15 The word of the Lord came to me: 16 “Son of man, behold, I am about to take the delight of your eyes away from you at a stroke; yet you shall not mourn or weep, nor shall your tears run down. 17 Sigh, but not aloud; make no mourning for the dead. Bind on your turban, and put your shoes on your feet; do not cover your lips, nor eat the bread of men.” 18 So I spoke to the people in the morning, and at evening my wife died. And on the next morning I did as I was commanded.
19 And the people said to me, “Will you not tell us what these things mean for us, that you are acting thus?” 20 Then I said to them, “The word of the Lord came to me: 21 ‘Say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will profane my sanctuary, the pride of your power, the delight of your eyes, and the yearning of your soul, and your sons and your daughters whom you left behind shall fall by the sword. 22 And you shall do as I have done; you shall not cover your lips, nor eat the bread of men. 23 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.24 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.’
25 “As for you, son of man, surely on the day when I take from them their stronghold, their joy and glory, the delight of their eyes and their soul's desire, and also their sons and daughters, 26 on that day a fugitive will come to you to report to you the news. 27 On that day your mouth will be opened to the fugitive, 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.”
There is another problem, however, in this stark episode, and it lies in the forbidding of mourning to the prophet. There are two ways of taking this: some have thought that Ezekiel's lack of mourning was meant to jolt the captives in Babylon to an awareness of their lack of sorrow at what was going on in Jerusalem. That is a possible way of looking at it; but it is more likely to mean that this catastrophe was too great and too terrible for outward expressions of mourning; and stupefaction would be the word to describe the situation. This is true to human psychology; sometimes when sudden grief and shock and sorrow come, people are in a daze, they cannot take it in, they do not mourn or weep, no tears will come, for they are simply stupefied. It is in the inward places that the desolation is known. Ezekiel must have felt this supremely, and his pain was too terrible even for outward grief to be expressed. In the same way, God was saying, 'This disaster that you always thought was unthinkable, now that it has taken place, is too terrible for ordinary grief. Stupefaction will lay hold upon you, and you will pine away.'
The 'dumbness' mentioned in 27 can be interpreted in two ways. Some think it refers back to chapter 2, where God said He would make the prophet dumb. If this be so, we must assume that from that point to this all the communication that Ezekiel gave to the captives at Chebar was written down, and not spoken by word of mouth, and that his dumbness was a testimony. Others think that it refers to the period from this moment in 588 BC, through to 586, two years later, when Jerusalem finally fell, and that during these two years Ezekiel spoke no word at all, and then at the end of that time his lips were opened. At all events, it was when Jerusalem was destroyed, and all human hope taken away from the captives, that Ezekiel began to speak words of hope to them, proclaiming the promise of a new covenant, and new life (ch 33 onwards).