Ezekiel 4 describes a series of “sign acts.” The first is found in 4:1–3 and introduces us to what’s to come. Ezekiel is told to take a brick, engrave an image of Jerusalem on it, and lay siege to it (with the help of battering rams and the like). He’s then told to take an iron griddle and set it up as a wall between himself and the city.
It’s not too hard to work out what’s depicted here. Judah’s days are over. Jerusalem will soon be besieged and will eventually fall.[1]
Also reflected in Ezekiel’s sign is the reason for Jerusalem’s fall. Ezekiel depicts both himself (in his role as a prophet) as well as the God who called him to be a prophet. Jerusalem has refused to listen to Ezekiel and by extension to her God, and so God now won’t listen to her. (Jeremiah will soon be told not to pray for Judah, if he hasn’t already [Jer 7:16; 11:14; 14:11]).
Ezekiel’s sign is all about separation, which is signified by the iron griddle-turned-wall. Judah’s sins have “separated her from her God” and led God to “hide his face” from her (Is 59:2). The notion of “an iron wall” likely alludes to Leviticus 26, where God says that if his people don’t listen to him, he’ll shatter their pride and power and make their heavens “like iron” (Lev 26:18–19).
Israel’s 390 Days, Ezekiel 4:4–5
Next, Ezekiel is told to lie on his side for 390 days and to “bear Israel’s iniquity.” Two questions are raised by God’s command. First, what does it mean “to bear iniquity”? And second, what does the term “Israel” denote here?
The first question isn’t too hard to answer. Throughout the book of Ezekiel, “to bear sin” means “to suffer the consequences of sin” (e.g., Ezek 14:10; 18:19; 44:10). Ezekiel is made to feel the consequences of Israel’s sin and hence to enter into God’s own sense of grief, as prophets often do.
The second question concerns the referent of “Israel.” The term “Israel” can (a) denote Israel as a whole or (b) can denote Judah insofar as Judah is what’s left of Israel in the land (e.g., Ezek 3:1; 4:3; 1 Chr 9:1–2), or (c) can single out the northern kingdom. Which of these senses is in mind in Ezekiel 4:4–8? Singling out the northern kingdom seems the most likely because (a) the text distinguishes Israel’s 390 days from Judah’s 40 days, which suggests that “Israel” denotes a different entity to Judah, and (b) Israel’s 390 days are associated with Ezekiel’s left side and Judah’s 40 days with his right side, which makes sense if “Israel” denotes the northern kingdom and “Judah” the southern kingdom, since the Hebrew word for “left” can also mean “north” and the Hebrew word for “right” can also mean “south” (e.g., Ezek 16:46).
The Significance of the 390 Days
We thus come to the issue of what the 390 days signify. According to Ezekiel, they signify “the number of the years of Israel’s iniquity.” This could theoretically look forward to a future sin or period of punishment. (The word translated as “iniquity” can denote either an act of sin or its penalty/consequences.) But given that Israel had already been ousted from her land during Ezekiel’s prophesying, she clearly had some major transgressions in her past, so it seems reasonable to ask, “Did anything significant happen about 390 years prior to the events of Ezekiel 4?” The answer is “yes.” Israel started to splinter away from the tribe of Judah. Around 977 BC, 390 years prior to the exile, Absalom “stole the people’s hearts,” ousted David from his kingdom, and laid claim to the throne (2 Sam 15).[2] David soon regained control (2 Sam 16–19), but the seeds of division had been sown. Sheba ben Bichri immediately incited the northern tribes to revolt against David (2 Sam 20), and when Israel finally splintered in two in Jeroboam’s day, the northern tribes repeated Sheba’s words: “We have no inheritance in the son of Jesse” (1 Ki 12:16).[3]
What we’re supposed to make of all this isn’t immediately obvious because Absalom’s revolt doesn’t seem like a very significant event in Israel’s history given all the other things that took place. But there are a number of reasons why we should give it serious consideration as a start-date for Israel’s 390 years.
First, the purpose of prophecy isn’t to portray history in the way that we’d naturally be inclined to portray it. It’s an act of revelation. It lifts up the curtain and reveals God’s perspective on history, which might well differ from ours.
Second, Absalom’s revolt against David was anything but an insignificant issue. Around 2000 BC, God called the one man Abraham forth from a mass of nations and promised him that a king would arise from his loins who would bless and rule the nations (Gen 12:1–3; 17:6–8, 16; 22:17–18; 28:11–15). And that king, it turned out, would arise from the Davidic dynasty (Gen 49:8–10; Num 24:9, 17; 2 Sam 7:1–16; Ps 2; Is 9:6; Rev 5:5–10). David’s lineage was thus one of cosmic significance in and through which God’s purposes for the world would be realized. So Israel’s rejection of David’s dynasty was a massive issue.
Third, the idea that Israel’s 390 years began with Absalom’s revolt makes good sense of the text of Ezekiel 4. Absalom’s revolt was an act of sin whose consequences persisted for 390 years—i.e., from 977 BC to the exile in 587 BC—at which point Israel’s rebellion against David’s lineage was effectively brought to an end because Judah’s autonomy was brought to an end. Indeed, after the exile, none of Judah’s leaders is referred to as a “king” in the Old Testament. The reign of the Gentile colossus had begun (Dan 2).
