Ezekiel - Lesson 5

Lesson number five, putting on a show, dramatizing the fall of Jerusalem, Ezekiel 4, 1, 2, 5, 4. I preface my exposition of this large section with a few comments on the nature of biblical preaching and teaching generally, and Christian teaching and preaching specifically. These days, many insist that unless Christ is the center and focus of a sermon, we have not delivered a Christian sermon. In general, I could agree, except that sermons may have different functions. When we preach evangelistically, we need to follow the paradigm and kerygma of the apostles and preach Jesus Christ crucified and risen again. However, not all sermons serve primarily evangelistic purposes. Preachers proclaim the truths of scripture to bring about repentance, to reveal God, to encourage and guide believers in a life of godliness, to console those who grieve, and to present hope for the future by effecting transformation in the present. Sometimes the goal of a presentation may be simply to help people read the scriptures better. Failure to mention Jesus as the sacrifice for our sins and whose resurrection gives us hope in life eternal in a sermon does not mean we haven't preached a Christian sermon. When I preach Yahweh, I preach the God who was incarnate in Jesus Christ, whether I name him by the New Testament name or not. What is important for me and us all is that we grasp that every text of scripture has significance in the light of the climax of the story. The goal of this session is simply to help us understand the scriptures better, specifically one scripture, Ezekiel chapter 4. In my strategy, I'm actually following the lead of the prophet Ezekiel himself. Within this book, chapters 4 and 5 belong together. Chapter 5 represents a theological interpretation of what has happened in chapter 4. Since we cannot possibly handle these two chapters in one session and make adequate sense of the biblical text, here I will spend most of my time explaining the riddles of chapter 4, not their theological significance, but simply how these riddles are supposed to work. Many have told me that to them Ezekiel makes no sense. Well, the purpose of this exposition, of this fascinating book, are complex to help to make sense out of it. On the one hand, we need to make the message of the book relevant for all so we will know how to live out the message we have learned. But at the same time, unless we understand the method the prophet uses to get his points across, we will not understand the message, and so we ask for patience. In the present presentation, the relevance of this passage will be limited. In this instance, we must be true to the text by offering a single long presentation in two parts. The first part, now chapter 4, up to chapter 5, verse 4, and then in the next address, we will speak more fully on the theological significance of the actions of this prophetic clown as intended by God, Ezekiel's script writer and drama director. On the surface, Ezekiel's antics were bizarre, but they were anything but funny. They were deadly serious. With the transition from chapter 3 to chapter 4, we have left act 1 of the drama, where Ezekiel and God are the two main characters, and here we have entered act 2. The first act had been concerned entirely with the call and conscription of Ezekiel to divine service, priestly service with a pronounced prophetic character, and we have seen how the medium has become the message. Together, chapters 4 and 5 began the real drama. These chapters introduce the second major section of the book, which will continue through chapter 24. In this large collection of prophecies, we will see and hear the prophet pronounce Yahweh's doom on those who prided themselves in being his people, and he will do so with relentless intensity and unbelievable color. This long section consists of a fascinating array of messages cast as sign acts, visions, creative and shocking retelling of Israel's history, funeral dirges, and cleverly crafted parables. If our eyes and ears are open, we will never be bored with Ezekiel. This exiled prophet had a way of communicating God's message that ran roughshod over the people's and our tastes, and their and our illusions of their present state. And Yahweh seems not to have cared whom Ezekiel would offend. These were urgent, rhetorical tactics for a nation in crisis. He tried to wake them up out of their lethargy and smugness to the real state, especially their standing with God. And he did so with shocking tactics and offensive vocabulary that break the bounds of tradition and, shall we say, decency, sophisticated literary taste. From a literary and topical perspective, we can break chapters 1 to 24 into four larger, if uneven, sections. The first part, messages of doom for the city and land, chapters 4 to 7. Second, messages of doom for the temple, 8 to 11. Third, messages of doom for the king and his people, 12, 1 to 24, 14. And then the final sign of doom, 24, 15 to 27. Well, since by now Ezekiel had become the embodiment of his message through his ordination and induction, perhaps it's not surprising that Yahweh should have him launch his