Barber

The barber appears only once in the Old Testament, in Ezekiel 5:1, where God commands the prophet: take thee a sharp knife, take thee a barber's razor, and cause it to pass upon thine head and upon thy beard. This enacted sign — dividing the shaved hair into three portions representing the three fates of Jerusalem's inhabitants during the siege — assumes the barber's razor as a familiar instrument. Barbers in the ancient Near East were artisans who cut both hair and beards using iron or bronze razors.

The Nazirite vow prohibited the use of a razor on the head during the period of separation (Numbers 6:5), and Samson's strength was bound up with his Nazirite hair — Delilah's having a man shave off his seven locks (Judges 16:19) represented the profaning of his consecration. Isaiah 7:20 employs the metaphor of the Lord shaving with a hired razor from beyond the Euphrates — the king of Assyria — to describe the complete stripping of the land. The razor and the barber thus serve both practical and potent symbolic functions in the prophetic text.