Judah’s 40 Days, Ezekiel 4:6–8
We come to the issue of Judah’s forty days. Given our interpretation of Israel’s 390 days, we’d expect these forty days to envisage a forty-year period when Judah rejected a God-ordained Judahite king, and we’d expect that forty year period to post-date the exile (given that the forty days begin after the 390 days have ended in Ezekiel’s sign act). Yet, as we noted above, no post-exilic rulers of Judah are referred to as “kings” in the Old Testament. To find the fulfilment of Ezekiel’s prophecy, we therefore have to turn to the New Testament where we encounter a man who’s born “king of the Jews” (Matt 2:2) and is crowned with glory and honor on Golgotha’s hill (Matt 27:37; Heb 2:9). Judah categorically rejected this Davidic king. Just as Israel said, “We have no inheritance in David!” so Judah said, “We have no king but Caesar!” (Jn 19:15). And then, forty years later, Jerusalem was besieged and sacked (Matt 22:7). Judah’s forty days depict Judah’s rebellion against king Jesus, and Ezekiel’s forty days of prophesying against the city of Jerusalem depict the preaching of the apostles (Ezek 4:7). For example: “The sun shall be turned to darkness…before the great and terrible day of the Lord! Save yourselves, therefore, from this crooked generation!” (Ac 2:20).
Conclusion
Ezekiel 4’s sign act depicts three main states of affairs:
- The state of Jerusalem in Ezekiel’s day: shut off from God and about to be besieged (4:1–3).
- The state of Israel in Ezekiel’s day: languishing in a state of exile for 390 years (4:4–5).
- The future state of Judah in AD 30–70: falling prey to the same sin as her wayward sister (4:6–8; 16:51–52).
True, the view that Ezekiel 4’s sign act looks forward to AD 30–70 isn’t a widely held one, but it’s not out of keeping with Ezekiel’s overall message. Many of Ezekiel’s prophecies look beyond Judah’s return from exile in the 6th century BC toward a time when a new Israel would arise and undergo a second wilderness experience to purge out the transgressors from her midst (Ezek 11:14–21; 20:33–44). This is precisely what happened in the period AD 30–70 (see, e.g., Heb 4). This new Israel didn’t, however, arise out of thin air. She was born in and through the resurrection of an Ezekiel-esque “son of man” who was both the king whom his people rejected and the priest who vicariously bore their sin (Ezek 16:53–63). Importantly, therefore, our interpretation of Ezekiel 4 resonates with the numerical properties of Ezekiel’s sign act. Just as at the end of Israel’s 430 years in Egypt, Israel acquired her promised inheritance (Ex 12:40–41), so too did a new Israel at the end of Ezekiel’s 430 days (Gal 3).
James attends a church in Romford, London, where he lives. His particular interests include figural interpretations of the Gospels, Biblical chronology, and the study of names. He regularly participates in the Theopolis podcasts, and posts on Thoughts on Scripture | James Bejon | Substack.
NOTES
[1] The same siege is described in 4:16–17, where the construction hinnî šōḇēr (הִנְנִי שֹׁבֵר), “I am about to break,” reflects the fact that it’s not far away.
[2] Solomon’s reign can be dated to c. 970–930 BC by means of multiple independent sources. Dating Absalom’s revolt (2 Sam 15–20) then becomes a matter of working back from the start of Solomon’s reign (1 Ki 1:34–53), which can be done via 2 Samuel 24’s trilemma. In 2 Samuel 24, David is made to choose between a seven year famine, a three month war, or a three day plague (24:13). In the parallel text in 1 Chronicles, however, the first of these options is a three year famine (1 Chr 21:12), which is the case because Israel had already undergone four years of famine (2 Sam 21:1, 10–14). The events of 2 Samuel 21–24 can thus be taken to span a total of seven years, which makes 977 BC the latest possible date for Absalom’s revolt, and also makes it a reasonable approximation as to the actual date of Absalom’s revolt given that we’ve got no reason to think that the events of 2 Samuel 20 and 21 were separated by a long period of time. See R. C. Young, “Three verifications of Thiele’s date for the beginning of the divided kingdom,” Andrews University Seminary Studies 45, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 163–189. See also R. C. Young, “When did Jerusalem fall?,” JETS 47, no. 1 (Mar 2004): 21–38; R. C. Young, “Tables of reign lengths from the Hebrew court recorders,” JETS 48, no. 2 (June 2005): 225–248.
[3] The connection between these three events—i.e., between Absalom’s, Sheba’s, and Jeroboam’s revolts—is borne out by a sequence of allusions to the ten northern tribes in the biblical narrative. When David was ousted from his kingdom, he left his ten concubines behind, who depict the ten northern tribes (1 Sam 12:11–12; 15:16; 16:22). When David reclaimed his kingdom, he declined to restore these ten concubines to the king’s palace, which the Biblical narrator portrays in negative terms (1 Sam 20:3). Finally, the events set in motion by Absalom came to their logical conclusion in Jeroboam’s day when Ahijah tore his cloak into twelve pieces and told Jeroboam to take ten of them for himself (1 Ki 11:30–39). I’m grateful to my friend Simon Wakeling for drawing my attention to many of these things.