Ezekiel 44:15-17 depicts God as needing priests to bring him 'fat and blood' at 'my table' — a primitive picture of a deity who literally eats sacrificial food, like the gods of surrounding pagan mythologies.

The language of 'food of God' (*lechem elohim*, e.g., Lev 21:6,8,17,21-22) and cultic 'table' imagery is a real inherited idiom shared across the ANE, and it is worth being honest that Israelite cultic vocabulary did not spring from nowhere — it borrows the conventional vocabulary of its ANE environment (see John Walton, *Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament*, on the 'food of the gods' motif in Mesopotamian temple theology, where deities are ritually fed and literally sustained by offerings, e.g. in Atrahasis and Enuma Elish traditions). The decisive difference is that the Hebrew Bible repeatedly, explicitly, and polemically de-literalizes this inherited vocabulary rather than affirming it. Psalm 50:9-13, addressed precisely to this issue, has God say: 'I will not accept a bull from your house... for every animal of the forest is mine... if I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?' — an explicit, direct denial of divine nutritional need placed in Scripture's own mouth. Isaiah 1:11 ('I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams... I do not delight in the blood of bulls') makes the same point: sacrifice divorced from justice is worthless to God, which is incoherent if God's real interest were caloric. Ezekiel 44 itself needs to be read within its immediate literary context: it is part of a highly stylized, symbolic temple-vision (Ezek 40-48) using the conventional cultic idiom of priestly 'service at God's table' as covenant-relationship and access language — the priests' privilege of proximity to the sanctuary, not literal food service to a hungry deity. The fat and blood restrictions elsewhere (Lev 3:17, 17:11 — 'the life is in the blood') explain the deeper logic: fat and blood are reserved to God symbolically because they represent life itself, which belongs to God alone; the priest's role at the altar is a solemn symbolic transaction about the meaning of life and atonement, not meal preparation.

The Hebrew Bible's own trajectory — inheriting ANE cultic vocabulary while simultaneously and repeatedly denying its literal, mythological content (Ps 50; Isa 1; 1 Sam 15:22, 'to obey is better than sacrifice') — is itself striking evidence of a deliberate, self-aware theological polemic against the surrounding polytheistic conception of needy gods, using the shared cultural vocabulary as a vehicle for a genuinely different metaphysic: a God who is not sustained by, but who is the sole sustainer of, everything that exists (Ps 50:12, 'the world and its fullness are mine').