professional prophetic career by acting out his messages. We call these kinds of prophecies sign actions or sign acts. The word comes from chapter 4, verse 3, where Yahweh had declared, if that it, that is the action Ezekiel has just performed, it is a sign, oath, for the household of Israel. This word refers elsewhere to the rainbow as the sign of God's covenant with the cosmos and of circumcision as the sign of the covenant with Abraham and his descendants, Genesis 17, 11, and the crimson cord that Rahab hung from the window in the walls of Jericho, Joshua 2, 14 and 4, 6. Here it referred to Ezekiel's actions which were intended to communicate a message other than the actions themselves. Ezekiel was not an entertainer performing street theater for vacationers in Babylon.When he spoke of himself as the embodiment of his message, he preferred the word Mopheth, 12.6, 12.11, 24, 24, and 27, which speaks of a portent, an ominous prefiguring of a future event. But here he would be acting out his actual message. In the past, people have interpreted Ezekiel's sign actions variously as rites of sympathetic magic or evidence of psychological dysfunction or expressions of prophetic, uncontrolled prophetic ecstasy. While some have thought that sign acts set in motion and bring about the events they represented, the Swiss scholar Bernard Lange spoke of them as street theater, like we encounter on the beaches of Europe in the summertime. However, those were intended to entertain, to get the kids off their parents' backs for a few minutes. This is not the case here. We do best to interpret Ezekiel's sign acts as dramatic performances designed to visualize a message and in the process to enhance its persuasive force so that the observer's perception of a given situation might be changed and their beliefs and behavior modified. This is visualized rhetoric, not verbal, but visualized. Although the people would treat the prophet as an entertainer, chapter 33, the prophet was deadly serious in his performances, and in no cases was he more serious than in chapter 4. We can easily identify sign acts in the prophets generally by some tell-tale features which typically involve some or all of the following.First, there is a command by God to the prophet to execute an action, a sign action. Second, there is a report of the prophet's execution of the sign action. And third, there is an interpretation of the sign action.Occasionally, we also find a reference to eyewitnesses. The text will say something like, do this in their sight while they're watching. Sometimes we have a divine promise to carry out the event represented by the action. And third, sometimes we have a clarification of the relationship between the dramatic presentation and the event represented. Whereas individual sign acts were usually followed by God's interpretation, chapters 4 to 5 involve a complex series of actions bunched together in 4.1 to 5.4. The chapter division here is unfortunate. And then it's followed by a comprehensive theological interpretation of the whole package of sign acts.That's 5 to 17. The actions included in chapter 4 by Ezekiel are a whole series of these actually. First, he is to draw a map on a brick and set up a siege around it. That's 4.1 to 2. Second, he is to erect a barrier between himself and the brick, 4.3. Third, he is to lie on his left and right sides, respectively, 4.4 to 6. He is to bear his arm, 4.7, roll up his sleeves. He is to be bound, 4.8. He is to eat rationed food and drink rationed water, 4.9 to 11. He is to eat cakes baked over feces, 4.12 and 14 to 15. He is to shave and dispose of his hair. And finally, he is supposed to isolate a remnant of his hair and put it in the hem of his garment. That's a whole bunch of dramatic things that he's to do in the presence of the people. Now, while Ezekiel probably performed these actions over an extended period of time, someone, probably Ezekiel, brought them together and integrated them into the present literary form after the fact. The sign acts seem to be randomly arranged. However, while the prophetic priest performed them before his exilic audience, they all contributed to a vivid portrayal, not of their fate, but of the fate that awaited Jerusalem back home.That fate involves three phases that we may rearrange logically and chronologically based on the phase with which they deal. First, we may group the sign actions relating to the siege of Jerusalem. Ezekiel procured a brick, sketched on it the map of the city, and erected a griddle between it and himself. That's 4.1 to 3. With his face toward the model, he lay down on his left side for 390 days. Meanwhile, he bared his arm and prophesied against Jerusalem. During this long period, his diet consisted of rations outlined in 4 to 8. So, that's the siege complex of sign acts. Second, we see sign acts relating to the destruction of Jerusalem. Upon completion of the siege-related performances, Ezekiel shaved his head, divided his hair into three parts, which he burned, chopped up, and scattered to the winds, respectively, 5.1 to 2. Ezekiel 5.10 and 12 to 17 summarize the verbal interpretation of these