Ezekiel4chapter 4

The brick is the most ordinary object in Babylonia. Walls, houses, temples and city gates were all built of mud brick, and a fresh brick was a soft clay slab about a foot square before it dried. Scribes drew maps and building plans on exactly such tablets — an actual clay tablet from Nippur preserves a scaled street map of that city. Ezekiel scratches Jerusalem onto one and lays siege to it in miniature.

The siege props are accurate to the last item. Attackers threw up an earth ramp against the weakest stretch of wall, built a siege wall around the city to stop anyone slipping out with food, dug in at camps, and brought up the ram — a heavy beam under a hide-covered shed. Assyrian palace reliefs of the capture of Lachish in Judah show all of it in one picture: ramp, ram, camp, and the people going out into exile.

The iron griddle is a kitchen object. Flat iron or pottery plates were used for baking cakes over coals. Set on its edge between the prophet and the little city, it makes a wall that nothing gets through — including prayer.

The food ration is famine arithmetic. About eight ounces of bread a day and roughly a pint and a half of water, weighed and measured out, is what a besieged city eats near the end. The loaf is made of wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet and spelt all mixed — nobody bakes bread that way by choice; you do it when you are scraping every bin in the house into one bowl. Dried dung was and is the ordinary cooking fuel where firewood is scarce, but the substitution God first names would have made the bread ritually filthy, and Ezekiel the priest protests until it is changed to cow dung.