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Ezekiel, part 14, Eating the Defiled Word

Ezekiel 4:7 says,

⁷ Then you shall set your face toward the siege of Jerusalem with your arm bared and prophesy against it. ⁸ Now behold, I will put ropes on you so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have completed the days of your siege.

Ezekiel must face the besieged city with his arm uncovered and prophesy against it. His fixed face expresses determination. Earlier, God had strengthened Ezekiel’s forehead against the people’s resistance (Ezekiel 3:8, 9). Now that resolve appears in his unyielding posture toward Jerusalem.

The uncovered arm suggests readiness for action. Isaiah 52:10 speaks of God baring His holy arm to bring salvation; here, the exposed arm accompanies a prophecy of judgment. The same divine power that delivers can also execute a sentence. Ezekiel is therefore doing more than illustrating military events. His posture declares that God has taken an active judicial position against the city.

Verse 8 recalls Ezekiel 3:25, where he told the prophet ahead of time that he was to be bound by ropes. Here the restraint emphasizes the fixed duration of the sign. Ezekiel cannot end it at his own discretion. He must continue until the judgment is complete.

It also portrays the confinement of the besieged population, especially during the siege of Jerusalem. Their freedom of movement would disappear, and they could not simply escape the consequences of the judgment. The passage does not explain every practical detail of how Ezekiel performed these actions. We need not assume that he remained motionless twenty-four hours a day; the following verses also require him to prepare and eat food. The emphasis rests on his obedience to the prescribed sign and its duration.

The governing principle is that covenant privilege carries covenant accountability. Jerusalem’s religious importance could not cancel its accumulated iniquity. Yet the numbered days also show that judgment has a measured extent. God determines its boundaries as surely as He determines its beginning.

Food Rationing

Ezekiel 4:9–13 portrays the famine and defilement that would accompany Jerusalem’s siege and the people’s exile. The measured food, rationed water, and offensive cooking fuel turn Ezekiel’s daily meals into a prophetic warning. More than that, by requiring the prophet to participate in their condition, God gives Ezekiel the role of an intercessor.

Ezekiel 4:9, 10 says,

⁹ But as for you, take wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet and spelt, put them in one vessel and make them into bread for yourself; you shall eat it according to the number of the days that you lie on your side, three hundred and ninety days. ¹⁰ Your food which you shall eat shall be twenty shekels a day by weight; you shall eat it from time to time.

God tells Ezekiel to combine wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt in one vessel and make bread from them. He must eat this during the 390 days that he lies on his side, representing the iniquity of the house of Israel.

The mixture fits the conditions of a siege. Rather than having an abundant supply of wheat, people would gather whatever grains and legumes remained and combine them to sustain life. The emphasis is on scarcity and survival.

Although this recipe is sometimes promoted today as an ideal health food, its purpose here is to portray judgment. The ingredients themselves are not necessarily unhealthy; the distress lies in the circumstances, the severely limited portions, and the conditions of preparation.

Ezekiel’s daily allowance is “twenty shekels a day.” Depending on the weight assigned to a shekel, this amounts to approximately eight ounces, or 225–230 grams, of food daily. It is a meager ration for an adult.

The weighing of food recalls the law of tribulation in Leviticus 26:26,

²⁶ When I break your staff of bread, ten women will bake your bread in one oven, and they will bring back your bread in rationed amounts, so that you will eat and not be satisfied.

Ezekiel is therefore acting out a judgment for persistent sin that had already been announced in the law. Jerusalem’s coming famine would be the consequence of covenant disobedience, rather than an event without moral or prophetic meaning. The instruction to eat “from time to time” indicates appointed intervals. His eating is governed by God’s prescribed ration rather than by appetite.

Ezekiel 4:11 says,

¹¹ The water you drink shall be the sixth part of a hin by measure; you shall drink it from time to time.

This is approximately a little over a pint, or about six-tenths of a liter. Bread and water—the basic necessities of life—are both controlled. The sign portrays the loss of ordinary security. People can no longer assume that enough food and drink will be available.