actions. And third, we observe sign acts relating to the deportation of Jerusalem's population. Prior to scattering the third part of his hair, Ezekiel picked out a few hairs and tucked them away in the hem of his garment, 5.3 to 4. Meanwhile, he turned over and lay on his right side for 40 days. During this period, his diet consisted of barley cakes prepared over fecal fuel for which, remarkably, God offered an appropriate explanation in chapters 4.12 to 13. In our day, there are people who take this particular sign act in a very interesting direction. You may go to the grocery store or health food stores, particularly, and there on the shelf you will find Ezekiel 4.9 bread or Ezekiel 4.9 cereal. And on these packages, you will see the link between the text we have here in Ezekiel and the bread itself or the cereal itself. This is a very interesting application of the biblical text, but at the end, I will assure you it has absolutely zero connection with the meaning of this text. The person who bakes this bread also offers a recipe, two and a half cups of wheat grains, one and a half cups of spelt, hulled barley, millet, green lentils, northern beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, and then lukewarm whey or water, and then raw local honey, dry yeast, flaxseed, and dough enhancer, and gluten, and then one egg plus water, and sunflower and sesame seeds, and dried fruit. And all of this is supposed to give us health food. They look to Ezekiel as the model of health food diet. Well, I've got news for you. This has nothing to do with health food at all. We'll clarify that in a bit, but the point here is for Yahweh and Ezekiel, it would not suffice merely to announce verbally, O house of Israel, Jerusalem will fall. With these actions, the prophet concretized the coming crisis for fellow exiles. If you need all of these little bits of grains and different kinds of vegetables even to make one loaf of bread, it means you're starving. The siege is working, and what you are doing in order to get food is you're scraping the bottom of every barrel, and then putting it together, and trying to make a single loaf of bread. That's how desperate we are. This is not health food. This is death food.It's a sign that there's death all around us. Now, with these actions, the prophet concretized the coming crisis for his fellow exiles in Babylon. In the introductory lesson, lesson number one, I noted that Ezekiel's pronouncements of judgment would be focused on the four pillars on which they based their security, this one's great nation.First, Yahweh has made an eternal and irrevocable covenant with his people. That's pillar one. Second, Yahweh has made an eternal and irrevocable gift of land to the nation, number two. Number three is the Lord has chosen eternally and irrevocably Jerusalem as his capital city, and four, the Lord has made an eternal and irrevocable installation of David and his descendants on the throne of Israel. It's no mystery which of these four pillars the prophet was addressing was challenging here in this series of synax. The focus is on Jerusalem. It starts out draw a map of Jerusalem, though it's not primarily here, the site of the Lord's temple. It's simply representing the state. It's the capital city. It doesn't even represent only the king's palaces. It represents the land. These messages will come later, the ones about the city and the temple in chapters 8 to 11 and then 12 and 17. Rather, here, Jerusalem represents the land. This was the capital of their homeland. Five years ago, the people in front of Ezekiel, in his audience, they had come from Jerusalem to Babylon. When they left Jerusalem, they thought they would be safe in the holy city. They were confident that the Lord would defend them against the infidel Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian hordes. While the people back home now from the exiles' perspective, his primary audience, while they were in for an even more devastating shock, the exiles in Babylon, who still look to Jerusalem as the symbol of their security and the guarantee of their soon return, God will take care of Nebuchadnezzar, and we'll be back soon. They were about to have their eyes opened. While the fate demonstrated here affected Jerusalem back home from where they'd come, it was a message for them. They, too, lived under the illusion and delusion of divine favor, but we will see that the Lord himself looked upon them with very different eyes. As demonstrated in the interpretation in 5, 15 to 17, the prophet's aim was to destroy the people's false bases of security and to dash all hope among his countrymen of an early return to the homeland. The sign acts addressed the second pillar. The Judeans thought they were secure because they were in the land that God had given them and promised to Abraham and his descendants eternally. Jerusalem was the symbol of that irrevocable decision. No one can touch their land or remove them from it. Well, let's look more closely at how these signs are working now. A quick look at how each of these sign acts works. If I were a cartoonist, I would happily play with these word