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So there’s the prophet Ezekiel who just has to be one of the craziest characters in all of the Bible. Granted, all Bible prophets tend to be borderline insane, I guess it comes with the territory. But Ezekiel and his story sure are something special.
I remember enjoying this Bible book as a kid, and I only liked the crazy ones. In other words: If you’d want to make a movie of the book of Ezekiel, you’d have to cast Nicolas Cage.
So there’s this dude Ezekiel, and God instructs him to warn the Kingdom of Israel about an impending siege. Once again God and the Kingdom have had a falling-out, and God has decided to deliver a message. Now when the Mafia delivers a message it’s usually a horse’s head or something, but when God delivers a message because you’ve pissed him off, he sends your enemies to attack, pillage and destroy you.
So Ezekiel is chosen as messenger. God says:
Go now to the people of Israel and speak my words to them. By the way, your tongue will stick to the roof of your mouth and you’ll be mute.
Guess God was trying to spice things up a bit. So instead of warning Israel by word of mouth (because that’s too easy, right?), he was supposed to play a game of Activity. Seriously. You can’t make this up. These are literally God’s instructions, and I quote:
Take a clay tablet; place it in front of you, and draw on it a city, Jerusalem. 2 Lay siege to it: build up siege works, raise a ramp against it, pitch camps and set up battering rams all around it. Then take an iron pan and set it up as an iron wall between you and the city. Set your face toward it and put it under siege. So you must lay siege to it as a sign for the house of Israel. Then lie down on your left side, while I place the guilt of the house of Israel upon you. As many days as you lie like this, you shall bear their guilt. I allot you three hundred and ninety days[b] during which you must bear the guilt of the house of Israel, the same number of years they sinned. When you have completed this, you shall lie down a second time, on your right side to bear the guilt of the house of Judah forty days; I allot you one day for each year. Turning your face toward the siege of Jerusalem, with bared arm[c] you shall prophesy against it. See, I bind you with ropes so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have completed the days of your siege.
Surely you can make things easier if you want folks to be saved. I mean, sure, that’s how you can have a warning delivered – if you’re fucking Jigsaw.
And what’s with the ropes? Seems God didn’t trust Ezekiel to pull through with the whole thing.
Anyway, instead of just telling the Kingdom of Israel they’d be destroyed, Ezekiel is supposed to pull off a weird art performance and hope folk will interpret it correctly.
Obviously Ezekiel will have to eat something. God has him covered. He orders the prophet to make himself some bread he’ll be eating during his ordeal. Here are the ingredients:
wheat
barley
beans
lentils
millet
spelt
God tells him to knead the dough in a pot and then bake the bread over fire fueled by human shit. I kid you not, here is the direct quote from the bible:
And the barley cake you eat you must bake on human excrement in the sight of all.
At this point this is just plain bullying from God.
This is also where Ezekiel has had enough and he tells God to fuck himself or words to that effect.
Very well, says God, I will let you use cow manure in place of human dung. You can bake your bread on that.
And again: This is a direct quote from the Bible. 50 bucks God was just making stuff up along the way.
In any case, Ezekiel got lucky: He didn’t have to eat where he shat, which is a good thing. But he still had to lie around for 390 days, playing a human riddle, because once again God and his people didn’t get along.
By the way: There’s a company that sells Ezekiel bread with said ingredients, but I am still waiting for reply whether that bread is baked over human excrements.
If you are now thinking, this surely can’t be the end of it, it must get still crazier, you guess right.
Stay tuned for the next installment of the Ezekiel chronicles.
Source: Ezekiel 4
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