Later in the chapter, God interprets this directly: Jerusalem’s inhabitants will eat their bread by weight with anxiety and drink their water by measure with horror (Ezekiel 4:16, 17). The suffering includes both physical deprivation and continual fear over the next meal.

In any prolonged military siege of a city, shortages of food and water were important factors. This included the siege of Jerusalem as well, for we read in 2 Kings 25:2, 3,

² So the city was under siege until the eleventh year of King Zedekiah. ³ On the ninth day of the fourth month the famine was so severe in the city that there was no food for the people of the land.

Yet Ezekiel showed that physical food shortages would not be the only problem. Amos 8:11, 12 tells us the Israelites in captivity would experience spiritual food shortages,

¹¹ “behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord God, “when I will send a famine on the land, not a famine for bread or a thirst for water, but rather for hearing the words of the Lord. ¹² People will stagger from sea to sea and from north even to the east; they will go to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, but they will not find it.”

Therefore, when the law of tribulation warns of food shortages as part of divine judgment for breaking the covenant (vow), the prophets apply the law to supplies of spiritual food as well.

Defiled Bread

Ezekiel 4:12, 13 says,

¹² You shall eat it as a barley cake, having baked it in their sight over human dung. ¹³ Then the Lord said, “Thus will the sons of Israel eat their bread unclean among the nations where I will banish them.”

Ezekiel must prepare the bread like a barley cake, using human excrement as fuel, and do so publicly. The instruction concerns the fuel used to bake the bread, rather than adding excrement to its ingredients. Nevertheless, the method renders the meal unclean according to normal interpretations of the law at the time.

Deuteronomy 23:12–14 required human excrement to be buried outside Israel’s camp because God walked among His people. Ezekiel’s sign presents a disturbing reversal: what should have been removed from the holy community now becomes associated with food preparation. Verse 13 interprets the prophetic meaning of this requirement: “Thus will the sons of Israel eat their bread unclean among the nations where I will banish them.”

The sign reaches beyond Jerusalem’s siege to Israel’s life in exile. The people would lose the ordered conditions in which they had been called to live as a holy nation. Among the nations, their food and circumstances would expose them to defilement. Hosea 9:3, 4 associates Israel’s exile with unclean food and the loss of acceptable offerings.

³ They will not remain in the Lord’s land, but Ephraim will return to Egypt, and in Assyria they will eat unclean food. ⁴ They will not pour out drink offerings of wine to the Lord, their sacrifices will not please Him. Their bread will be like mourners’ bread; all who eat of it will be defiled, for their bread will be for themselves alone; it will not enter the house of the Lord.

Israel had defiled its land and sanctuary; now it would experience defilement in the lands of its exile in Assyria and in other nations of their long exile. The outward circumstances would reveal the spiritually unclean condition that the people had refused to acknowledge.

The Prophetic Meaning

In Deuteronomy 8:3 we read that God fed Israel manna in the wilderness to teach them that “man does not live by bread alone,” but by everything proceeding from the Lord’s mouth. Physical bread illustrates the deeper necessity of receiving what God speaks. When the Israelites crossed the Jordan into Canaan, the manna soon ceased (Joshua 5:12), and at this point, the spiritual significance of manna carried over to their natural food. In other words, the people were required to continue hearing and obeying the word of the Lord just as they continued to eat and drink.

When Ezekiel was told to “eat this scroll” (Ezekiel 3:1), it was something that all the people were supposed to do as covenant people. Yet most of them had failed to do so, and when they did “eat” the word of God, it was defiled by the traditions of men—man’s preparation of the food. Hence, even though they possessed copies of the law and even taught from it in the temple, they misunderstood the spirit of the law and thereby lost much of its benefit.

This was the same condition prevalent in the first century, as Jesus pointed out in Matthew 15:7-11. Paul, too, addressing religious Jews, mentions this problem in Romans 2:23,

²³ You who boast in the Law, through your breaking the Law, do you dishonor God?

The law was part of the word of God; men’s traditions cook it with dung and render it unclean. This applies equally to both Israel and Judah, as well as the church itself. The problem is prevalent wherever men fail to distinguish between the word and their understanding of the word. The problem does not lie in the word itself, but in those who teach it apart from the revelation of the Holy Spirit.