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roll that I give thee. Then did I 'eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweet

ness.

4 And he said unto me, Son of man, go, get thee unto the house of Israel, and speak with my words unto them.

5 For thou art not sent to a people of a strange speech and of an hard language, but to the house of Israel;

6 Not to many people of a strange speech and of an hard language, whose words thou canst not understand. Surely, had I sent thee to them, they would have hearkened unto thee.

7 But the house of Israel will not hearken unto thee; for they will not hearken unto me: for all the house of Israel are 'impudent and hardhearted.

8 Behold, I have made thy face strong against their faces, and thy forehead strong against their foreheads.

9 As an adamant harder than flint have I made thy forehead: "fear them not, neither be dismayed at their looks, though they be a rebellious house.

10 Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, all my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears.

11 And go, get thee to them of the captivity, unto the children of thy people, and speak unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear.

12 Then the spirit took me up, and I heard behind me a voice of a great rushing, saying, Blessed be the glory of the LORD from his place.

13 I heard also the noise of the wings of the living creatures that touched one another, and the noise of the wheels over against them, and a noise of a great rushing.

14 So the spirit lifted me up, and took me away, and I went "in bitterness, in the "heat of my spirit; but the hand of the LORD was strong upon me.

15 Then I came to them of the captivity at Tel-abib, that dwelt by the river of Chebar, and I sat where they sat, and remained there astonished among them seven days.

16 And it came to pass at the end of seven days, that the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,

17 10Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me.

18 When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand.

19 Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul.

20 Again, When a "righteous man doth turn from his righteousness, and commit iniquity, and I lay a stumblingblock before him, he shall die: because thou hast not given him warning, he shall die in his sin, and his righteousness which he hath done shall not be remembered; but his blood will I require at thine hand.

21 Nevertheless if thou warn the righteous man, that the righteous sin not, and he doth not sin, he shall surely live, because he is warned; also thou hast delivered thy soul.

22 And the hand of the LORD was there upon me; and he said unto me, Arise, go forth into the plain, and I will there talk with thee.

23 Then I arose, and went forth into the plain: and, behold, the glory of the LORD stood there, as the glory which I saw by the river of Chebar: and I fell on my face.

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24 Then the spirit entered into me, and set me upon my feet, and spake with me, and said unto me, Go, shut thyself within thine house.

25 But thou, O son of man, behold, they shall put bands upon thee, and shall bind thee with them, and thou shalt not go out among

them :

26 And I will make thy tongue cleave to the roof of thy mouth, that thou shalt be dumb, and shalt not be to them "a reprover: for they are a rebellious house.

27 But when I speak with thee, I will open thy mouth, and thou shalt say unto them, Thus saith the Lord Gon; He that heareth, let him hear; and he that forbeareth, let him forbear: for they are a rebellious house.

1 Revel. 10. 9. 2 Heb. deep of lip, and heavy of tongue; and so verse 6.

Heb, deep of lip, and heary of language. 11 Chap. 18. 24. 12 Heb. righteousnesses.

Or, if I had sent thee, &c., would they not have hearkened unto thee? 5 Heb. stiff of forehead, and hard of heart. 6 Jer. 1. 8. 8 Heb. bitter.

7 lieb. kissed.

9 Heb. hot anger.

13 Chap. 1.

10 Chap. 33. 7.
14 Heb. a man reproving.

Verse 15. Tel-abib.'-Names of places beginning with 'Tel' are still common in Assyria, Mesopotamia, and Syria. The word, in its present usage, indicates an artificial height, or loosely, any height; and when used as a prefix, intimates that the place is situated on some elevation. Tel-abib means heaps of ears of corn,' and we are not sure whether it is the name of a town, so called from the fertility of its neighbourhood, or of the fertile district itself. Whether a town or a district it was certainly near

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to or traversed by the Chebar. Junius thinks it was the name of the district extending from Mount Masius to the Euphrates; but perhaps a more distinct recognition may be obtained in the Thallaba, which the Theodosian table places in Mesopotamia, on the banks of the Chaborus (Khabur or Chebar), and the situation of which is marked in the map of D'Anville as in about the centre part of the district which Junius supposes the present name to describe.

CHAPTER IV.

1 Under the type of a siege is shewed the time from the defection of Jeroboam to the captivity. 9 By the provision of the siege is shewed the hardness of the famine.

THOU also, son of man, take thee a tile, and lay it before thee, and pourtray upon it the city, even Jerusalem:

2 And lay siege against it, and build a fort against it, and cast a mount against it; set the camp also against it, and set battering rams against it round about.

