Hosea 9:3

Hebrew Bible

1 O Israel, do not rejoice jubilantly like the nations, for you are unfaithful to your God. You love to receive a prostitute’s wages on all the floors where you thresh your grain. 2 Threshing floors and wine vats will not feed the people, and new wine only deceives them. 3 They will not remain in the Lord’s land. Ephraim will return to Egypt; they will eat ritually unclean food in Assyria. 4 They will not pour out drink offerings of wine to the Lord; they will not please him with their sacrifices. Their sacrifices will be like bread eaten while in mourning; all those who eat them will make themselves ritually unclean. For their bread will be only to satisfy their appetite; it will not come into the temple of the Lord. 5 So what will you do on the festival day, on the festival days of the Lord?

Ezekiel 4:13

Hebrew Bible

11 And you must drink water by measure, a pint and a half; you must drink it at fixed times. 12 And you must eat the food as you would a barley cake. You must bake it in front of them over a fire made with dried human excrement.” 13 And the Lord said, “This is how the people of Israel will eat their unclean food among the nations where I will banish them. 14 And I said, “Ah, Sovereign Lord, I have never been ceremonially defiled before. I have never eaten a carcass or an animal torn by wild beasts; from my youth up, unclean meat has never entered my mouth.” 15 So he said to me, “All right then, I will substitute cow’s manure instead of human excrement. You will cook your food over it.”

 Notes and References

"... the use of human excrement is irregular and defiling: compare Deuteronomy 23:15 on the desecration of the army camp by unsanitary conditions. 'In their sight': The people must see how it is baked on excrement to realize that it is unclean ... 'unclean': Lands outside the land of Israel were 'unclean' (compare Joshua 22:19; Amos 7:17), probably on account of the idolatrous practices that went on in them (compare Ezekiel 36:18). Exiles were therefore necessarily in a state of uncleanness, and the food they prepared and ate, unclean comparable to 'the bread of mourners' (Hosea 9:3; compare Deuteronomy 26:14) ..."

Greenberg, Moshe Ezekiel 1-20: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (p. 107) Doubleday, 1983

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