Ezekiel's Prophecy on Two Destructions of Jerusalem
Ezekiel prophesized about two destructions of the city of Jerusalem. The detailed prophecy was recorded in Ezekiel 4:1-6:
Ezekiel's prophecy is about the siege and destruction of Jerusalem as seen from Ezekiel 4:1-3. The verses in Ezekiel 4:4-5 tell us that the prophet must lie on his left side for 390 days to bear the iniquity of the house of Israel for 390 years (one day for one year). Similarly, the prophet had to lie on his right side for 40 days to bear the iniquity of the house of Judah for 40 years.
A possible interpretation of this prophecy is that 390 and 40 years refer to two independent periods and that at the end of each period, Jerusalem would be besieged and destroyed. Jerusalem would be destroyed twice due to the iniquity of the house of Israel and the iniquity of the house of Judah.
Ezekiel did not provide any information about the starting point of the 390-year period. No one would be able to figure out what event should be related to the starting point of the 390-year prophetic period before finding out the starting point for the second 40-year prophetic period. It is well known that Jerusalem was destroyed in the 9th day of the fifth lunar month of 70 AD, forty years after the crucifixion of Yeshua in 30 AD (see the proof of the date of Yeshua's crucifixion in Chapter 31). Yeshua referred to his own body as the temple and prophesized that his body would be destroyed and raised up in three days. This implies that the resurrected body of Yeshua is the temple of God, which was built after his resurrection, in agreement with Revelation 21:22, "But I saw no temple in it, for Yehowah God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple."
For the 40-year prophetic period, the starting point was from the building of a spiritual temple, which was the resurrected body of Messiah Yeshua. By analogy, the starting point of the 390-year prophetic period should have been the time when the physical temple began to be built. Indeed, we have proved in Chapter 11 that there were 390 years plus about 100 days from the beginning of the construction of Solomon's temple to the first destruction of Jerusalem in the 10th day of the fifth lunar month of 587 BC.
Yeshua also prophesized the destruction of Jerusalem in Matthew 23:37-39; 24:1-2. Yeshua's prophecy about his own crucifixion and resurrection was recorded in Matthew 12:38-41:
Yeshua foretold that he would resurrect after being buried three days and three nights just as the prophet Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and there nights. He also told the scribes and Pharisees that he is greater than Jonah. Jonah prophesized that Nineveh would be destroyed within 40 days. The people of Nineveh believed Jonah's warning and turned away from their evil ways, so God relented from the disaster that He would have brought upon the city. Yeshua foretold that the men of Nineveh would rise up to judge this generation and condemn it because they repented at the preaching of Jonah while this generation did not repent in the 40-year grace period at the preaching of Yeshua who is even greater than Jonah. From this, Yeshua knew that God would not spare the holy city because of the evils that the leaders of His people committed. God gave Nineveh the grace period of only 40 days, but to His own people, He granted a grace- period of 40 years in hopes of their repentance.