Ezekiel 24:22

Hebrew (Westminster Leningrad Codex)

English Translation

You shall do as I have done: you shall not cover your lips, nor eat the bread of men.

World English Bible · Public Domain

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Word by word

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שָׂפָם֙

sâphâm

H8222

“mustache”

Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute

Appears 5× in the Hebrew Bible
First appears at Leviticus 13:45

Full BDB Definition

Origin: from H8193

TWOT: 2279

moustache

About this verse

These counts appear in no published source. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged text and Lemma’s own curated glosses. What Lemma adds →

11: words
9: distinct lemmas
Prophets: section

Notable vocabulary

The rarest word here is שָׂפָם֙ mustache H8222 — appearing just 5 times in the whole Hebrew Bible.

Shared distinctive vocabulary

שָׂפָם֙ mustache H8222 occurs in 5 verses of the Hebrew Bible. Also found in:

Grammatical profile

4 verbs
3 nouns
1 preposition
3 particles

Verb forms

וַעֲשִׂיתֶ֖ם Qal · Sequential Perfect
עָשִׂ֑יתִי Qal · Perfect
תַעְט֔וּ Qal · Imperfect
תֹאכֵֽלוּ Qal · Imperfect

Repetition

Words recur within this verse — often emphatic in Hebrew:

וַעֲשִׂיתֶ֖ם to do H6213 ×2
לֹ֣א not H3808 ×2

Hebrew & Septuagint length

In English translation the verse runs 19 words from the Hebrew and 25 from the Septuagint (LXX English) — closely comparable.

A rough comparison of the two English renderings, which tokenize alike — not a word-level alignment.

Word counts can differ between the Hebrew and the Greek without any difference in meaning — e.g. the Hebrew direct-object marker אֵת has no separate Greek word, and Greek often adds the article ὁ.

In the original languages it is 11 Hebrew tokens and 15 Greek tokens — but the two are counted differently (Hebrew bundles its prefixes and suffixes into one token; the Greek is in lemma form), so that isn’t a like-for-like length.

Cross-references

Topical passages linked to Ezekiel 24:22 in the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge — connected by theme and wording, ordered by reader-vote popularity; previews shown in the World English Bible.

Job 27:15 Those who remain of him shall be buried in death. His widows shall make no lamentation.
Psalms 78:64 Their priests fell by the sword, And their widows couldn't weep.
Jeremiah 16:4–7 They shall die grievous deaths: they shall not be lamented, neither shall they be buried; they shall be as dung on the surface of the ground; and they shall be consumed by the sword, and by famine; and their dead bodies shall be food for the birds of the sky, and for the animals of the earth.
Jeremiah 47:3 At the noise of the stamping of the hoofs of his strong ones, at the rushing of his chariots, at the rumbling of his wheels, the fathers don't look back to their children for feebleness of hands;
Ezekiel 24:16–17 Son of man, behold, I take away from you the desire of your eyes with a stroke: yet you shall neither mourn nor weep, neither shall your tears run down.
Amos 6:9–10 It will happen, if there remain ten men in one house, That they shall die.

Cross-references courtesy of OpenBible.info (CC BY 4.0).

Hebrew and Greek witnesses Masoretic Hebrew ↔ Greek Septuagint

The same verse in the two great witnesses to the Old Testament, shown verse-for-verse.

These are two independent witnesses, not word-aligned to each other, and the Septuagint is shown in lemma (dictionary) form.

Hebrew Ezekiel 24:22 Masoretic · Westminster Leningrad Codex

וַעֲשִׂיתֶ֖ם כַּאֲשֶׁ֣ר עָשִׂ֑יתִי עַל שָׂפָם֙ לֹ֣א תַעְט֔וּ וְלֶ֥חֶם אֲנָשִׁ֖ים לֹ֥א תֹאכֵֽלוּ

You shall do as I have done: you shall not cover your lips, nor eat the bread of men.

World English Bible · Public Domain

Greek LXX Ezekiel 24:22 Septuagint · lemma form

καί ποιέω ὅς τρόπος ποιέω ἀπό στόμα αὐτός οὐ παρακαλέω καί ἄρτος ἀνήρ οὐ ἐσθίω

And you⌃ shall do as I have done: you⌃ shall not be comforted at their mouth, and you⌃ shall not eat the bread of men.

LXX2012 (modern English Septuagint) · Public Domain

Hebrew: Westminster Leningrad Codex (CC BY 4.0). Greek: Septuagint (public domain); English from LXX2012 (modern English Septuagint) (Public Domain). How the Septuagint differs from the Hebrew →

Targum (Aramaic paraphrase)

The Targum is the ancient Jewish Aramaic paraphrase of the Hebrew Scriptures — an interpretive translation, not the Hebrew text itself. Onkelos (literal) and Pseudo-Jonathan (expansive) render the Torah, and Jonathan the Prophets. Coverage is partial: where no permissively-licensed English translation exists for a verse, only the Aramaic is shown. This is verse-level text, not a word-by-word alignment to the Hebrew.

Targum Jonathan Prophets (Joshua–Malachi)

וְתַעְבְּדוּן כְּמָא דַעֲבָדֵית עַל שָׂפָם לָא תִתְעַטְפוּן וּלְחֵים אֶבְלִין לָא תֵיכְלוּן:

(no public-domain English translation for this verse)

Targum Jonathan — Aramaic: “Mikraot Gedolot” (public domain). English: “Sefaria Community Translation” (CC0 1.0 (public-domain dedication)); “London "Chaldee Paraphrase," 1871” (public domain). Text via Sefaria.