3 Moreover take thou unto thee an iron pan, and set it for a wall of iron between thee and the city and set thy face against it, and it shall be besieged, and thou shalt lay siege against it. This shall be a sign to the house of Israel.

4 Lie thou also upon thy left side, and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel upon it: according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon it thou shalt bear their iniquity.

5 For I have laid upon thee the years of their iniquity, according to the number of the days, three hundred and ninety days: so shalt thou bear the iniquity of the house of Israel.

6 And when thou hast accomplished them, lie again on thy right side, and thou shalt bear the iniquity of the house of Judah forty days I have appointed thee each day for a

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to another, till thou hast ended the days of thy siege. 9 Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof, according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon thy side, three hundred and ninety days shalt thou eat thereof.

10 And thy meat which thou shalt eat shall be by weight, twenty shekels a day: from time to time shalt thou eat it.

11 Thou shalt drink also water by measure, the sixth part of an hin: from time to time shalt thou drink.

12 And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight.

13 And the LORD said, Even thus shall the children of Israel eat their defiled bread among the Gentiles, whither I will drive them.

14 Then said I, Ah Lord GOD! behold, my soul hath not been polluted: for from my youth up even till now have I not eaten of that which dieth of itself, or is torn in pieces; neither came there abominable flesh into my mouth.

15 Then he said unto me, Lo, I have given thee cow's dung for man's dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith.

16 ¶ Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, behold, I will break the staff of bread in Jerusalem: and they shall eat bread by weight, and with care; and they shall drink water by measure, and with astonishment :

17 That they may want bread and water, and be astonied one with another, and consume away for their iniquity.

3 Num. 14. 34.

6 Or, spelt.

Verse 1. Take thee a tile ... and pourtray upon it the city.'-Fortile,' we may read 'brick,' and for 'pourtray,' 'engrave. This is a striking reference to the Chaldæan usage of writing and portraying by indented figures upon broad and thin bricks. Great numbers of such bricks, charged with inscriptions in the arrow-headed character,

VOL. III.

2 D

7 Lev. 26. 26.

4 Heb. a day for a year, a day for a year. Chap. 5. 16, and 14. 13.

and with figures of animals and other objects, are found among the ruins of Babylon and other ancient sites in Chaldæa. The bricks applied to this use are of fine clay, much hardened in the fire. They are of different sizes, but very commonly a foot square by three inches in thickness. Heeren thinks it probable that the usual process in

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forming the inscriptions was to impress the characters upon the brick by means of forms which they applied before the mass was submitted to the fire. If so, they touched upon the invention of printing as nearly as the materials would allow. Some of these bricks, besides the lines of inscribed writing, bear the impression of seals, offering the figures of animals and other objects, with other lines of inscription attached to them; whence it has been conjectured that these bricks contain public or private documents, with the names and seals of witnesses, and that the ruined edifices from which they are obtained were the repositories of such archives. It is however not necessary to generalize this opinion, and to suppose that all the inscribed bricks were such documents, some of which may possibly contain the astronomical observations for a long series of years, which the ancient Chaldæans are said to have recorded on bricks. But it is difficult to explain, under any hypothesis, how it happens that such bricks should have been employed in the construction of walls, with their inscribed faces downward-their edges, which formed the front of the wall, only appearing-and connected by a strong cement, so as to preclude the possibility of their being read till after the destruction of the buildings of which they were composed. However, enough has been stated to illustrate, from the common practice of the country, the act of the prophet when he took a tile to portray' Jerusalem thereon. How this was done, we do not know; but probably by inscribing its name or symbol upon the brick, or possibly by making a representation of some conspicuous part or building of the city. [APPENDIX, No. 68.]

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3. An iron pan.'-Or an iron plate,' probably such as was employed for baking cakes of bread. See Lev. ii. 5.

9. Beans.- pul, whence the Latin puls, and our English pulse, as a general appellation for the seeds of leguminous plants. The kinds most common in Syria are the white horse-bean and the kidney-bean. The paintings of Egypt shew that the bean was cultivated in that country in very ancient times. It is stated by Herodotus that beans were held in abhorrence by the Egyptian priesthood, and that they were never eaten by the people. But, as they were nevertheless cultivated, the intimation of Diodorus, that the abstinence from beans was not general, is more than probable, though it is not likely that they formed so considerable an article in the diet of the poorer people as they do at present in the same country. It will be observed that the prophet is directed to make his bread with beans, dhourra, lentiles, and other coarse, inferior matters, mixed with wheat, to shew that wheat should become too costly to be used alone, and to express the shifts to which the besieged people should be driven. Thus the Romans were in the habit of mixing the meal of the bean with that of corn-grasses, in times of scarcity, and the practice has been imitated in modern times. The present passage shews the antiquity of this resource.

