This week we are reading Ezekiel 5, a continuation of the prophet’s bizarre series of sign-acts. The Lord commanded Ezekiel to get a sharp sword, instead of a barber’s razor, and shave his head and beard (5:1). The laws of Leviticus forbid priests from making bald spots on their head or shaving off the edges of their beards (Lev. 21:5). Yet, as a priest, Ezekiel did not protest this defiling performance. With a sword in his hand, he dramatized what must have seemed to his audience like a self-appointed excommunication.

In biblical times, shaving could be a legitimate expression of mourning (Job 1:20). Ancient mourners tore their clothes, put on sackcloth, and rubbed ashes on their head as outward representations of their internal suffering. One interpretation of the sign-act is that Ezekiel was symbolically mourning the coming loss of Jerusalem. If that was his intention, a razor would have sufficed. Instead, Ezekiel used a sword, an instrument of war, to shear himself. In the ancient Near East, victorious armies often degraded their captives by shaving them as a sign of their forced subjugation (Isa. 15:2). Ezekiel humiliated himself to represent the Babylonian’s military defeat of Jerusalem.

After Ezekiel shaved, God instructed him to put the hair on a balancing scale so that he could divide it into three equal parts (5:1). Weighing and measuring were verbs often used to describe God’s careful and deliberate judgement. After he divided the hair into thirds, the prophet was to dispose of each section of hair through different actions that symbolized the fate of Jerusalem’s population, whether their death occurred by fire, famine, or sword.