Packed Baggage and an Expired Proverb

This formula opens each of the chapter’s five units, at verses 1, 8, 17, 21 and 26: two acted signs, their explanations, and two answers to popular sayings. The long vision of chapters 8 to 11 is over, and short, sharp oracles take its place.

Jeremiah 5:21 had used the same words of Judah: “which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not.” Isaiah was sent to make ears heavy and eyes shut (Isaiah 6:9–10), and Jesus asks his disciples, “Having eyes, see ye not?” (Mark 8:18). Ezekiel lives among such people.

“Stuff for removing” is literally the baggage of exile, the small bundle a deportee was allowed to carry. The Assyrian reliefs of the fall of Lachish show families walking away with sacks over their shoulders. “It may be they will consider” is the same faint hope God gave Jeremiah: “It may be that the house of Judah will hear” (Jeremiah 36:3).

“As they that go forth into captivity” uses the verb of going out, the verb of the exodus, when Israel went out of Egypt. Here it is attached to captivity. The baggage goes out by day and the man follows at evening, two stages of a departure watched by everyone.

Babylonian houses were built of sun-dried mud brick, and verse 7 says Ezekiel dug through the wall “with mine hand”. Leaving by a hole rather than a door is the picture of an escape, not a journey: going out the way a thief would come in.

When David fled Jerusalem before Absalom, he went up the Mount of Olives weeping, “and had his head covered” (2 Samuel 15:30). A king leaving his city with his face covered had been seen once before. “A sign” here is mofet, a portent, the word for the wonders done in Egypt.

Ezekiel seldom reports carrying out a command; he does so here, again at 24:18, “I did in the morning as I was commanded”, and at 37:7. Each detail is ticked off in order: stuff by day, digging at evening, the load on the shoulder in the dark, all “in their sight”.

The explanation is held back overnight. The people had the whole night to wonder what the man with the bundle and the hole in his wall meant, and the question they asked is the subject of the next verse.

“What doest thou?” is what an acted sign was meant to provoke, and Ezekiel’s neighbours ask it again when his wife dies and he does not mourn (24:19). The question means they were watching. Whether they wanted the answer is another matter.

There is a pun in the Hebrew: “the prince”, hannasi, and “this burden”, hammassa, both come from the verb nasa, to lift or carry. The burden, meaning the oracle, is about the prince who will carry a burden on his shoulder. Ezekiel regularly calls Zedekiah prince rather than king.

Isaiah walked naked and barefoot three years “for a sign and wonder upon Egypt” (Isaiah 20:3); now Ezekiel says, “I am your sign.” The prophet’s body is the message. “Like as I have done, so shall it be done unto them” makes the whole performance a preview.

Verse 6 said Ezekiel should cover his face “that thou see not the ground”. For the prince the phrase is lengthened, “that he see not the ground with his eyes”. The addition of “with his eyes” quietly points toward what would be done to Zedekiah’s eyes at Riblah.

Josephus (Antiquities 10.106–107) reports that Zedekiah refused to believe either prophet because they seemed to contradict each other: Jeremiah said he would be taken to Babylon, Ezekiel that he would not see it. Both proved true. “My net” is repeated in 17:20, where the reason given is his broken oath.

“His bands” renders a word for the wings of an army, its flanks, found only in Ezekiel. Jeremiah 52:8 records it happening: when Zedekiah was overtaken in the plains of Jericho, “all his army was scattered from him”. The sword drawn after them repeats the threat of 5:2 and 5:12.

“Disperse” is the verb for winnowing, tossing threshed grain into the wind so that the chaff blows away, as Boaz “winnoweth barley” at night (Ruth 3:2). The people are thrown into the air across the countries. The recognition comes “when” this happens, not before.

“A few men” is literally men of number, so few they can be counted, the phrase of Deuteronomy 4:27: “ye shall be left few in number among the heathen.” Their survival has a job attached: to tell foreigners why it happened, which makes them witnesses rather than exceptions.

The third unit of the chapter, and a second acted sign. The first was a departure through a wall; this one is performed sitting at a table, with nothing more unusual than bread and a cup of water.

“Quaking” is ra’ash, the Hebrew word for an earthquake, as in “two years before the earthquake” (Amos 1:1). Ezekiel is to eat as though the ground under the table were moving. In chapter 4 the food was scarce; here the food is ordinary, and the one eating it is shaking.

The exiles are addressed as “the people of the land”, a title for landed citizens, though they no longer have land. “Desolate from all that is therein” is literally from its fullness, the word of Psalm 24:1, “The earth is the LORD’s, and the fulness thereof.” The fullness of Judah is to be emptied.

Isaiah asked “how long?” at his call and was told, “Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man” (Isaiah 6:11). The same double sentence falls here on the cities and the land, and the recognition formula follows it once more.

The fourth unit turns from signs to sayings. The formula introduces a new kind of oracle, an answer to something people are repeating, which Ezekiel will do again with proverbs in 18:2 and elsewhere.

Ezekiel quotes the popular sayings of his day more than any other prophet: 11:3, here, 12:27, 18:2, 33:10 and 37:11 among them. This one mocks the delay between warning and event. 2 Peter 3:4 records the same jeer in a later age: “Where is the promise of his coming?”

The answer keeps the proverb’s shape and changes its ending. “The days are prolonged, and every vision faileth” becomes “The days are at hand, and the effect of every vision”, literally the word of every vision. A new saying is offered to replace the old one.

“Flattering divination” is literally smooth divination, oracles that go down easily. Isaiah 30:10 quotes the people telling their seers, “speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits.” The prophets who supplied smooth words are the subject of the whole next chapter.

The Hebrew runs, “I the LORD will speak what I will speak, a word, and it shall be done”, repeating the verb in a way that recalls God’s self-description to Moses, “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious” (Exodus 33:19). The word is its own guarantee. “In your days” brings it into their lifetime.

The fifth and last unit. Its saying is not a jeer but a postponement, and it comes, the next verse says, from “they of the house of Israel”, not from outsiders.

They speak about Ezekiel, not to him: “the vision that he seeth”. “For many days to come” is the phrase Daniel was given, legitimately, for a vision that was to be sealed: “it shall be for many days” (Daniel 8:26). Here the phrase is a way of putting the message somewhere safe.

“Prolonged” is the verb for drawing something out, like a sound or a bowstring pulled back. Jerusalem fell about six years after the vision of chapter 8. The chapter ends with “saith the Lord GOD” twice in one verse, the last word given to the speaker, not to the proverb.