pictures and try to cast them into visual form, or even if we work with Play-Doh or plasticine or anything like that, it would be a fun project. Based on the literary signals within the text, I divide four one to five four into four parts. In your Bibles, you may observe that the Lord signals the beginning of each part with a fresh address to the human. Four one, now you, human, take a tile and lay it in front of you. Four four, but you lie down on your left side. Four nine, but you take some wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and ember. And then five one, but you, human, take a sharp sword. So these are really four acts all signaled by what the Lord tells Ezekiel to do. Act one, the sign of the brick, four one to three. The narration of Ezekiel's first public sign action opens abruptly with the Lord's command to the prophet to engage in an activity designed to arouse the audience's curiosity. He was to dramatize the imminent siege of Jerusalem by etching on a brick a map of the city and then besieging it. The command to incise a map on the assumes that clay was still fresh and soft and that it would harden under the hot Babylonian sun. The practice of sketching a city plan on a clay brick is confirmed by several exemplars that scholars have, archaeologists have discovered with maps on them. The Lord identifies the city as Jerusalem, but I wonder if the onlookers would have. I can imagine as Ezekiel is drawing this map on that brick, the people are standing around there asking each other, what's he drawing? Was he drawing a realistic picture? We know he's supposed to be drawing Jerusalem, but was it a realistic picture or was it stylized? Was it Picasso kind of art? We don't know, but in any case, draw a map of the city. Scene two, setting up siege forces around the city. Verse two, having drawn the map of the city, the prophet was to get out his G.I. Joel figures and toys, or are they Lego or Star Wars figures these days, and to pretend that the city was being subjected to a siege by an invading army. The features of the siege reflect thorough knowledge of how warfare was conducted in the ancient world. In fact, while scholars have found thousands of texts from the ancient world, no text has as detailed a description of how siege operations worked in the ancient world than Ezekiel provides for us right here. So, stage one of the siege, build a siege wall around the city. This would involve mounds of dirt and earth and rock all over the city, especially over the thoroughfares, the highways and the rivers, to prevent food and other resources from entering. That's the point of a siege, starve out the people. Second, construct a ramp. Since fortresses were usually located strategically on hilltops and therefore were inaccessible to offensive wet machines of war, the invader would construct inclines of dirt, massive mounds of dirt they would move, so that battering rams could be positioned near the walls. These inclines were made of vast amounts of earth, rock and debris, which were carried in baskets and literally poured out until the project was finished. Some estimate that it took 25,000 tons of earth and stones to construct the Assyrian ramp we can still see at Lachish, south of Jerusalem. Assuming a workforce of 1,000 porters, it would have taken 20 to 23 days to complete that phase of it. So, having made your ramp by which you have access to the walls and the gate, presumably, you set up army camps against it. Ezekiel's use of the plural, camps, suggests several separate army camps or military divisions strategically positioned outside the walls. Fourth, you stationed battering rams all around it. Because of their weight and cumbersome design, battering rams were difficult to move over long distances. However, they were critical for conquering the walled cities of Palestine. The ram itself was often tipped with a metal tip to make it more effective in creating breaches and walls simply by slamming this battering ram back and forth against the wall. And those walls would be made either of bricks or of stones. So far, the sign act probably made sense to the onlookers. But what it signified was anybody's guess. Given their theology, many who watched the prophet may have expected him to finish this play time like children often do, as soon as everything is in place, to wave his hand across the business and smash it all. That's what kids often do, and that would leave the city intact. But so far, Ezekiel didn't offer an interpretation, and he didn't even actually identify the city, though we know it was Jerusalem. Ezekiel knew that as well. But those in his audience who recognized it may have thought that someone would come along and destroy the siege works. Maybe the Egyptians would be here just in time, and they'd destroy the military equipment that the prophet had set up around it. Others may have thought it was actually Babylon, and that someone would soon come to Babylon and throw up the battering rams against the gates of this town and the other towns in Babylon, including Nippur, Tel Aviv, where Ezekiel and his friends were. But we don't know. Someone may have