[And] when I have broken the staff of your bread,.... Brought a famine, at least a scarcity of provisions upon them, deprived them of bread, the staff of life, by which it is supported; or however made it very scarce among them, so that they had hardly a sufficiency to sustain nature, and perhaps the blessing of nourishment withheld from that; see Isa 3:1;ten women shall bake your bread in one oven; for want of wood, according to Jarchi; or rather through scarcity of bread corn, they should have so little to bake every week, that one oven would be sufficient for ten families, which in a time of plenty each made use of one for themselves; and so Aben Ezra says, it was a custom in Israel for every family to bake in an oven by themselves, which they ate the whole week.
Ten is a certain number for an uncertain, and denotes many, as in Zec 8:23. Making and baking bread was the work of women in the eastern countries, as we find it was particularly among the Persians , and continues to this day among the Moors and Arabs :and they shall deliver [you] your bread again by weight; there being not enough for everyone to eat what they pleased, but were obliged to a rationed allowance, therefore everyone in the family should have their share delivered to him by weight; see Eze 4:16;and ye shall eat, and not be satisfied; not having enough to eat to satisfaction; or what they did eat, God would withhold a blessing from it for their nourishment, the reverse of Le 26:5.
Herodot. Polymnia, sive. l. 4. c. 187. Shaw's Travels, p. 241. Ed.