Commentary

Notes on Ezekiel 24:22 from classic Christian and Jewish commentators (each source and its license shown beneath its notes). The classic Christian expositions comment on the surrounding passage and are grouped to its opening verse, so a note may address several verses; the Jewish commentaries on the Tanakh (Rashi and others) are per-verse, so they appear only where the commentator wrote on this verse.

Lemma curates 59 commentaries, every one of them public domain or Creative Commons licensed, each selected and text-cleaned for this edition rather than reprinted as found. About our sources →

Trapp's Complete Commentary

John Trapp

Eze 24:22 And ye shall do as I have done: ye shall not cover [your] lips, nor eat the bread of men.

Ver. 22. And ye shall do as I have done.] Your grief shall be above tears, you shall be so overgone with it; besides you shall have neither leisure nor leave of your enemies to bewail your losses, &c.

Ye shall not cover.] See on Eze 24:17. Antonius Margarita, a Christian Jew, hath written a book of the Jewish rites or superstitions at the burial of the dead, and otherwise; so hath Leo Modena, another Jew, but no Christian.

John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown

Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown

(Jer 16:6-7). So general shall be the calamity, that all ordinary usages of mourning shall be suspended.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

John Gill's Exposition

And your tires shall be upon your heads, and your shoes upon your feet..... As will be necessary while travelling, and when carrying captive to a foreign country, as now will be their case:

ye shall not mourn nor weep; shall not dare to do it, because of their enemies; and, moreover, so great should be their miseries and calamities, that they should be struck dumb, and quite astonished and stupefied with them; that they should not be able to vent their sorrow by an outward act of mourning:

but ye shall pine away for your iniquities; without any true sense of them, or godly sorrow for them, but in wretched hardness of heart, and black despair:

and mourn one towards another; not to God, confessing their sins, being contrite and penitent; but to one another, fretting, murmuring, and complaining at the hand of God upon them: this seems to denote the private way of mourning they should use for fear of the enemy, when they could get together by themselves, as well as their disregard to God, against whom they had sinned.

John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

Matthew Poole's English Annotations

Ye shall do as I have done, when you are in captivity, where you cannot, may not use your own customs and rites on these or any other occasions.

Ye shall not cover your lips: Eze 24:17.

Nor eat the bread of men: see Eze 24:17.

Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

John Wesley's Explanatory Notes

Ye shall do - When you are in captivity, where you may not use your own customs.

John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.

unfoldingWord translationNotes

Door43 World Missions Community

you will melt away

Here "melt away" is a metaphor for wasting away and dying. AT: "you will become very thin and slowly die" (See: Metaphor)

in your iniquities

This implies that God will not forgive the sins of these people. AT: "and I will not forgive your sins" (See: Assumed Knowledge and Implicit Information)

groan

This is the sound a person makes who wants help, but who has too much pain or sorrow to speak.

So Ezekiel will be a sign for you

Here the word "sign" refers to something that communicates a special warning to those who see it. Yahweh speaks of Ezekiel and his actions as being this warning. See how you translated this metaphor in Ezekiel 12:6. AT: "So Ezekiel will be a warning for you" (See: Metaphor)

translationWords

iniquity

Ezekiel

sign

know

unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.

Rashi

Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (Rashi)

And you shall do as I have done You shall not observe mourning because you have no consolers, for no one among you is not a mourner, and there is no mourning except where there are consolers. Another explanation: For you will be afraid to weep before the Chaldeans in whose midst you are.

upper lip [Heb. שָּׁפָם,] grenon in Old French, moustache.

Rashi on the Tanakh — English translations: “The Judaica Press complete Tanach with Rashi, translated by A. J. Rosenberg” (CC BY 4.0); “Pentateuch with Rashi's commentary by M. Rosenbaum and A.M. Silbermann, 1929-1934” (public domain); “The Metsudah Tanach series, Lakewood, N.J” (CC BY 4.0); and “The Book of Joshua, Metsudah Publications, 1997” (CC BY 4.0). Text via Sefaria.

Lesson kit

Teaching starters — assembled from the data on this page, not authored interpretation. Every prompt links to the verse data it draws on. Edit before teaching.

Ezekiel, in the Prophets, opens this verse with 11 words (9 distinct Hebrew lemmas). Its most distinctive word is sâphâm (“mustache”). A historical commentator’s framing appears above. Read the whole chapter for the surrounding context.

Discussion questions

How does “mustache” (sâphâm) shape what this verse is saying?
How does Leviticus 13:45, which shares the word «mustache», read alongside this verse?
What does the repetition of “to do” (2× in this one verse) do in this verse?
These translations render this verse differently; the difference is in the English rendering, not the original. What questions does that raise?
«וַעֲשִׂיתֶ֖ם» is a Qal Sequential Perfect verb. How does that grammatical form shape the action described?
Compare how Trapp's Complete Commentary and Jamieson, Fausset & Brown read this verse. Where do they agree or differ?

Things to notice

This verse counts 11 Hebrew ↔ 15 Greek words.
These translations choose different wording for 10 words in this verse.
“to do” occurs 2× in this single verse.
9 distinct Hebrew lemmas span 11 words in this verse.