And you shall eat it as a barley cake: The pronoun it refers to the small loaf of bread that Ezekiel is to bake. God tells him to prepare and eat it as a barley cake. Bread made of barley was the staple diet of poor people, but the important thing here is the way the barley cake was cooked, not that it had barley as an ingredient. It was bread that was cooked on the coals of a fire (like Australian Aborigines cook damper) or on hot stones in a fire (compare 1 Kgs 19.6). Good News Translation expresses the meaning of this clause accurately by saying “You are to build a fire … bake bread on the fire, and eat it.” Translators may also say “Bake your bread on hot coals and eat it.” It is not necessary to retain the expression barley cake, but if a culture has a certain type of bread that is associated only with poor people, it could be used in place of barley cake.

Baking it in their sight on human dung: Although dried animal manure mixed with straw was, and still is, used in many countries as fuel, God tells Ezekiel to use human dung, that is, human manure, as the fuel for the fire to bake his bread. Ezekiel’s horror at this (recorded in verse 14) is easy to understand in view of the way the bread was cooked on the manure because traces of human manure would stick to the bread in the ashes from the fire and make him ritually unclean. So translations must retain the force of the original text here, even though appropriate polite words will need to be chosen to avoid offending people. Translators may render baking it … on human dung as “Use human excrement for the fuel for the fire to bake your loaf.” Ezekiel was to do all this in their sight, that is, where everyone could see him. It was necessary that the people saw that the bread was baked on human manure, so that they knew it was ritually unclean.

Quoted with permission from Gross, Carl & Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on Ezekiel. (UBS Helps for Translators). Miami: UBS, 2016. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .