1. take you a brick and . . . incise on it the city of Jerusalem. Bricks were the building material of choice in the Mesopotamian valley, whereas stone was more commonly used in the mountainous region of Judah. (Compare the use of bricks in the story of the Tower of Babel, Genesis 11.) The incising would have been done before the firing of the brick. A brick with a depiction of the Babylonian city of Napur was actually discovered in an archaeological dig.

2. And you shall lay a siege against it. This appears to be a model of a siege with the appropriate siege-works, not an image also incised on the brick. The proclivity for symbolic acts is brought to an elaborate extreme here.

3. an iron wall between you and the city. Now, in the playing with models and symbols, Ezekiel takes on the role of God (!), estranged from the city, a condition represented by the interposed iron wall.

4. For the number of days that you lie on it you shall bear their guilt. This is another instance in which the borderline between symbolic act and psychological aberration in Ezekiel is blurred. If, as seems likely, he actually performed this act, he would have been in a state of paralysis (hysterically induced?), lying on one side, for almost thirteen months. The idiom “bear guilt” has several different meanings in biblical usage, but the most likely one here is that the prophet symbolically takes on himself the guilt—the word can also indicate “punishment”—of his offending people.

5. three hundred ninety. This number of years, if one calculates from the erection of the Temple around 970 B.C.E., takes us forward to 580 B.C.E., which falls within the period of Ezekiel’s prophecy in Babylonia. Moshe Greenberg observes that, in accordance with the viewpoint of the Deuteronomist, the existence of the “high places” outside of Jerusalem throughout this period would define the entire span of nearly four centuries as a time when guilt was incurred.

6. lie down again on your right side and bear the guilt of the house of Judah forty days. Forty is a formulaic number, but it is difficult to reconcile it with the figure of 390 or to imagine what it could refer to historically. Many scholars plausibly conclude that the lying on the right side is a secondary interpolation, and that “the house of Israel” in verse 5 refers to the entire people of Israel, and then is made to indicate the northern kingdom only by this inconvenient add-on that introduces a reference to the southern kingdom. Surely more than a year would have been enough for the prophet to continue in this paralytic state.

7. your arm laid bare. The bared arm is a token of the use of force.

8. I have put cords on you. As in 3:25, these are not literal cords: the prophet, feeling unable to move from this position lying on his side, understands that he has been immobilized by God.

9. wheat and barley and beans and lentils and millet and emmer. Although one American Christian group actually markets bread purportedly made from this recipe, it is in fact siege bread, made not from wheat but from a combination of grains and legumes because of the lack of sufficient wheat supplies. The Talmud reports an experiment in which the bread was made with these ingredients and a dog would not touch it.

10. twenty weights a day. By some calculations, this is no more than eight ounces—a very scant daily ration.

12. it shall be baked on the turds of human excrement before your eyes. Dried animal dung was commonly used for fuel, but not human excrement. Thus the baking manifests the condition of the exiles constrained to live in an “unclean” (or “defiled”) land, which is how foreign territory was conceived. The “your” of “your eyes” is plural and is addressed to the exiles, not the prophet.

14. my throat is undefiled. While the prohibition against consuming the meat of carrion and animals torn up by predators is incumbent on all the people, Ezekiel as a priest would have taken special care to preserve the condition of ritual purity.

15. cattle dung instead of human turds. Seeing the prophet’s visceral revulsion, God offers a compromise, but the bread is still baked on filth.

16. break the staff of bread in Jerusalem. Bread is a “staff” because it supports or sustains life, and in biblical Hebrew, as in many other languages, it is a synecdoche for food in general. The obvious reference is to the condition of near starvation in time of siege, and so this element of the prophecy is linked with the model siege of verses 1–3. The phrase “break the staff of bread” is taken from the dire prediction of disaster in Leviticus 26 if Israel abandons God’s ways, and other phrases from that passage in Leviticus are invoked here.