Ezekiel 4:2
And lay siege against it, and build a fort against it, and cast a mount against it; set the camp also against it, and set battering rams against it round about. And lay siege against it, and build a fort against it, and cast a mount against it; set the camp also against it, and set battering rams against it round about.
Ezekiel 4:2 is part of a symbolic visual portrayal of Jerusalem under siege, with a fort, a mount, a camp, and battering rams set round about to illustrate the coming judgments and calamities that awaited the Jews and Judah. God directed the portrayal on a tile and its enactment in detail as a visual lesson, making Israel's condition clearer and the message more forceful. The portrayal was a message sent to Judah's captives, showing that pictures and other visual forms can legitimately communicate God's message when used for his glory. Its miniature realism of laying siege, building a fort, casting a mount, setting the camp, and setting battering rams portrays a real coming siege.
God preaches in a most realistic way through terrible things seen in righteousness, as in the Jamaica earthquake disaster, and those who witness such a scene tell their message with new force, emphasis, positiveness and dispatch as those who know assuredly what they affirm. The chapter's other signs belong to the same symbolic portrayal in which sacred writers speak or act to represent the future experience of others: lying a number of days on the left side and then on the right side, and eating bread by weight and drinking water by measure, and eating defiled bread, typified the captivity and represented the food that the children of Israel would eat in their captivity among the Gentiles. The signs include lying on the left side for Israel 390 days and on the right side for Judah 40 days, with each day representing a year of captivity, covering Israel's captivity and the remainder of Judah's captivity through the restoration after seventy years.
In its context of Ezekiel 4:1-6, also cited as 4:1-7, the verse gives God's established rule and key for reckoning symbolic prophetic time, that each day stands for a corresponding year and symbolic days refer to the same number of years as the number of days named. By that rule the 2,300 days signify 2,300 years. By that rule the 1,260 prophetic days of papal persecution yield 1,260 literal years. Applied to the period of a time, times, and half a time, the 1,260 prophetic days become 1,260 years of papal persecution, ending in 1798. Applied to Daniel, 483 days extend to the appearing of Messiah as 483 years, reckoned from the commandment to restore Jerusalem in 457 B.C. to the anointing of Christ at His baptism in A.D. 27, which proves the rule works.