I’m reading a book on comparative religion, and at one point, discussing Ezekiel, the author says that he buttered his bread in a way that need not be described, to warn the people against eating contaminated food.
Don’t leave me hanging… What was Ezekiel’s parable here?
Chapter 4 verses 9 and 12-15:
[9]Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof, according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon thy side, three hundred and ninety days shalt thou eat thereof.
[12]And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight. [13] And the LORD said, Even thus shall the children of Israel eat their defiled bread among the Gentiles, whither I will drive them. [14] Then said I, Ah Lord GOD! behold, my soul hath not been polluted: for from my youth up even till now have I not eaten of that which dieth of itself, or is torn in pieces; neither came there abominable flesh into my mouth. [15] Then he said unto me, Lo, I have given thee cow’s dung for man’s dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith.
And, in case you wonder, he only had to lay on his side more like 3 days, and then 7 days on the other side. It was 1 day per year of exile. But he apparently had to eat the bread for longer.
Thank you kindly!
I’ve long thought that these verses were misinterpreted. It doesn’t say that Ezekiel smeared cow or human poop on his bread – it says that he was to “bake it with dung.” Dried dung can be used as fuel, and has been around the world for ages, especially where little else is available. Meals are frequently cooked over a cow dung fire in India to this day (it is supposed to provide a long-lasting low flame, like a low-tech “crockpot”).
So I think it’s not as gross as it sounds, although, depending upon how the bread and fire are made, the smoke can probably affect the flavor of the bread.
I also assume he used it as fuel. Though I also assume it affected the bread, if only because the whole point of the metaphor is that they are contaminated.
in [12], God tells one to cook bread with human excrement, yet in [15], God says to use cow manure. If God were so all knowing as people believe, God would have known back in [12] that cow manure was the way to go. Keep in mind that 50% of all cow manure is bull s***.
Not so - cows outnumber bulls by a factor of 20 or so these days and I see no reason why it should have much been different in Old Testament times.
So…Steerno?
So what was the idea of human dung? That seems like it would not burn, and more like it was for the shock value, or misunderstanding how the neighbours cooked. Or were they such strict vegetarians that as the one character in Road to Wellville put it “I eat nothing but whole grains, and my stools have the smell and consistency of a warm muffin.”
Yeah that is a misinterpretation. Ezekiel never put dung (human or animal) on the bread itself, he was using it as fire fuel.
I haven’t looked up any commentary on this, but I don’t think it would be kosher to cook food with dung. It can probably be burned for heat, but since spilling gut contents can render meat non-kosher, I would think that cooking over dung would do the same.
There’s a special prohibition against saying the name of the deity in the presence of human excrement, which is why you don’t put mezzuzot on your bathroom doorways. So you couldn’t say a blessing over food that had been cooked with human excrement, I’m presuming. I don’t know how exactly that would have played out in Ezekiel’s time-- I’m not sure if that prohibition is Talmudic, and did not exist for Ezekiel-- but a lot of things in the Talmud were practiced long before they were written down.
IIRC, that passage was during a time of famine, when people were doing anything they could to stay alive-- Even the “wholesome” ingredients in that bread (properly translated) refer to barely-edible weeds. So the people may well have been short of standard fuels as well as standard foods.
IIRC, that passage was during a time of famine, when people were doing anything they could to stay alive-- Even the “wholesome” ingredients in that bread (properly translated) refer to barely-edible weeds. So the people may well have been short of standard fuels as well as standard foods.
In Ezekiel 4:12 God tells Ezekiel to cook his bread using human excrement as fuel. (And in that modern translation, it is made clear that he’s only using dung as a fuel, not as an ingredient. Even so, ew!) And then in Ezekiel 4:15, God does say to use cow dung. But the text does make it clear, this isn’t just God getting absent-minded about the best kind of dung to use as cooking fuel; in Ezekiel 4:14 ol’ Zeke says:
Or in other words, “Ew! Please don’t make me do THAT!” (with a substantial admixture of theological revulsion, not just regular old disgust). And then God says “Oh, OK, then; if you’re going to be that way about it, just go ahead and use cow dung like a normal Ancient Near Eastern person”.
You could certainly raise various points about God’s foreknowledge and omniscience and how that relates to the idea of human prayer and so on, but that would all be pretty deep waters for General Questions, so we probably shouldn’t.
Cows outnumber bulls today because most male calves are slaughtered. The birth ratio is pretty close to 50-50. Were there dairy farmers 2500 years ago or were cattle raised primarily for food?
I totally do not understand any of that - partly it’s the archaic language, but also I suspect coming into this mid-story. WTF is going on there?
Way back when cattle were raised for both, of course, but there was good reason to keep extra cows around, just one or two bulls, maybe keep a few castrated males as oxen for labor, and slaughter the other young males before they got big and surly. So with living cattle the cows probably did outnumber the bulls (definitely) and the steers/oxen (if the culture practiced castration on the young males).
“Cattle were used more to pull loads than for meat. Goats and sheep provided most of the meat in the Jewish diet. The ancient Israelites used cows more like we use tractors today. The pulled plows and carts, and threshed grain. The full-grown animals were regarded as too costly to slaughter for food or sacrifice. One had to be very wealthy to do that. When it was time finally to slaughter the animal in old age, it would be penned, fed grain, and fattened up for slaughter.”
From : https://hcscchurch.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Domestic-Animals-.pdf
I’m not a biblical scholar, but based on my reading of how these old testament prophets usually work it goes something like this.
The Jews are doing something that god doesn’t like (because they are always doing something god doesn’t like.) So he’s gonna smite them hard. But to give them one last chance to repent, (which by the way he know they won’t because he’s all knowing and they never to repent) he’s going to send them the prophet Ezekiel. He then instructs Ezekiel to do some performance art, where he lies on his side for 430 days, next to a model of Jerusalem drinks only water, and eats only cakes made of grasses, baked with human dung. This is to symbolize the famine that is coming for Israel.
Now purity is a big thing with the Israelites and maintaining your purity is how one shows their devotion to god. Eating food cooked with human dung is definitely not pure. God is telling Ezekiel to do this so as an example to Israel of how low and degraded they will fall. But Ezekiel being told by god to eat these cakes puts him in a bit of a bind. He’s been successfully pure his entire life to show his devotion to god, and now god is telling him to break his vows. Think of it like the head of AA telling a 25 year sobriety member to show the danger of alcohol to high schoolers by downing a 5th of scotch. So god relents and lets him not use the human dung so he can maintain his purity.