Following are a number of back-translations as well as a sample translation for translators of Ezekiel 4:12:
Kupsabiny: “You shall use dried excrements to burn/light a fire and bake bread and eat (it) while everybody is watching.” (Source: Kupsabiny Back Translation)
Hiligaynon: “You bake bread each day while the people are looking. Bake this like the baking of barley bread. Use as firewood the dried dung of a man. And then eat the bread.” (Source: Hiligaynon Back Translation)
English: “Eat that bread like you would eat a loaf of barley bread. But use your own dried dung for fuel to bake the bread while people are watching.” (Source: Translation for Translators)
Barley Hordeum distichum or Hordeum vulgare is a type of grass like wheat and rice. It has been cultivated in the Middle East for thousands of years and is now one of the most prominent seed crops grown in the world. Twenty species are known, of which eight are European. Barley needs less rain than wheat does, so in the Holy Land it was typically found in the drier areas above the coastal plain and near the desert. From 2 Kings 7:1 and Revelation 6:6 we know that barley was considered inferior to wheat and was often used to feed animals, as it is today. When the wheat supply ran out, people had to make their bread with barley. Barley was gathered before wheat, the harvest coming around March or April in the lower regions and in May in the mountains (see Exodus 9:31 et al.). In Egypt and in ancient Greece barley was used to make beer.
Barley plants look like wheat or rice. They are less than 1 meter (3 feet) tall, and have a single head on each stalk, with six rows of kernels, although the biblical kind may have had only two rows. The head bends at a down-ward angle when it is ripe.
In the story of Gideon and the Midianites in Judges 7:13, “a cake of barley” representing the (despised) Israelite army tumbles into the Midianite camp and knocks down the tent (representing the nomadic Midianites).
Barley is a plant of temperate zones, like Europe and the Near East; it does not grow well in the tropics. However, barley has been recently introduced along with wheat into many parts of the world for brewing beer and other malted drinks. It is also known to have grown in Korea as early as 1500 B.C. along with wheat and millet. It is becoming known in Malay as barli. Except for the reference in Judges, all references to barley in the Bible are non-rhetorical, so unrelated cultural equivalents are discouraged. Some receptor language speakers may coin a name for it as in Malay, or the translator can use a transliteration from Hebrew (se‘orah), Latin (horideyo), or from a major language (for example, Arabic sha’ir, Spanish cebada, French orge, Portuguese cevada, Swahili shayiri), together with a classifier, if there is one (for example, “grain of shayir”).
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 .
Then he brought me to the nave: Next the angelic guide took Ezekiel to the main room of the Temple. For he brought me, see 40.17. A nave is the long narrow central hall of a church that makes up the large main area of the church. Here the word refers to the long main room of the Temple building. Some translations render it in this way by saying “large main room of the Temple” (New Living Translation [1996]), “central room” (Good News Translation), “main room of the temple” (Contemporary English Version), or “great hall” (New Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh). But most translations include an explanatory interpretation of what the room was for, for example, “Holy Place” (Good News Translation, New Century Version) or “[outer] sanctuary” (New International Version, New Living Translation, New King James Version , Revised English Bible, Christian Community Bible, Complete Jewish Bible). The Hebrew word for nave often refers to the Temple as a whole, not just the large room inside it (compare King James Version “temple”). Jerusalem Bible and New Jerusalem Bible use “Hekal,” which is a transliteration of the Hebrew word here. In this context the best rendering is “sanctuary” or “large main room [of the Temple].” If the expression “Holy Place” is familiar in the church, this is also acceptable.
And measured the jambs; on each side six cubits was the breadth of the jambs: The angelic guide continued to measure the features of the building. The jambs were the doorframes of the sanctuary’s opening. The breadth, that is, the thickness, of each doorframe was six cubits, that is, 3 meters (10 feet). There was one on each side of the doorway opening.
And the breadth of the entrance was ten cubits: The width of the door opening was ten cubits, that is, 5 meters (17 feet).
And the sidewalls of the entrance were five cubits on either side: The sidewalls of the entrance refers to the walls on either side of the opening, where the doorframes were. The width of each sidewall from the doorframe to the outside wall on each side was five cubits, that is, 2.5 meters (8 feet).
And he measured the length of the nave forty cubits, and its breadth, twenty cubits: The Temple’s main room, was forty cubits, that is, 20 meters (68 feet), long and twenty cubits, or 10 meters (34 feet), wide.
At the end of verse 1 there are two Hebrew words whose meaning is difficult to understand. The words are literally “width of the tent.” King James Version renders them as “which was the breadth of the tabernacle” (similarly New King James Version ). The reference to the Tabernacle does not fit the context here, but it may have been a note added by somebody who noticed that this room was the same width as the Tabernacle. It may even have been a comment by Ezekiel himself. Nevertheless, it is probably best to omit these words, as most of the translations do.
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 .
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