interpreted it as that way. We're going to be going home soon. Scene three, setting up an iron griddle between himself and the city. This is verse three. Here, the drama took an interesting turn. Ezekiel was to take an iron griddle and set it up between himself and the map of the city on the brick. Now, if he had set it up between the brick and the siege mounds, this action would have reinforced the people's interpretation. Yahweh will stop the invaders from entering the city. But he set the griddle up outside the ring of enemy forces. And in this case, Ezekiel's own role changes. Ezekiel now represents God, and the griddle represents the barrier that Yahweh had placed between himself and Jerusalem. The use of an iron griddle highlights the impenetrability of the barrier and the firmness of God's rejection of his people. He would listen to their cries no longer. The covenant Lord whom they trusted for deliverance had turned his back on them, and his resolve would not weaken. He would let whatever force was setting up the siege, he would let them do their work on the city, and he would not interfere. Its fate had been sealed. His decision to bring Jerusalem to its knees was irrevocable. Look at the final command.Set your face, he's talking to Ezekiel, set your face against it, so that it may be under siege. Yes, you must be sieged. It is a sign for the household of Israel.4-3. The following statement stressed that the siege of the city was not merely the result of Yahweh's passive hostility. God, not foreign armies, had become the enemy, laying siege to his own city, an inconceivable notion for adherence of the prevailing orthodox theology. A shocker to be sure. That's Act I. Act II. Bearing the iniquity of Israel, or is it guilt? Chapter 4, verses 4-8.This second act divides into four scenes as well. Scene 1. The prophet lay on his left side for 390 days, verses 4-5. But what is the point of this? What's the significance? And then he's to turn over and lie on his right side for 40 more days. So it's 390 days on one side, and then 40 days on the other. Yahweh declared that in both cases, each day actually represented one year. So we should be asking, to what was Yahweh referring when he spoke of 390 years and 40 years respectively? In answering this question, we must recognize that whatever these years mean, the former has in mind either the nation of Israel as a whole, that is the 390 days, the nation as a whole, or the northern kingdom of Israel, particularly while the latter focuses on the kingdom of Judah, which was all that was left by the time Ezekiel was presenting this prophecy. And after the northern kingdom had fell to the Assyrians in 722, that's almost 130 years ago. The answer to the question on its significance also depends on what Yahweh meant by to bear the iniquity of someone. In this case, Ezekiel was to bear the iniquity of Israel for 390 years, and then the iniquity of Judah 40 years. One thing is clear. By bearing the iniquity, Ezekiel was not functioning in an expiatory role. That is, he is not making atonement for the people. He's not solving the sin question that had plagued the descendants of Abraham from the beginning. He is illustrating the problem created by that, their iniquity. While most interpreters assume the expression to bear the iniquity, nasah avon, in verses 4 to 5 and 6 must mean the same thing, this actually makes no sense. Indeed, it seems the key to understanding the passage is to recognize that, as he often would, Ezekiel will use a single word in two or three different ways in a single context. We will see this when we get to chapter 37. He uses the word ruach for spirit, wind, breath, direction in four different ways within 10 verses or so. Here, I think what he's doing here is using the words with two different meanings within the same context without signaling to us what he is doing. We'll find that out in the next chapter. Commentators have proposed many solutions for the riddle of the 390 and the 40 years, but the best solution recognizes this subtle shift in meaning as we move from the left side to the right side. In my understanding, in verses 5 to 6, Ezekiel spoke nonverbally about Israel's historical past. By taking on himself the iniquity of the people for 390 days, Ezekiel demonstrates how he was weighed down with the burden of rebellion that the Israelites had carried on for 390 years. He carries that. He owns it. It's his problem. He represents the nation. If we retrace Israel's history back 390 years from 586, which is just around the corner, this takes us back to 976 BC. Oh, this was the approximate date of the end of David's reign and the beginning of Solomon's reign. While these numbers are general and symbolic rather than specific, Solomon's reign marked the beginning. It marked the climax of David's reign when he built the temple, but if you read the narrative in 1 Kings, everything after the temple that is said about Solomon is negative after that moment was complete. His reign marked the beginning of state-sponsored idolatry in Israel. Stephen, in the New Testament, seems to have recognized this sort of periodization of