What Does Ezekiel 4:9 REALLY Say? (About Ezekiel 4:9 Bread)

Perhaps you've browsed the health food section of your local grocer and noticed a loaf of Ezekiel 4 .9 bread with the verse right there on the label.

Take also unto thee wheat and barley and beans and lentils and millet and spelt, and put them in one vessel, and make bread out of it.

What the label doesn't tell you is what the rest of that passage says. During the number of days that you lie on your side, three hundred ninety days, you shall eat it, and your food shall be by weight twenty shekels a day, and water you shall drink by measure one sixth of a hen, and you shall eat it as a barley cake, baking it in everyone's sight on human dung.

Yeah, hopefully that's not how Food for Life makes their Ezekiel bread. Jerusalem was about to be invaded by the

Babylonians, and God was giving Ezekiel signs of the siege. The ingredients Ezekiel was supposed to make his bread with were rations, because during a siege, there would not be enough ingredients to make a whole loaf of bread.

No one made bread with spelt unless they absolutely had to. Furthermore, the bread represented Israel's rebellion against the

Lord. The law of Moses said not to grow two kinds of seed in the same field, yet Ezekiel's bread contained several seeds, just as Israel had become like the pagans worshiping several gods.

It was also to be baked over human dung, but God let Ezekiel use cow dung. If that sounds gross, it's supposed to.

The unclean Israelites would eat unclean food among unclean foreigners. So if you like Ezekiel bread, fine, just don't think of it as a blend of God -given ingredients for good health.

Instead, remember that you are an unclean sinner before God in need of a righteous Savior when we understand the text.