a siege wall: the structure an attacking army builds around a city to seal it off, and not the earth ramp heaped up against the city wall
All six appearances of this word describe one stretch of history: a Babylonian army closing in on a city, first Jerusalem in the last months before its fall, then Tyre in a later warning. Every time, the word names something the attacking army builds or sets in place against a city it means to take. And four of those six times it stands right beside the ramp of earth that gets poured up against the city wall (סֹלְלָה), which settles the most important point about it: whatever this structure was, it was not the ramp.
What it actually was is still argued. Most modern lexicons and Bible versions read an encircling wall, because the accounts of Jerusalem say the army built it "all around" the city, and the aim was plainly to seal the place off: famine set in before the walls were breached about eighteen months later. An older reading, still a serious one, begins from where the word most likely comes from, a verb meaning "to look out," and takes it as a tower or raised platform from which attackers watched the city and shot down into it. The warning to Tyre says the structure was "set" against the city rather than "built," which fits a tower a little better than a heaped-up wall.
Hebrew keeps the pieces of a siege carefully apart, and the model siege Ezekiel stages on a clay brick names them one at a time:
- the ramp of earth poured up against the city wall
- the battering rams brought up to break through (כַּר)
- the camps of troops set all around the city
- the blockade itself as a whole operation (מָצוֹר)
- and this structure, built against the city alongside the rest
So a version that folds the whole list into one vague "siege works" loses information the Hebrew is keeping. What every reading agrees on is that the word names a piece of real military engineering, the sort of thing Mesopotamian armies had perfected long before Judah met it firsthand.
Disputed
What physical structure the word names. It is agreed to be an offensive work the besieger builds, distinct from the earthen ramp and from the battering rams, but the lexica, the ancient versions, and the medieval commentators divide over whether it is an encircling wall, an observation and shooting tower, or a tower-like engine or fort.
- majorityAn encircling siege wall of circumvallation, thrown up around the city to seal it off. This reading is supported by the adverb sabib ("all around") in 2 Kings 25:1 and Jeremiah 52:4 and by the blockade and famine that follow, and it is where the modern lexica and translation committees have converged.; Brown, Driver, and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. דָּיֵק ("bulwark, siege-wall"); J. D. Michaelis, whose Circumvallationslinie proposal is reported and once followed in W. Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. דָּיֵק; Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1-20 (Anchor Bible 22; Doubleday, 1983), at Ezekiel 4:2
- minorityA watchtower or observation and shooting platform erected by the besiegers. The case rests on the etymology, the root דוק with Aramaic and Syriac cognates meaning "to look out" (Syriac for a watchtower), and is mildly supported by Ezekiel 26:8, where the structure is set in place rather than built.; W. Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. דָּיֵק ("a watch-tower, place to look out, as erected by besiegers")
- minorityA tower-like siege engine or fort. This is the reading behind the older concordance gloss "a battering-tower" and the King James rendering "fort" in all six verses, and it matches the medieval Jewish commentators and the Targum, which use tower, engine, and fortress vocabulary.; David Kimchi (Radak), Commentary on Ezekiel (a wooden tower); Rashi, Commentary on Ezekiel (a stone-throwing engine)