history in Acts 7 when he noted that the reign of Solomon represented a turning point in the history of the nation. Although Solomon built the temple, it was really David's temple, but he was responsible for beginning the history of court-sponsored apostasy, 1 Kings 11, 1 to 13. From that time on, the people were a stiff-necked and apostate people, Acts 7, 47 to 53. By taking the weight of Israel's sin on himself for 390 days, Ezekiel dramatized Yahweh's indictment of his people. In a legal case, this would be the presentation of the evidence, corresponding to the verbal accusation we will find in 5, 6 to 7. Their sins had been piling up for a long time. But what about lying on his right side for 40 days, verse 6? The simplest answer is to see here that there is a shift in the meaning of the phrase to bear the iniquity off. When Ezekiel lay on his right side for 40 days, something different was happening here. As is often the case when converted to years, the number 40 symbolizes a generation. According to Numbers 14, 33 to 35, the Israelites were sentenced to one year in the desert for every day the scouts had spent in the promised land. That's 40 years. And that's how long it took to get rid of the Exodus generation and replace them with a new one. Now we recognize what is happening here. It will take 40 years to get rid of the generation that had infuriated Yahweh leading up to 586. And if we calculate forward from 586, we arrive at 546, which falls within a few short years of the Persian king Cyrus's decree to let the Jewish exiles return to rebuild Jerusalem after the devastation caused by the Babylonians. That decree came in 539 BC. Here, to bear the iniquity does not mean dramatizing Israel's sin, but dramatizing the sentence for their sin, the holocaust that was unleashed in the wake of Israel's sin. But by limiting this act to 40 days, Yahweh announced subtly, in veiled form, that the exile would not last forever. More than 100 years earlier, Isaiah had looked forward with hope to the day after the coming judgment when Israel's suffering for their sin would come to an end. But like the first sign involving the brick, this one ends surprisingly. Scene 3, bearing his arm and prophesy. In verses 7 to 8, the prophet again represented God. Linking this sign act with the first, Ezekiel was to set his face toward the BC city, bear his arm, a gesture signifying impending divine intervention.God is rolling up his sleeves. He's about to act. Since in Isaiah 52.10, the bared arm signals Yahweh's salvation, the people may have interpreted this as a sign that Yahweh would step in at the last moment and rescue Jerusalem and its inhabitants. However, the fact that Ezekiel was to set his face toward Jerusalem and prophesy against it, not to it, but against it, this set Ezekiel's audience up for a surprise. The city was not only the target of Nebuchadnezzar's army, it was in Yahweh's own crosshairs. Scene 4, being bound up with ropes by Yahweh. Verse 8, by tying himself up. In 3.25, others had tied him up here. He does it himself. The prophet affirmed that Yahweh's message was irrevocable and unalterable. The prophet could not adjust his message by changing his position or meddling with the scene that he has created in front of him. Ezekiel was not free to fabricate his own message or act them out however he pleased.Yahweh exercised absolute control over him and over the fate of Jerusalem. So, that's Act 2. Let's go to Act 3, food for the hungry. 4, 9 to 17. This is by far the longest and most complicated of Ezekiel's opening sign acts. The section divides into three scenes that all involve food. Scene 1, the diet of people under siege. This is verse 9. Here Yahweh commanded the prophet to go get six kinds of raw materials with which to make a loaf of bread, wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, emmer, a grain inferior in quality, both wheat and barley. These are the six grains. Presumably, having ground up these elements into flour, Ezekiel was to combine them and make dough to bake as a sort of bread that would last him for 390 days. Again, as I said earlier, people in the health food industry have capitalized on this text to justify a special series of products which they label Ezekiel bread, Ezekiel cereal. But this interpretation is hermeneutically abusive and misses the point of the text completely. This was not normal dough. Here the prophet mixed beans and lentils with cereal flour, and this was not about healthy food. The Babylonian Talmud recounts a 3rd century AD experiment in which these elements were combined to make bread, but the product was so disgusting that not even a dog would touch it. This was obviously not intended as some exotic Babylonian recipe to sustain the prophet for 390 days. This was siege diet. The purpose of a siege is to starve out the people, to force them to surrender. This is a picture of food so scarce that there will not be enough of any kind of flour or vegetable meal to make one proper loaf. This image gives new meaning to the metaphor scraping the bottom of the barrel. In this instance, hoping to get enough to make that loaf. Actually, we