Discovery BoxEzekiel 4:9-15 
Context4:9 “As for you, take wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt, 1 put them in a single container, and make food 2 from them for yourself. For the same number of days that you lie on your side – 390 days 3 – you will eat it. 4:10 The food you eat will be eight ounces 4 a day by weight; you must eat it at fixed 5 times. 4:11 And you must drink water by measure, a pint and a half; 6 you must drink it at fixed times. 4:12 And you must eat the food like you would a barley cake. You must bake it in front of them over a fire made with dried human excrement.” 7 4:13 And the Lord said, “This is how the people of Israel will eat their unclean food among the nations 8 where I will banish them.”
4:14 And I said, “Ah, sovereign Lord, I have never been ceremonially defiled before. I have never eaten a carcass or an animal torn by wild beasts; from my youth up, unclean meat 9 has never entered my mouth.”
4:15 So he said to me, “All right then, I will substitute cow’s manure instead of human excrement. You will cook your food over it.”
1 sn Wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt. All these foods were common in Mesopotamia where Ezekiel was exiled.
2 tn Heb “bread.”
3 tc The LXX reads “190 days.”
4 sn Eight ounces (Heb “twenty shekels”). The standards for weighing money varied considerably in the ancient Near East, but the generally accepted weight for the shekel is 11.5 grams (0.4 ounce). This makes the weight of grain about 230 grams here (8 ounces).
5 tn Heb “from time to time.”
6 sn A pint and a half [Heb “one-sixth of a hin”]. One-sixth of a hin was a quantity of liquid equal to about 1.3 pints or 0.6 liters.
7 sn Human waste was to remain outside the camp of the Israelites according to Deut 23:15.
8 sn Unclean food among the nations. Lands outside of Israel were considered unclean (Josh 22:19; Amos 7:17).
9 tn The Hebrew term refers to sacrificial meat not eaten by the appropriate time (Lev 7:18; 19:7).