'Millet.'-The millet is the Panicum miliaceum of Linnæus, and is a kind of grass, which has a most extensive cultivation for the sake of its nutritive seeds. Panicum is from panis, 'bread,' and shews in what estimation it was held by the ancients. There is also another species which is called Panicum Italicum and Setaria. It is an annual, in the warmer parts of Europe, and produces a seed that is smaller than the foregoing species. The original word, in the present instance, is dokhan, and may very possibly have been the dhourra, or holcus sorghum, of which we give a representation, and which is now so extensively cultivated and used in Palestine, Syria, Arabia, Egypt, Nubia, etc.; being in some of these countries the principal food of the lower classes. It is sometimes called the greater millet,' though belonging to a different genus. All these grasses have large spreading clusters of flowers at the top of the stem, and present a curious appearance to the eye that has been accustomed to regard wheat as the staff of life. In Egypt three harvests of the dhourra are obtained in one year; in other places two or one only, according to circumstances. 466

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like rice. The poorer inhabitants of Arabia have little other food than the dhourra-bread, which, from its coarseness, is seldom much liked by Europeans, till necessity accustoms them to it. The usual way of preparing it in Arabia is by kneading it with camel's milk, oil, butter, or grease. Niebuhr says he could not eat of it at first, and that he should have preferred to it the worst bread he had ever eaten in Europe. But the people of the country, being used to it, prefer it to barley, which they think too light.

Notwithstanding its present extensive use, it might be and has been questioned whether the dhourra was so early cultivated in the south-west of Asia as the time of Ezekiel. On this subject we have however no doubt. The dhourra does still also bear the Scriptural name of dochen or dokhen. Wilkinson, in his enumeration of the products of ancient Egypt, as evinced by paintings and seeds preserved in the ancient tombs, mentions dhourra, wheat, beans, lentiles-all of which are specified in this In another place, after having spoken of wheat, he says, 'Another species of grain, with a single round head, was plucked up by the roots, but formed, in the Thebaid at least, a much smaller proportion of the cultivated produce of the country. Its height far exceeds the wheat, near which they represent it growing; and its general appearance cannot better answer to any of the order of gramina than to the sorghum, or Egyptian dhourra.' He adds, in a note, that of the fifteen species of holcus, five at least appear to be natives of Egypt: and

verse.

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that there seem also to be two unnoticed varieties. In another place this writer expresses his full conviction that the Holcus sorghum was grown in ancient Egypt.

15. Cow's dung for man's dung.'-The command, in the first instance, to use dung, implies that the siege should be of such duration that the supply of firewood in the town would be exhausted, and, being precluded from having more from the country, the inhabitants must necessarily resort to dung to prepare such miserable food as remained to them. In such cases, and in all cases where wood is scarce, animal dung, and especially cow's dung, is much employed in the East. But the command to use human dung intimates, further, that not only was the wood exhausted, but that no animal dung could be obtained, probably because all the animals in the town had been killed for food, or had perished for want of nourishment. Thus, as cow-dung is a common resource in the East, the command to use that at first would not have conveyed that intimation of distress which is involved in the other direction.

There is sufficient intimation that the Hebrews sometimes employed animal dung for fuel; but this could not generally have been the case in a country so tolerably well wooded as Palestine appears to have been. But in some regions of Western Asia, where wood is scarce, it forms the common fuel; and, as the supply of this is often inadequate to the occasions of the people, great anxiety is exhibited in collecting a sufficient quantity, and in regulating the consumption. In winter we have seen it used in the best rooms of some of the most respectable houses in towns of northern Persia; and while travelling through the same country, and some parts of Media and Armenia, when we formed our camp near the villages, all the

children who were old enough would come out with baskets and wait long and patiently to receive all the animal dung that occurred, to secure which there was often much rushing, contention, and violence among the numerous claimants for its possession. Cow-dung is deemed much preferable to any other; but all animal dung is considered valuable. When collected it is made into cakes, which are stuck against the sunny side of the houses, giving them a curious and rather unsightly appearance. When it is quite dry and falls off, it is stored away in heaps for future use. It is much used for baking, being considered preferable to any other fuel for that purpose, as it is by the villagers in Devonshire. In the East, they either heat with it the portable oven, or iron plate, or else lay their cakes upon the fire of dung. A very common resource, in the want of a plate or oven, is to form the dough into balls, which are placed either among live coals or into a fire of camel's dung, and covered over till penetrated by the heat. The ashes are then removed and the bread eaten hot, with much enjoyment by the natives; but it sometimes contracts a flavour and appearance which is not pleasant to Europeans. It seems very probable that it was such cakes or balls, baked in immediate contact with the fire, which the prophet intended to provide, and which made him the more abhor the idea of employing human dung for the purpose. Our cut (from the great work on Egypt) shews the process followed in Egypt, which is precisely the same that we have described. Two females bear on their heads the baskets made of date-leaves, full of what they have collected, while another makes the dung-cakes by breaking up the dried dung, and compounding it with a little water, chopped straw and dust.