could interpret the word lechem, bread, as food more generally, and it could be a cake baked on a pan. Scene 2, the rations of people under siege. Interpreted this way, verse 9 prepares for the synax of scene 2. Here Yahweh specifies Ezekiel's daily allotment of food as twenty shekels, eight ounces, and his ration of water as one-fifth of a hymn, two-thirds of a quart. That's less than three cups, and he is to do this for 390 days under the hot Babylonian sun. Ezekiel clarified the intention of the synax in chapter 4. He explained to me, human, look, I am about to cut off the food supply, the staff of bread in Jerusalem, causing them to ration their bread by weight, and to eat it with anxiety, and to ration their water by volume, and drink it with alarm, in order that the bread and the water may be so scarce that every single person shall be devastated and rot away on account of their iniquity. The language is borrowed directly from the covenant curses in Leviticus 26 and 39. The idiom of breaking the staff of bread is found in one of a series of curses that Yahweh pronounced upon his people, should they persist in breaking faith with him. God had said long ago, this is what will happen if you persist in your rebellion. Leviticus illustrated it with the image of ten women baking bread in one oven and then distributing bread in rationed amounts. Yahweh hereby served Israel and his people noticed that he was about to fulfill this ancient covenant curse upon the people. Contrary to their charge that Yahweh had broken faith in not protecting them, the use of this idiom affirms his determination to keep the covenant, even the fine print, and to hold his people to that fine print. That is the letter of the Torah. Well, in its concrete sense, the verb namak, to rot away, they will rot away, refers to the decomposition of flesh. Here and in Ezekiel 24, 23, and 33, 10, where the same expression occurs, it has, it obviously requires a figurative interpretation. Perhaps the image is that of a corpse with the iniquity eating at it like maggots. Later Ezekiel would announce that the recognition of this disgusting condition caused by their iniquity would lead to self-loathing. It all stinks to high heaven. Scene 3, the food of exiles, verses 12 to 15. Without warning, Yahweh changed the subject from this cake of mixed flour to a barley cake, now specified as a flat disk baked in a pan over hot stones, which represented the staple food of lower classes of people. Barley is much cheaper than wheat, and so this is poor people's food. Then he charged Ezekiel to bake the cake in a fire fueled by human excrement. Since we would all find that disgusting, we are not shocked that Ezekiel protested. But the reason the prophet gave for protesting may surprise us. As one who came from a priestly family, this exiled priest had no doubt scrupulously adhered to the boundaries of clean and unclean food specified in the covenant documents, Leviticus 11, Deuteronomy 14. So it was not the idea of using human feces for fuel to cook food that he protested, but their basis in Israel's purity regulations. Even so, Ezekiel's outburst in verse 14 offers us a rare glimpse into his emotional reactions to what God was asking him to do. Yahweh's response to Ezekiel's shock was sympathetic. Verse 15, He compromised by saying to the prophet, okay, it's too much to ask you to cook it over human dung. Let's have it baked over a cow dung instead of that. And he conceded to the prophet's personal sensitivity, but he preserved the contaminating element of the dramatization. It is still dung.The point was that just as cooking food over a fire fueled by excrement renders the food unclean, so preparing food in a foreign land by definition yields defiled food. With this deliberate contravention of traditional dietary laws, Yahweh intended to shock Ezekiel's audience into taking the threat of Jerusalem's collapse and the deportation of its population seriously. Since the prophet's immediate audience consisted of people already in exile, it reinforced the shame of their own lot. Everything they eat in exile is defiled. We come finally then to Act 4, the fate of the inhabitants of Jerusalem 5, 1 to 4. As in 4.1 and 4.9, Yahweh's command to Ezekiel to take an object, this time a sword, signaled a new sign act that would provide the key to its performance. The narrative reflects a two-phased dramatization. Scene 1, cutting and disposing of the prophet's hair, 5.1a, the Lord began by commanding Ezekiel to take a sword, now that's scary, and shave his head and beard with a sword, using this instrument as, quote, a razor of barbers. Now, although the word for sword was used for various kinds of cutting instruments, Joshua 5, Exodus 20, elsewhere in Ezekiel, it always refers to a military weapon. The use of a piercing military weapon for so sensitive a task as shaving the head and the beard obviously required extreme sharpness. The onlookers to Ezekiel's actions probably initially interpreted his actions as a sign of grief. You shave your hair when you're grieving the loss of somebody, or could be self-inflicted disgrace. However, as the