4:1–3 Ezekiel’s first sign-act involves erecting an elaborate model depicting Jerusalem as a city under siege. He is to take a clay brick, perhaps 10 inches by 24 inches (25 cm by 61 cm), and draw a map or a picture of Jerusalem on it while it is still soft (v. 1). Such bricks were common building materials in Babylon, and city plans sketched out on bricks have been excavated at the site of Nippur, in the same region as Ezekiel’s exile.26 Then the prophet is to create a diorama of a besieged city around the brick, with siege ramps, army camps strategically located around the city, and battering rams to break through the walls (v. 2)—all the latest weaponry and the overwhelming force the Babylonians will bring to bear on Jerusalem. With the city surrounded by the Babylonians, there would be no way into or out of Jerusalem.

Yet the Babylonians are not Jerusalem’s biggest problem. The prophet himself is to take the Lord’s part in the drama, with his face fixed toward Jerusalem, representing a settled attitude toward the city, and an iron griddle, or pan, between him and the city, depicting the complete severing of relations between Israel and her God (v. 3). The use of an iron object highlights the impenetrability of the barrier. No communication between the people and the Lord will be possible, which means that their cries for mercy and relief will go unheeded. This griddle is thus the visual equivalent of the Lord’s forbidding Ezekiel in the previous chapter to act as an intercessor for the city (cf. comment on 3:24–27 [at v. 26]).

The dual agency of Jerusalem’s awful fate is prominent throughout these signs. The Babylonians may provide the army that is to besiege the city, but it is the Lord who has decreed the city’s inevitable destruction and has cut off any channels of communication. This must have seemed inconceivable to many of the prophet’s contemporaries, raised on the assurance of Psalm 46, that Zion could not fall so long as the Lord dwelt within her. Ezekiel will challenge head on this concept of Jerusalem’s inviolability in Ezekiel 8–11 (cf. the sermon of Ezekiel’s contemporary Jeremiah in Jeremiah 7).

4:4–8 The second sign the prophet is required to perform is related to the first and involves lying down next to the model he has built for a lengthy period of time, first on one side and then on the other. In this sign, foreshadowing the work of the final Son of Man, the prophet represents both the afflicted people and their God. Ezekiel is to be tied with ropes, representing the siege victims and confining him to a single position. These cords are placed on him by the Lord himself, emphasizing the Lord’s agency in this series of events and the unchangeable nature of what is being signed (Ezek. 4:8).

First, the prophet is to lie on his left side for 390 days to “bear [the] punishment” of the house of Israel (vv. 4–5). Then he is to lie on his right side for another forty days to “bear the punishment” of the house of Judah (v. 6). This may not necessarily require the prophet to adopt this position twenty-four hours a day; very likely he lies down daily for a period of time in a public spot and then returns home in the evening. “Bearing punishment” (the normal Hb. idiom is nasaʾ ʿawon, though here the prophet uses the verb sim) can mean either the priestly task of atoning for sin (cf. Ex. 28:38; Lev. 10:17) or the undergoing of punishment for one’s own sin (cf. Num. 14:33).

While it is tempting to think that “house of Israel” represents the northern kingdom and “house of Judah” the southern, everywhere else in Ezekiel these terms are used interchangeably. Thus the “house of Israel” here represents the whole covenant community, not only the former northern kingdom;27 its 390-year history of sin, symbolized by the prophet’s prostration on his left side, stretches back to around the time of the construction of the temple in Jerusalem, whose defilement is such a key theme in the prophecies to follow. Already during those early days of empire Solomon had begun leading Israel astray, building temples to false gods for his foreign wives (1 Kings 11:1–8). During this period of the sign-act the prophet, weighed down with his heavy burden, symbolizes the entire nation’s long history of accumulated sin, which will culminate in the siege of Jerusalem, God’s chosen city, and the destruction of its temple. Ezekiel is not atoning for the people through his suffering; he merely represents the people’s being loaded down with their sin (cf. Isa. 1:4).

The “house of Judah,” on the other hand, here represents God’s people in their experience of exile (cf. Ezek. 25:3).28 The forty days on Ezekiel’s right side represents their time outside the land as a symbolic period of forty years—as with the wilderness generation (cf. 20:35–36). Ezekiel’s “bearing their punishment” has no atoning significance for them, either; there was no temple in exile where he could offer sacrifice, and no one is healed through his suffering.

Throughout the depiction Ezekiel continues to represent God’s wrath against Jerusalem, gesturing angrily against the city with his arm stripped and ready for decisive action (4:7). The goal of the sign-act is to represent the mountainous accumulation of Israel’s sin, ready to tumble down on the heads of this present generation. Given that reality, it is no surprise that Jerusalem’s anticipated siege will be ferocious and bloody, a just reckoning for its long history of sin.

Yet there is a tiny glimmer of hope in the total length of Ezekiel’s confinement (430 days). This number matches the years of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt (Ex. 12:40). Perhaps there can be a new exodus at the end of this period of judgment, as prophets like Isaiah had foretold, even if the people presently in exile might not see it themselves, any more than the generation of Moses and Aaron saw the Promised Land. Indeed, as far as we know, godly people like Daniel and Ezekiel died while still in exile, though Daniel at least lived to see the decree of Cyrus permitting people to go home (Dan. 6:28). Daniel was too old to take part in this new beginning himself, however, except through prayer and prophetic hope (Dan. 9:1–19). God has not completely abandoned his promises and his purposes for his people, or there would be no need to send prophets to interpret his actions to them.

4:9–17 The third part of the sign-act comes in the form of the prophet’s diet during this acted-out siege. Once again, as the representative of the people in Jerusalem, he is to join them in consuming siege rations while he lies down next to the surrounded city. The strange mixture of grains and legumes from which he is to make his bread is not a secret health formula, as some have supposed;29 rather it represents a situation in which food shortages are so desperate that there is not enough grain of any one kind to make proper flour, and so scrapings of whatever can be found must be mixed together into a single loaf. The Jewish commentator Moshe Greenberg reports an experiment in the third century AD that apparently determined that even dogs would not eat this bread.30

This food not only is disgusting but is to be served in tiny portions: about 8 ounces (220 g) per day, with two thirds of a quart (0.6 L) of water. This is a near-starvation diet, barely enough on which to live. To make things even worse, Ezekiel is initially instructed to cook his bread in a pan over human excrement, which would not only be disgusting but would make him constantly ceremonially unclean (Ezek. 4:12). This would be particularly abhorrent to a priest like Ezekiel, whose ceremonial cleanness is a matter of considerable importance, but in the sign it represents the fact that when the Israelites are sent into exile they will be forced to eat all kinds of unclean food (v. 13). Their suffering in the siege of Jerusalem, when they have so little to eat, will not save them from the fate of exile, where they will have no choice but to eat unclean food among the Gentiles.

In view of Ezekiel’s protests, however, the Lord relents and allows him to cook it over animal dung, which is not defiling but merely unpleasant (v. 15). His recounting of the interaction with God over the unclean fuel is sufficient to make the point clear to his observers. Moreover, his own commitment to preserving his purity in eating will be matched by others among the exiles, even under considerable pressure from their captors (cf. Daniel 1). But those left behind in Jerusalem will very soon have little or nothing to eat, kosher or nonkosher. The covenant curses of Leviticus 26 are coming upon the people, as is clear from the citation of Leviticus 26:26 in Ezekiel 4:16.