CHAPTER V.

1 Under the type of hair, 5 is shewed the judgment of Jerusalem for their rebellion, 12 by famine, sword, and dispersion.

AND thou, son of man, take thee a sharp knife, take thee a barber's razor, and cause it to pass upon thine head and upon thy beard then take thee balances to weigh, and divide the hair.

2 Thou shalt burn with fire a third part in the midst of the city, when the days of the siege are fulfilled: and thou shalt take a third part, and smite about it with a knife: and a third part thou shalt scatter in the wind; and I will draw out a sword after them.

3 Thou shalt also take thereof a few in number, and bind them in thy 'skirts.

4 Then take of them again, and cast them into the midst of the fire, and burn them in the fire; for thereof shall a fire come forth into all the house of Israel.

5 Thus saith the Lord GOD; This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations and countries that are round about her.

6 And she hath changed my judgments into wickedness more than the nations, and my statutes more than the countries that are round about her for they have refused my judgments and my statutes, they have not walked in them.

7 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Because ye multiplied more than the nations that are round about you, and have not walked in my statutes, neither have kept my judgments, neither have done according to the judgments of the nations that are round about you;

8 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I, even I, am against thee, and will execute judgments in the midst of thee in the sight of the nations.

9 And I will do in thee that which I have not done, and whereunto I will not do any

1 Heb. wings.

more the like, because of all thine abominations.

10 Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers; and I will execute judgments in thee, and the whole remnant of thee will I scatter into all the winds.

11 Wherefore, as I live, saith the Lord GOD; Surely, because thou hast defiled my sanctuary with all thy detestable things, and with all thine abominations, therefore will I also diminish thee; neither shall mine eye spare, neither will I have any pity.

12 A third part of thee shall die with the pestilence, and with famine shall they be consumed in the midst of thee: and a third part shall fall by the sword round about thee; and I will scatter a third part into all the winds, and I will draw out a sword after them.

13 Thus shall mine anger be accomplished, and I will cause my fury to rest upon them, and I will be comforted: and they shall know that I the LORD have spoken it in my zeal, when I have accomplished my fury in them.

14 Moreover I will make thee waste, and a reproach among the nations that are round about thee, in the sight of all that pass by.

15 So it shall be a 'reproach and a taunt, an instruction and an astonishment unto the nations that are round about thee, when I shall execute judgments in thee in anger and in fury and in furious rebukes. I the LORD have spoken it.

16 When I shall send upon them the evil arrows of famine, which shall be for their destruction, and which I will send to destroy you and I will increase the famine upon you, and will break your 'staff of bread :

17 So will I send upon you famine and 'evil beasts, and they shall bereave thee; and pestilence and blood shall pass through thee; and I will bring the sword upon thee. I the LORD have spoken it.

2 Levit. 26. 29. Deut. 28. 53. 2 Kings 6. 29. Lam. 4. 10. Baruch 2. 3. 4 Deut. 28. 37. 3 Levit. 26. 26. Chap. 4. 16, and 14. 13. 6 Levit. 26. 22.

3 Chap. 7. 4, 9.

Verse 1. A sharp knife....A barber's razor.'-The word rendered 'a sharp knife' is a general one denoting a sword, a knife, and other cutting instruments. Newcome has a sharp tool,' Boothroyd, a sharp instrument;' and some of the ancient versions understand a sword to be intended, and that the second clause does not define it to be a barber's razor, but describes it as sharper than a barber's The word rendered razor' (yn ta'ar) is of more limited application to a sharp knife or a razor for shaving. As the Jews allowed their beards to grow, and did not

razor.

habitually shave their heads like the modern Orientals, there could have been little occasion among them for the use of the razor. Perhaps the allusion in Isa. vii. 20, to a razor that is hired,' suggests that the suitable implements were so uncommon as to be hired from the persons who possessed them, on those occasions of mourning when it was usual to shave the head; or, as possibly, that there were professional barbers, little as their services were generally required-the employment of the hired barber being perhaps involved in the hiring of the razor. The

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