performance progressed, it became increasingly evident that the razor, the sword, was in someone else's hand, and that Ezekiel's shaven appearance symbolized the impending humiliation of their countrymen still in Jerusalem.We'll see that in chapter 5.15. Indeed, as the people watched, some may have recalled a metaphor used by Isaiah more than a century earlier. In that day, Yahweh will shave with a razor hired from beyond the river. That was with the king of Assyria.The head and the pubic hair, it would also remove the beard, as had been the case with the prophets eating of the straw. Verbal images that others invented or used as metaphors, Ezekiel was actually to do them literally on himself. But Ezekiel's performance went two or three stages beyond the metaphor.According to verse 1b, having shaved himself, Yahweh ordered his agent to weigh out his hair on a set of scales. Nothing here is accidental or casual. He's to measure it all off precisely and carefully divide it into three equal parts.The use of scales reflects a meticulous concern for precision and sends a signal to those who grasp the significance of all of this that the judgment that Yahweh would inflict would not be haphazard, but deliberate and carefully measured. Compliant with Yahweh's command, the prophet moved to phase two of the sign act, and this is verse two. He weighed and divided his hair into three equal piles, which he then disposed of in three different ways.One third, he lit a match and burned them up. He set on fire. One third, he chopped up with his sword and one third, he scattered to the wind.Yahweh also provided a couple of clues concerning the significance of these actions. The third that were burned in the middle of the city at the end of the siege signified the fate of Jerusalem's population when the city would fall to the Babylonians. The fire symbolized the conflagration that would follow.And to this day, if you go to Jerusalem, you can see evidence of this fire. It is still visible in the charred remains of lumber and bones from this very event. The prophet chopped up a second third all around the city, suggesting this clump of hair represented those who managed to escape the fire, only to fall into the hands of the enemy troops stationed all around the city. And the third that he scattered to the wind may have thought they had escaped, but this would prove to be an illusion. Wherever they went, Yahweh's own sword will pursue them. You can run, but you can't hide. God will find you. Verse three is something of a flashback. Ezekiel had to have removed the few hairs. Now we can use the plural. They are numerable. Prior to destroying the pile, he had picked out a few and stashed them away in the hem of his garment. Yahweh did not interpret this action, but we may assume they represented the exiles among whom Ezekiel lived. Although their captivity and deportation to Babylon was intended as punishment for their history of rebellion, now we learn that Babylon had a second function in the divine plan. For them, Babylon would be like a safe. While the house, Jerusalem, burned, those in the safe would survive. But the timing of this prophecy is crucial. At this point, only God knew what lay ahead for the city and for the exiles. In this tuft of hair, we begin to get a glimmer of the theological significance of the exile. But lest the people solve this riddle and get too smug, the prophet was to perform one final act, take some of the hair out of his hem and burn them as well. With hindsight, after the message had come that the city had fallen, the exiles could recognize that the hopes they had pinned on Jerusalem and God's irrevocable promise of security in the land were also groundless.Through this final action, they should also have learned that just because they had escaped the fury that the Lord had poured out on Jerusalem didn't mean they had a ticket to a blessed future. In the safe, Babylon, they may have survived the holocaust of 586, but that did not mean that all would be well for all of them. The fire may find them in exile. In fact, it may find the exiles from the whole house of Israel scattered all over Mesopotamia. What about theological and practical implications? Well, for people who are banking on every promise in the book is mine, the opening volley of Ezekiel's prophetic ministry could or should have been devastating and should have had them crawling to the prophet for an explanation and for an information on how they needed to respond in order to escape the force of God's fury where they are. He's coming here where they live by the Kibar Canal. Unfortunately for Ezekiel and for us who look for evidence of the power of the prophetic word, the book offers not a single hint that anyone ever took Ezekiel and his preaching seriously. And so the question for us is, will we? Or will we read this book only for its entertainment value? Well, there's plenty here for that. I am always entertained by what Ezekiel is up to. But in the next session, we will try to bring Ezekiel's message of chapter 4 home to the prophet's audience and to us, and we will discover that this was no laughing matter.