World English Bible · Babylon and the exile
Ezekiel 4
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"You also, , take a tile, and lay it before yourself, and portray on it a city, even . Lay siege against it, build forts against it, and cast up a mound against it. Also set camps 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. Then set your toward it. It will be besieged, and you shall lay siege against it. This shall be a sign to the . "Moreover lie on your left side, and lay the of the on it. According to the number of the days that you shall lie on it, you shall bear their . For I have appointed the years of their to be to you a number of days, even three hundred ninety days. So you shall bear the of the . "Again, when you have accomplished these, you shall lie on your right side, and shall bear the of the house of Judah. I have appointed forty days, each day for a year, to you. You shall set your toward the siege of , with your arm uncovered; and you shall against it. Behold, I put ropes on you, and you shall not turn yourself from one side to the other, until you have accomplished the days of your siege. "Take for yourself also wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt, and put them in one . Make bread of it. According to the number of the days that you will 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 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." said, "Even thus will the eat their bread , among the nations where I will drive them." Then I said, "Ah ! Behold, has not been polluted; for from my youth up even until now I have not eaten of that which dies of itself, or is torn of animals. No meat has come into my !" 15Then he said to me, "Behold, I have given you cow's dung for man's dung, and you shall prepare your bread on it." Moreover he said to me, ", behold, I will break the of bread in . They will eat bread by weight, and with fearfulness. They will drink water by measure, and in dismay; that they may lack bread and water, be dismayed one with another, and pine away in their .
A public domain modern English translation, free to read and share. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · Babylon and the exile, 612 BC to 539 BC ›
Babylon replaces Assyria, Jerusalem and its temple are destroyed in 586 BC, and the leadership of Judah lives in Mesopotamia without a king, a temple, or a country.
- Babylon
- Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilds the city on a scale meant to be seen from a distance: the Ishtar Gate in glazed blue brick, the processional way, the ziggurat, and gardens later counted among the wonders of the world. Babylonian tablets record rations issued to the captive king Jehoiachin of Judah by name, which is one of the tidier points of contact between the Bible and the archives.
- Egypt
- Briefly resurgent. Pharaoh Neco marches north, kills King Josiah at Megiddo, and installs and deposes kings in Jerusalem, until Babylon beats him decisively at Carchemish in 605 BC. Jeremiah spends his career saying that betting on Egypt is suicide, and is proved right.
- Judah
- Deported in stages, then destroyed. The temple is burned, the walls broken, and the leadership marched to Mesopotamia. What happens next is one of the strangest survivals in history: a people keeps its identity without land, king, or sanctuary, and comes out of it with its scriptures more central than before.
- Further afield
- An extraordinary century for ideas everywhere at once. Thales and the first Greek philosophers, Solon's reforms at Athens, the Buddha in India, Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, and Zoroaster in Persia all fall within a few generations of the exile.
All of Ezekiel