Ezekiel 4:9 - Exposition

Take thou also unto thee, etc. The act implies, as I have said, that there were exceptions to the generally immovable attitude. The symbolism seems to have a twofold meaning. We can scarcely exclude a reference to the famine which accompanied the siege. On the other hand, one special feature of it is distinctly referred, not to the siege, but to the exile ( Ezekiel 4:13 ). Starting with the former, the prophet is told to make bread, not of wheat , the common food of the wealthier class ( Deuteronomy 32:14 ; Psalms 81:16 ; Psalms 147:14 ; Jeremiah 12:13 ; Jeremiah 41:8 ), nor of barley , the chief food of the poor ( Ezekiel 13:19 ; Hosea 3:2 ; John 6:9 ), but of these mixed with beans ( 2 Samuel 17:28 ), lentils ( 2 Samuel 17:28 ; Genesis 25:34 )—then, as now, largely used in Egypt and other Eastern countries— millet (the Hebrew word is not found elsewhere), and fitches , i.e. vetches (here also the Hebrew word is found only in this passage, that so translated in Isaiah 28:25-27 standing, it is said, for the seed of the black cummin). The outcome of this mixture would be a coarse, unpalatable bread, not unlike that to which the population of Paris was reduced in the siege of 1870-71. This was to be the prophet's food, as it was to be that of the people of Jerusalem during the 390 days by which that siege was symbolically, though not numerically, represented. It is not improbable, looking to the prohibition against mixtures of any kind in Deuteronomy 22:9 , that it would be regarded as in itself unclean.