to communicate to modern people. Frequently, the prophetic sign-acts are cited as biblical justification for this approach. Is this a justified comparison?
Certainly, there are points of contact. Well-executed drama has an affective function, touching emotions not easily reached by words while stimulating and holding interest.22 It communicates to an indifferent audience more powerfully than words alone, which is why drama is particularly valued by “seeker-sensitive churches.” Yet we should not fail to see the differences between the prophetic sign-acts and contemporary dramas. The prophetic sign-acts were more than mere visual aids or attention-getting devices. They were delivered with divine authority and thus functioned as the divine word made visible and sure. In Ezekiel’s case, the message took over the messenger in a life-dominating way.
The ultimate sign-act. The real significance of the prophetic sign-acts emerges when we ask the question, “How did God communicate his wrath and his love to a lost and dying world?” He did so through the ultimate prophetic sign-act of the Incarnation, whereby the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, not to act out a ten-minute dramatic sketch but to live in our midst for thirty-three years. God did not merely put on human costume, he became a human being. The culmination of Jesus’ earthly ministry was the profound sign-act of the cross, where God’s wrath and mercy met. There that wrath was visibly depicted as the Sinless One was abandoned by God the Father. Just as Jerusalem was once abandoned by God because of her sins, so also Jesus was abandoned by God because of his people’s sins. Jesus was not playacting when he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).
Unlike Ezekiel, however, Jesus was genuinely doing away with the accumulated guilt of his people as their substitute, which meant enduring the turning away of the Father’s face. No wonder the sky grew dark and the earth shook! There on the cross was also depicted the love of God, whose passion for sinners was such that he would rather die than let them go. In the words we know so well that we frequently forget their awesome profundity, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16, KJV).
The cross is an “in-your-face” message of God’s love and his wrath, his justice and his grace. That is why the message of the crucified Christ is a stumbling block and foolishness to many (1 Cor. 1:23). It refuses to trivialize sin, insisting that only the death of the Son of God was sufficient to atone for it. It refuses to compromise with our cozy delusions of adequacy, whereby we fondly imagine that our best efforts will be enough to satisfy the demands of God’s holy law. It refuses to flatter our religious pride that demands a complicated scheme of salvation that allows us to earn our way to heaven.
Moreover, in the sacraments we perform dramatic reenactments of God’s once-and-for-all sign-act. We are baptized into his death, visibly passing through the waters—a sign that assures us that if by faith we are crucified with Christ and if his death was for our sin, then we will certainly also be raised with him. We receive the broken bread, just as his body was broken for us, and the poured out wine, just as his blood was poured out for us, which remind and assure us that the efficacious sacrifice was made for us personally.23 In liturgical churches, this personal aspect of the Lord’s Supper is underlined by the repetition of the sentence, “The body of Christ broken for you; the blood of Christ shed for you.” These sacraments are given not simply to feed our senses, as if the preached word by itself were insufficient; rather, they are given to minister to our affections, to drive home to our hearts the reality of our salvation in Christ, the message that has been preached to us.
In but not of the world. But the cross is not simply something that has been borne for us, it is also something that we are called on to bear (Matt. 10:38). God’s “wonderful plan for your life” may easily involve suffering or even martyrdom for the sake of Jesus. Like Ezekiel, we are to be totally taken up by the message with which we have been entrusted. Many people will find our behavior odd in consequence, as we seek to remain pure in a world that is not our home. We are called to be “Puritans” in the best sense of the word, living in a compromised world as those whose lives are uncompromisingly committed to obedience to God’s Word and “perfecting holiness out of reverence for God” (2 Cor. 7:1). Our very lives are letters to the world from Christ, inscribed by his Spirit (3:3).
At the same time as our lives may be too pure for the taste of those outside the kingdom, we are not to be so separate from sinners in our desire for holiness that we fail to share the gospel with them. In the New Testament, the apostle Peter had a similar vision to Ezekiel’s, in which he too was commanded to eat unclean food (Acts 10:13). His response echoed that of Ezekiel: “Surely not, Lord! . . . I have never eaten anything impure or unclean” (10:14). But unlike Ezekiel, he is instructed not to call impure that which God has made clean (10:15). This vision, so important to the book of Acts that it is related three times,24 forms the theological basis for the mission to the Gentiles. The old laws of cleanliness, with their emphasis on separation from that which was unclean, had now been transformed on the basis of the new revelation in Jesus. As a result, the doors of the kingdom are now thrown open to “unclean sinners” and Gentiles alike, through faith in Christ.
In obedience to this vision, we are not to build walls to keep the prostitute and the drug addict out of our churches, nor are we to treat those who come into the kingdom with a checkered sexual or marital history as second-class citizens. These too, if they have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb, are declared by God as clean (cf. 1 Cor. 6:11). Like Jesus and Ezekiel, we are called to lives of identified purity, living in the world but not of it, loving every one of our neighbors even while living radically different lives from them.