Ezekiel is a WILD book. Not only are the numbers crazy, but this old testament prophet also spent a year laying on his side cooking his food on cow poop…
Ezekiel 4 gives us the prophecy in question. You have to hear it in full if you want it to make sense at all.
“Now, son of man, take a block of clay, put it in front of you and draw the city of Jerusalem on it. 2 Then lay siege to it: Erect siege works against it, build a ramp up to it, set up camps against it and put battering rams around it. 3 Then take an iron pan, place it as an iron wall between you and the city and turn your face toward it. It will be under siege, and you shall besiege it. This will be a sign to the people of Israel.
4 “Then lie on your left side and put the sin of the people of Israel upon yourself.[a] You are to bear their sin for the number of days you lie on your side. 5 I have assigned you the same number of days as the years of their sin. So, for 390 days you will bear the sin of the people of Israel.
6 “After you have finished this, lie down again, this time on your right side, and bear the sin of the people of Judah. I have assigned you 40 days, a day for each year. 7 Turn your face toward the siege of Jerusalem and with bared arm prophesy against her. 8 I will tie you up with ropes so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have finished the days of your siege.
9 “Take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them in a storage jar and use them to make bread for yourself. You are to eat it during the 390 days you lie on your side. 10 Weigh out twenty shekels[b] of food to eat each day and eat it at set times. 11 Also measure out a sixth of a hin[c] of water and drink it at set times. 12 Eat the food as you would a loaf of barley bread; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel.” 13 The Lord said, “In this way the people of Israel will eat defiled food among the nations where I will drive them.”
14 Then I said, “Not so, Sovereign Lord! I have never defiled myself. From my youth until now I have never eaten anything found dead or torn by wild animals. No impure meat has ever entered my mouth.”
15 “Very well,” he said, “I will let you bake your bread over cow dung instead of human excrement.”
Alright, let’s forgo the poop thing and get some dates together, because that’s generally a good time.
Where does this prophecy start? Well, it starts in 605 BC, after what is known as the “Battle of Carchemish.” We have non-biblical evidence of this battle supported by the “Nebuchadnezzar Chronicle.”
"This historical chronicle describes Nebuchadnezzar’s first campaign against Jerusalem in 597 BC. The tablet covers the period of 12 years from the 21st year of Nabopolassar (605 BC, which was also Nebuchadnezzar’s accession year), through to the 11th year of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign." Source
This time frame is also confirmed biblically thanks to the dating we’re provided with in Jeremiah 29. And you might be thinking, “It’s just a date, what’s your point?” But it’s not just a date; it’s a date provided almost several thousand years before a predicted event happened.
Let’s get into it.
So, what kicked off this prophecy/judgment? Well, we have to go to Jeremiah to understand that. Basically, Israel had been unfaithful to God for hundreds of years. They weren’t honoring the sabbath days, which are a time for both people and the land to rest. Once every 7 days man is supposed to rest, and in a similar fashion, every one in seven years fields are to be left unharvested. The idea is that fields need time to rejuvenate after years of working them.
8 “Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘Because you have not heard My words, 9 behold, I will send and take all the families of the north,’ says the Lord, ‘and Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, My servant, and will bring them against this land, against its inhabitants, and against these nations all around, and will utterly destroy them, and make them an astonishment, a hissing, and perpetual desolations. 10 Moreover I will take from them the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones and the light of the lamp. 11 And this whole land shall be a desolation and an astonishment, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years.
Jeremiah 25:8-11
Ezekiel’s prophecy, the subject of this article, is written 70 years into the Jewish captivity in Babylon.
So, why did they go from a 70-year punishment like in Jeremiah to a 430-year judgment? Rebellion! Ezekiel talks about it. It’s rebellion that gets them cursed. They’ve grown comfortable in Babylon and the Jews are still not following God.
At the time of Ezekiel’s prophecy, 360 years were owed, 70 of those years had been paid, so there were 360 years not yet served (those two numbers together are where the 430 comes from).
If you go from the time of the prophecy 360 years into the future, you know what you get?
Nothing. Yep, that just points to a date in Israel when, apparently, nothing happened.
This stumped biblical historians for a while, but if you look back in Leviticus 26 there might be a clue as to why this time is left alone. Leviticus 26 talks about how ignoring God’s judgement will lead to a multiplication of that judgement by 7 times. This is reiterated several times in the chapter. Here’s one example:
23 ‘And if by these things you are not reformed by Me, but walk contrary to Me,
24 then I also will walk contrary to you, and I will punish you yet seven times for your sins.
Leviticus 26:23-24
Ok. So, were they cursed again? Was their judgment multiplied 7 times as it says in Leviticus?
Let’s say it was.
If you multiple 7 x 360 you get 2520 years owed to the Lord
Don’t worry, the math only gets worse from here…
There are arguments for several calendars to be used here. It’s a thing Christians argue about. They argue about calendars. However, if you apply the calendar the Jews/Babylonians were using at the time, it was a 360-day calendar.
And we do know the Jews were using a 360-day calendar at the end of this period. In fact, most of the world was using this calendar at the time, the Greeks, Romans, Indians, Egyptians, and Jews, to name a few. Here’s just a few non-biblical sources that reference this.
Greek Calendar: Herodotus is sometimes called the Father of History. And in about 440 B.C., Herodotus quoted Solon of Athens (638 - ca. 558 B.C.) as saying:
"...you ask me about human affairs. Over a long period of time, many things come to pass which no one would wish to see or suffer. I propose seventy years as the average life span for a man. These seventy years represent, excluding intercalated months, 25,200 days."
Greek sculpture of Herodotus: Carol M. Highsmith Archive/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-highsm-02111)
Sumerian Calendar: Dr. Robert Englund, professor of Assyriology & Sumerology at UCLA wrote about Sumeria's numeric and calendric systems in his Administrative Timekeeping in Ancient Mesopotamia published in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 1988, pp. 121-122:
The sexagesimal system of counting... is attested in periods much earlier than any secure attestation of the Sumerian language, namely in the periods Uruk IV-III [~3200 B.C.], and possibly in some token assemblages from clay envelopes unearthed in levels of proto-elamite Susa corresponding to Uruk V [~3400 B.C.]. ... A mixture of this sexagesimal system with a heritage of natural cycles resulted in the 3rd millennium time divisions attested by administrative documents. ... The resulting system... which without question complemented throughout the 3rd millennium natural, lunistellar divisions, is attested in its basic form of a twelve-month, 360-day year in the archaic documents from the end of the 4th millennium [B.C.].²
So, what we need to do is break down these 2520 years the Jews owe God into days, and then we can convert those days into our modern calendar.
2520 x 360 = 907,200 days
If you convert that back into our modern calendar, accounting for leap years and whatnot, you get 2483 years, 9 months, and 21 days.
From what we know historically, the first siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar lasted until the summer of 537 B.C. If you use the date of Jul 23, 537 B.C. (this day is used somewhat arbitrarily, in that July 23rd is clearly in summer. We're just demonstrating that this seems to get very close) as the time of the Jewish release, and you add the 2483 years, 9 months, and 21 days onto that you’re brought to May 5th, 1948.
May 5th, 1948, is particularly relevant because it’s when Israel was re-established as a nation.
So, we have another prophecy that comes from thousands of years out and seems to align with a well documented modern event. Sure, you can make arguments based on the time periods or different calendars. But the synchronicity remains exceptionally hard to ignore.
If you enjoyed this, check out my book!
References: