“Put a yoke on your neck”
Make for yourself a yoke out of leather straps and put it on your neck. (Jeremiah 27:2 BSB)
What it sounds like today
An odd instruction to wear a piece of farm equipment.
The cultural key
To grasp this you have to picture the yoke: the heavy wooden bar and straps fastened over an ox's neck to force it to pull the plow, the universal image of servitude and hard labor. Jeremiah is told to strap one onto his own neck and walk among the envoys of the surrounding kings as a living message. The meaning is political and blunt: God has handed the nations over to Nebuchadnezzar, so any people that 'places its neck under his yoke' and serves Babylon will be left to live in its land, while any that refuses 'will be punished by sword and famine and plague.' To 'put your neck under the yoke' was the standard idiom for accepting a conqueror's rule. So the prophet's strange costume is a piece of political theater: submit to Babylon and survive, or resist and be crushed. The drama continues when the false prophet Hananiah snaps the yoke off Jeremiah's neck to contradict him (28:10).
Recovered meaning
Jeremiah wearing an ox-yoke is a sign-act: the yoke pictures submission and servitude, and the message is that the nations must bend their necks to Babylon's rule and live, or resist and be destroyed. 'Putting the neck under the yoke' was the idiom for accepting a conqueror.