Ezekiel 5:1 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Take thee a sharp knife, take thee a barber's razor The latter expression explains the former; and cause it to pass upon thy head, &c. Hair being then accounted an ornament, and baldness a token of sorrow, therefore shaving denoted calamity or desolation. “Among the Arabs,” says Harmer, chap. 6. observ. 23, “there cannot be a greater stamp of infamy than to cut off any one's beard: and many among them would prefer death to this kind of punishment. And as they would think it a grievous calamity to lose it, so they carry things so far as to beg for the sake of it, ‘By your beard, by the life of your beard, do.' In like manner some of the benedictions are, ‘God preserve your blessed beard, God pour his blessings on your beard.' And when they would express their value for a thing, they say, ‘It is worth more than his beard.' I never had so clear an apprehension, I must confess, as after I had read these accounts, of the intended energy of that thought of Ezekiel, where the inhabitants are compared to the hair of the prophet's head and beard. The passage seems to signify, that though the inhabitants of Jerusalem had been dear to God, as the hair of an eastern beard to its owner, yet that they should be taken away and consumed, one part by pestilence and famine, another part by the sword, and a third by the calamities of an exile.” See note on 2 Samuel 10:4. And then take the balances, &c. A symbol of God's justice, as the razor was of his wrath; to weigh and divide the hair What the prophet is here commanded to do was by way of another emblematical representation of what was to happen to the inhabitants of Judea and Jerusalem. The hair signified the Jewish people; shaving the hair with a razor, the divine vengeance; the weighing of the hair in the balances, the divine equity, which metes out to every one what is just and right; the dividing of the hair, the punishments allotted to different persons of them.