Sunday, October 13, 2019

Ezekiel 4:16

I read Ezekiel 4 a couple weeks ago, and I noticed something interesting about verse 16:  "Moreover he [God] said to me, 'Son of man, behold, I will break the supply of bread in Jerusalem.  They shall eat bread by weight and with anxiety, and they shall drink water by measure and in dismay.'"  At first, I noticed only that the second sentence features zeugma:  while "by weight" and "with anxiety" are both adverbial prepositional phrases that modify "eat," "by weight" describes how in a physical sense and "with anxiety" describes how in an emotional sense.  Same for "drink water by measure and in dismay" because the sentence also features structural parallelism.

When I lookt up the definition of zeugma to confirm that I'd correctly identified it, Merriam-Webster's observation that "Zeugma... is economical: it contracts two sentences into one" made me realize something else.  This verse describes how people will have to ration their food and water, and zeugma's reuse of sentence elements illustrates this saving in a grammatical way.  Rather than two clauses ("They shall eat bread by weight, and they shall eat it with anxiety"), they're combined into one.

Then I started wondering whether this structure is in the original Hebrew.  I've been reading The Lutheran Study Bible, which uses the English Standard Version.  The New International Version has the more prosaic "The people will eat rationed food in anxiety and drink rationed water in despair."  When I referenced the STEP Bible, I discovered that the Hebrew text does have zeugma:
וְאָכְלוּ־לֶחֶם בְּמִשְׁקָל וּבִדְאָגָה וּמַיִם בִּמְשׂוּרָה וּבְשִׁמָּמוֹן יִשְׁתּֽוּ׃
Here's a link to the interlinear.