Your turbans shall be on your heads and your shoes on your feet; you shall not mourn or weep, but you shall rot away in your iniquities and groan to one another.
Ezekiel's wife has died, and God has forbidden him the ordinary signs of grief — and now God tells the exiles to do the same when Jerusalem falls. Verse 23 turns a private sorrow into a national one. Turbans stay on, shoes stay on, and no one weeps — there is only a wasting away under guilt and a groaning to one another.
The loss this silence answers to
The command not to mourn has a reason. Just before it, God announced what He would do to His sanctuary and to the sons and daughters the exiles had left behind.
William KellyGod would teach them about their unmatched trouble, and it would leave no room for tears or ordinary mourning. So sweeping a destruction had begun that nothing would remain for them but pining away in their iniquities and groaning to one another. The Lord Himself was profaning the sanctuary by judgment, just as they had profaned it by their transgressions and abominations.
Grief allowed, its expression forbidden
So what did God take from the prophet, and what did He leave him?
Numerical Bible NotesIt is not that grief is forbidden, but the expression of it. In this grief that has no outward expression he is to be a sign to the people: "Sigh in silence, make no mourning for the dead, bind your turban on you, and put your sandals on your feet…"
A sorrow no funeral could measure
Why drop the funeral customs at all? Because the coming loss is too big for them.
Numerical Bible NotesIn such cases people normally wailed aloud, and they even hired mourners. So this conduct calls for explanation… The mourning for these sons and daughters is to cease, in view of the mourning that can have no adequate expression.
"Pine away in your iniquities" — the wound they will not name
The phrase is not new. God had used it long before, in Leviticus 26:39, warning a disobedient people: "Those of you who are left shall rot away in your enemies' lands because of their iniquity." Ezekiel keeps reaching back to the wording of the first five books of the Bible:
The Bible TreasuryThe whole book of Ezekiel is soaked in the language of the Pentateuch… So the phrase "pine away in their iniquity" — Ezekiel 4:17, Ezekiel 24:23, Ezekiel 33:10 — occurs only here and in Leviticus 26:39.
The wasting is real, but it is not repentance:
Numerical Bible NotesIt is their sin which has caused their calamity. It is their sin in which they still pine away — feeling, no doubt, certain effects of it, but not feeling the iniquity itself.
Commentators read this silence in more than one way. Kelly calls it "a picture of despair, when the sorrow lies too deep for tears." Others look past the people to God Himself.
The grief behind the sign
Look at who takes the blow:
Numerical Bible NotesNotice that the stroke falls not on the people, but on the prophet himself… He stands before the people fully as the representative of God Himself, speaking and acting in His name… So it is plainly hinted that the prophet's sorrow is the sorrow of God Himself. The affliction is on His part, not on man's side.
What the silence is meant to produce
The chapter does not stop at the ruin. A verse later God states the purpose of the whole sign:
William Kelly"Thus shall Ezekiel be to you a sign; according to all that he has done you shall do. When this comes, then you will know that I am the Lord God"… "On that day your mouth will be opened… and you shall speak and be no longer mute. So you will be a sign to them, and they will know that I am the Lord."
One writer draws out what all this shows about God's own heart:
Numerical Bible NotesGod will not let it all end in judgment only. If we have heart for it, He brings us to His side in this matter and shows us that His heart remains unchanged… Nothing can divorce His heart from those He loves. He may have to act in a way that seems to contradict this, yet faith can still see through the disguise and grasp the unchanging love running through it all.
Summary
- Cause — their own sin brought the ruin; the Lord Himself profaned the sanctuary in judgment, as they had profaned it by their sins.
- Sign — Ezekiel's tearless grief acted out the message; hired mourners could never match a loss this size, so the usual rites had to go.
- Silence — God never forbade grief, only its outward show; the sorrow had no adequate expression.
- Sin — to "pine away in your iniquities" is to feel the effects of sin without ever feeling the sin; the wasting is real, the repentance is not.
- Love — the sign ends in "you will know that I am the Lord," and nothing can divorce God's heart from those He loves.