Behold, I take away from thee, etc. The next word of the Lord, coming after an interval, is of an altogether exceptional character, as giving one solitary glimpse into the personal home life of the prophet.
The lesson which the history teaches is, in substance, the same as that of Jeremiah 16:5. The calamity that falls on the nation will swallow up all personal sorrow, but it is brought home to Ezekiel, who may have read those words with wonder, by a new and terrible experience.
We are left to conjecture whether anything in the prophet's home life furnished a starting-point for the terrible message that was now borne in upon his soul. Had his wife been ill before? or, as the words, with a stroke, suggest, did it fall on him, as a thunderbolt "out of the blue"?
I mention, only to reject, the view that the wife's death belongs as much to the category of symbolic visions as the boiling cauldron. To me such a view seems to indicate an incapacity for entering into a prophet's life and calling as great as that which sees nothing but an allegory in the history of Gomer in Hosea 2:1-23; Hosea 3:1-5.
We, who accept the Scripture record as we find it, may believe that Ezekiel was taught, as the earlier prophet, to interpret his work by his own personal experience. To Ezekiel himself the loss of one who is thus described as the desire (or, delight) of his eyes (the word is used of things in 1 Kings 20:6, of young warriors in Lamentations 2:4, of sons and daughters in Verse 25), must have been, at first, as the crowning sorrow of his life; but the feelings of the patriot-prophet were stronger even than those of the husband, and his personal bereavement seemed as a small thing compared with the desolation of his country.
He was to refrain from all conventional signs of mourning, from weeping and wailing, from the loud sighing (for forbear to cry, read, with the Revised Version, sigh, but not aloud), from the head covered or sprinkled with ashes (Isaiah 61:3), and from the bare feet (2 Samuel 15:30; Isaiah 20:2), from the covered lips (Le 13:45; Micah 3:7), which were "the trappings and the garb of woe" in such a case.
Eat not the bread of men. The words point to the custom, more or less common in all nations and at all times, of a funeral feast, like the parentalia of the Romans. Wine also was commonly part of such a feast (Jeremiah 16:7).
The primary idea of the custom seems to have been that the mourner's friends sent the materials for the feast as a token of their sympathy.