9 “And you, take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and emmer, and put them into a single vessel and make your bread from them. During the number of days that you lie on your side, 390 days, you shall eat it. 10 And your food that you eat shall be by weight, twenty shekels a day; from day to day you shall eat it. 11 And water you shall drink by measure, the sixth part of a hin; from day to day you shall drink. 12 And you shall eat it as a barley cake, baking it in their sight on human dung.” 13 And the Lord said, “Thus shall the people of Israel eat their bread unclean, among the nations where I will drive them.” 14 Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Behold, I have never defiled myself.From my youth up till now I have never eaten what died of itself or was torn by beasts, nor has tainted meat come into my mouth.” 15 Then he said to me, “See, I assign to you cow's dung instead of human dung, on which you may prepare your bread.” 16 Moreover, he 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. 17 I will do this that they may lack bread and water, and look at one another in dismay, and rot away because of their punishment.
The third of the acted parables occupies the remainder of the chapter. The prophet was to limit himself to a stringent diet, which was meant to signify the famine that was to come upon Jerusalem: the people were to live on famine rations (9-11), and their diet was to be unclean and defiled (12-17). It is not quite clear whether we are meant to take the earlier verses as referring to the siege conditions within Jerusalem, and the latter to the conditions they would experience in exile. This is probably the simplest way of taking the 'sign'. Ezekiel seems to have accepted without comment the former, but his whole soul protested at the latter, and it is a measure of the extremity of the conditions that were to come upon the exiles that he should have done so. In point of fact, however, it would be impossible for them to maintain and observe any of the Levitical requirements in an alien culture such as Babylon, and this was one of the grim consequences of their sinfulness and departure from God, that they should have to abandon practices that had became so much a part of their own religious culture. Part of the price of sin is that, once you commit it, it compels you to go on in it more and more.