Bread freshly baked with human dung (Ezekiel 4:12)

While we don't want to take shots at other Good Christians, "Ezekiel bread"? Really? While others have commented on this in the past, we still have a few questions.

First off, when you were putting the ingredients together, citing Ezekiel 4:9, why did you leave off the human dung? We know you read your Bible, so there is no way you missed this. It says it right there in vs 12:

You shall eat it as a barley-cake, baking it in their sight on human dung.

(For the record, scholars argue over whether this means that the bread was baked on human dung fuel instead of animal dung, or if the human dung was kneaded into the dough. We're pretty sure it was the former)

Also, why did you leave this off of your FAQ section:

Q: Do we need to bake the bread over bricks of our own shit like the Bible says to get the full, divine benefits?

A: No. An conventional oven at 300 degrees will suffice.

In your defense vs 14-15 does record that God (being a good God) allows Ezekiel to talk Him out of the whole "eat food with heated particles of your own fecal matter" thing, but still it was a part of the original recipe.

But larger than the whole "you left out the shit" issue, we're more troubled by the bigger oversight: the context, the point, the purpose of this so-called "Ezekiel bread".


Ezekiel was asked to perform a spiritually serious and physically strenuous demonstration, one in a series of other symbolic acts that showed that the nation was going into Exile as a result of their sins.

Ezekiel was representing, in the presence of the whole community, that they would be eating unclean things in the land of their oppressors: that the starvation and thirst that accompanies siege warfare, and the death-march of exile, was soon to be upon them.

Ezekiel was asked to only eat 8 oz of "bread" and 1 pint of water a day for almost two years, not as health food or a nutritional supplement, but as a sign that things are about to get really shitty, really fast.

It was a symbol of punishment and despair: that in this forced wilderness journey, YHWH would not be providing any manna from heaven. It was not an ancient method for looking good in an appropriately modest swimsuit, or divinely appointed roughage for a angelically clean colon.

 

Perhaps the marketers of E-Bread, and the various Christian blogs, recipe sites and cookbooks should consider this.

Perhaps it is important to remember that "man does not live by bread alone."

Or perhaps we're just cranky and need more wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and fitches in our diet.

But what do we know: we made this game and you probably think we're going to Hell.

 

P.S. For some words on how "clean" and "unclean" can be interpreted in the Hebrew Bible, you should check out our Wet Dreams (okay that sounded a lot worse than it is).