Ezekiel 4 - Introduction

Ezekiel 4:1 to Ezekiel 5:4. Symbolical actions representing the siege and capture of Jerusalem, and the fate of the inhabitants their slaughter around the city and dispersion among the nations

(1) Ch. Ezekiel 4:1-3. Symbol of the siege of Jerusalem.

(2) Ch. Ezekiel 4:4-8. Symbol of the people's bearing their iniquity in the siege and exile.

(3) Ch. Ezekiel 4:9-17. Symbol of scarcity during the siege, and pollution among the nations.

(4) Ch. Ezekiel 5:1-4. Symbol of the slaughter of the inhabitants around the city on its capture, and their dispersion over the world.

The following symbols seem as much designed for the prophet himself as for the people. He is commanded of God to perform them. They represent the thoughts which under the inspiration of God filled his mind at this time, regarding the fate of the city and the state. His thoughts as well as those of the captives around him are occupied with Jerusalem, for Jerusalem is almost Israel. Being far from it and from its inhabitants his imagination is fertile in devising means to bring it before him. Sometimes he portrays a picture of it on a brick, and sometimes he is carried by a lock of his head through the air and set down in the midst of it, in order to behold its iniquities (ch. Ezekiel 8:1). Though some of the symbols here might have been actually represented, others could not, such as lying on his side immoveable for many days (Ezekiel 4:4-8), and probably none of them were actually performed. The prophet no more drew a sketch of Jerusalem upon a brick than he was carried by the hair of his head from the Chebar to Palestine. At the same time there is more than mere literary artifice. The symbols stood actually before his imagination, and the narration of them to the people would convey the same instruction as the actual representation of them (Ezekiel 4:3, cf. ch. Ezekiel 11:25). The three symbolical actions (ch. 4) must go on simultaneously, viz. the siege, the lying on his side or bearing iniquity, and eating bread by measure and in pollution. For the three are the same thing under different aspects; first the actual siege, then the meaning of this, God's judgment for sin, and finally some of the ways in which this judgment is felt, straitness of food and water, and dispersion and defilement among the nations.