Daily Reading - 8/24/26

Above: Ezekiel 4:9 bread marketing image. Note that the bag itself reads, “AS DESCRIBED IN THE HOLY SCRIPTURE VERSE” and then it provides the verse.

• Ezekiel 4-7

• Psalm 52

• Proverbs 24

And you, son of man, take a brick, put it out in front of you, and engrave on it a city: Jerusalem. Put siege works against it, build a siege wall around it, build a mount against it, and put battering rams around it.

Ezekiel 4:1-2

In today’s reading we have one of the most colorful scenes from the book of Ezekiel. In the story, Ezekiel prophesies the destruction of Jerusalem by making a miniature model of the city under siege. He carved a brick to represent Jerusalem (4:2) and then built various model siege weapons around it (4:2). The most dramatic part of the prophecy, though, was Ezekiel’s personal role. God commanded Ezekiel to lay down on his side, tied up, for 430 days. Each day represented a year of the Israelites’ sins, seemingly since the death of king David. While Ezekiel was tied up, representing the Judeans who would soon be under siege, he was commanded to eat unclean food. God told him to make a bread out of various scraps of grains, to ration it by days, and to cook it over human dung (4:9-17). This was to represent the famine and suffering that would accompany the siege.

Next God told Ezekiel to shave his hair and beard. He was then commanded to burn a third of the hair in the middle of the city, to put another third of the hair outside the city and attack it with a sword, and then to scatter the remaining third to the wind. He was also told to put a few hairs in his pocket, and then to burn even a few of those (5:1-4). This was to represent the widespread death and destruction that was coming. After these two pieces of prophetic performance art, Ezekiel gave the speeches now contained in chapters 6-7.

If you understand the historical background, the meaning of these texts are clear. As we saw before, Ezekiel was a young man from a priestly family who was taken as an exile to Babylon in 597 BC. This was the first Babylonian reprisal against Judah, rather than the second (586). In that first reprisal, the Babylonians deposed the Judean king and they took many nobles into exile—but they left the capital and the temple intact. When the Babylonians returned in 586, that is when they destroyed Jerusalem, burned the temple, and ended the kingdom of Judah.

Ezekiel’s prophetic diorama was thus a final warning by God. If the Judeans did not repent of their sins, then Babylon would return to finish the job. So God told Ezekiel to act out what would happen if the Judeans ignored God again. His dramatization was a warning of the horrors to come, when only a small handful of them would be spared an excruciating death (5:3).

This text also provides a great example of how not to read the Bible. We Christians say—correctly—that the Bible is “God’s word.” But we sometimes do not think clearly about what that claim means. This is compounded by the fact that many Christians do not know the Bible very well, and so do not have the broad background knowledge sometimes necessary to understand the text accurately. This combination of veneration without study creates some strange results.

Consider, for example, Ezekiel 4:9 bread. It is a product of the Food for Life company, which began its life as a cult in southern California. The bread, as the name suggests, is based on a verse in Ezekiel. According to the translation on the company’s website, that verse reads, “Take also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils and millet, and spelt and put them in one vessel.” The advertising copy on the website claims that this mixture of grains and legumes provides a natural, perfectly balanced source of complete protein.

The marketing for Ezekiel 4:9 bread depends on you not thinking very deeply or clearly about the verse in Ezekiel. The company assumes that you will think, “A recipe from the Bible, huh? Must be good!” But as we have seen, the truth is quite the opposite. Ezekiel was told to eat this bread as a punishment, to symbolize wartime famine conditions. It was baked over dung.

This is a good reminder that you should be careful about people who claim the authority of the Bible. Sometimes, like here, a company will try to exploit your religious faith in the Bible to get you to buy a product. We must remember that not everyone claiming to speak for God is in fact a faithful spokesperson.