Ezekiel 4:16-17

16, 17. These verses explain Ezekiel 4:10-11.

Staff of bread Or, staff ( of life), which is bread (Leviticus 26:26; Isaiah 3:1). Expositors differ as to whether Ezekiel actually was compelled to eat this bread during the six months of the pictorial siege or not. There is no sufficient reason to doubt it. Certainly, if the painting of the tile and the pictured siege and the prophet’s lying upon his side were real acts, then this was also. Dr. Davidson’s objection that he is represented as making and eating the bread, while at the same time he is said to be lying motionless upon his side is by no means conclusive. Even if he were in a cataleptic condition, as some think, yet he might still have obeyed all these commands, the bread, of course, being made by his wife. But if, as we understand it, these commands to remain in a certain posture, motionless, applied only to the hours during which his picture-sermon was being preached, and not to his private life, then he might with his own hands have prepared the food. It could have been eaten lying upon his side, as one hand was not “bound” (Ezekiel 4:7).

Consume away for their iniquity “Another echo from the book which had so largely entered into the prophet’s education” (Leviticus 26:39). “Pine” in Hebrew is same as “consume.” “To the wretchedness of physical privation there was added the consciousness of the sufferers that it was caused by their own evil deeds.”