You also, son of man, take a tile, and lay it before yourself, and portray on it a city, even Jerusalem:
and lay siege against it, and build forts against it, and cast up a mound against it; set camps also against it, and plant battering rams against it all around.
Take for yourself an iron pan, and set it for a wall of iron between you and the city: and set your face toward it, and it shall be besieged, and you shall lay siege against it. This shall be a sign to the house of Israel.
Moreover lie on your left side, and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel on it; [according to] the number of the days that you shall lie on it, you shall bear their iniquity.
For I have appointed the years of their iniquity to be to you a number of days, even three hundred ninety days: so you shall bear the iniquity of the house of Israel.
Again, when you have accomplished these, you shall lie on your right side, and shall bear the iniquity of the house of Judah: forty days, each day for a year, have I appointed it to you.
You shall set your face toward the siege of Jerusalem, with your arm uncovered; and you shall prophesy against it.
Behold, I lay bands on you, and you shall not turn you from one side to the other, until you have accomplished the days of your siege.
Take for yourself also wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and spelt, and put them in one vessel, and make bread of it; [according to] the number of the days that you shall lie on your side, even three hundred ninety days, you shall eat of it.
Your food which you shall eat shall be by weight, twenty shekels a day: from time to time you shall eat it.
You shall drink water by measure, the sixth part of a hin: from time to time you shall drink.
You shall eat it as barley cakes, and you shall bake it in their sight with dung that comes out of man.
Yahweh said, Even thus shall the children of Israel eat their bread unclean, among the nations where I will drive them.
Then I said, Ah Lord Yahweh! behold, my soul has not been polluted; for from my youth up even until now have I not eaten of that which dies of itself, or is torn of animals; neither came there abominable flesh into my mouth.
Then he said to me, Behold, I have given you cow's dung for man's dung, and you shall prepare your bread thereon.
Moreover he said to me, Son of man, behold, I will break the staff of bread in Jerusalem: and they shall eat bread by weight, and with fearfulness; and they shall drink water by measure, and in dismay:
that they may want bread and water, and be dismayed one with another, and pine away in their iniquity.
Canonical academic citations for Ezekiel 4 (WEB) — copy in your preferred format.
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God instructs Ezekiel to enact Jerusalem's siege symbolically: Draw the city on a tile, build siege works around it, place an iron pan as a wall between him and it (representing God's separation), and lie on his left side 390 days for Israel's iniquity, then right side 40 days for Judah's, bearing their sins. For food during this period, Ezekiel is to bake barley cakes over human dung (later changed to cow dung at his protest, symbolizing defiled exile bread), with rationed water and food to represent famine scarcity in the besieged city.
Symbolic actions and visions offering judgment and future hope.
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