Lamentations 1: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This is the first of five poems mourning Jerusalem after her enemies captured the city and carried her people away. The first half describes the empty city from the outside: her roads, gates, priests, princes, and hungry people. In the second half Jerusalem herself speaks, calling passersby to look at her pain, saying the LORD is righteous and that she rebelled against his command. She asks God to see her distress and to deal with her enemies as he has dealt with her.

Claim by Claim

1. 1:1
   • The city sits alone.
   • The city was once full of people.
   • She has become like a widow.
   • She was great among the nations.
   • She was a princess among the provinces.
   • She has become subject to forced labor and tribute.
   • The speaker asks in astonishment how this came about.
2. 1:2
   • She weeps bitterly in the night.
   • Her tears are on her cheeks.
   • Among all her lovers she has no one to comfort her.
   • All her friends have dealt treacherously with her.
   • Her friends have become her enemies.
3. 1:3
   • Judah has gone into exile out of affliction and much servitude.
   • She dwells among the nations.
   • She finds no rest.
   • All her pursuers overtook her in the narrow places.
4. 1:4
   • The roads to Zion mourn.
   • No one comes to the appointed feasts.
   • All her gates are desolate.
   • Her priests groan.
   • Her young women are grieved.
   • She herself is in bitterness.
5. 1:5
   • Her adversaries have become the head over her.
   • Her enemies are at ease.
   • The LORD has afflicted her.
   • He afflicted her because of the multitude of her transgressions.
   • Her young children have gone into captivity before the adversary.
6. 1:6
   • All her splendor has departed from the daughter of Zion.
   • Her princes have become like deer that find no pasture.
   • Her princes went without strength before the pursuer.
7. 1:7
   • Jerusalem remembers, in the days of her affliction and her wandering, all the precious things that were hers in days of old.
   • Her people fell into the hand of the adversary.
   • There was no one to help her.
   • The adversaries saw her.
   • The adversaries laughed at her; the word for what they laughed at may mean her downfall or her sabbaths.
8. 1:8
   • Jerusalem has sinned grievously.
   • Therefore she has become an unclean and despised thing.
   • All who honored her now despise her.
   • They despise her because they have seen her nakedness.
   • She herself groans.
   • She turns away backward.
9. 1:9
   • Her uncleanness is in her skirts.
   • She did not consider her end.
   • She came down astonishingly.
   • She has no comforter.
   • The speaker asks the LORD to look on her affliction.
   • The enemy has magnified himself.
10. 1:10
    • The adversary has spread out his hand over all her precious things.
    • She has seen nations enter her sanctuary.
    • God had commanded that those nations should not enter his assembly.
11. 1:11
    • All her people groan.
    • They are seeking bread.
    • They have given their precious things for food to keep themselves alive.
    • The speaker asks the LORD to see and consider.
    • The speaker says she has become despised.
12. 1:12
    • The speaker addresses all who pass by; the address is ambiguous, meaning either 'is this nothing to you' or 'may this never come upon you'.
    • The speaker tells them to look and see.
    • The speaker asks whether there is any sorrow like her sorrow.
    • The sorrow was inflicted upon her.
    • The LORD afflicted her with it.
    • He afflicted her in the day of his fierce anger.
13. 1:13
    • He sent fire from on high into her bones.
    • The fire prevailed against her bones.
    • He spread a net for her feet.
    • He turned her back.
    • He made her desolate.
    • She is faint all the day.
14. 1:14
    • The yoke of her transgressions is bound fast by his hand.
    • They are wreathed together.
    • They have come up upon her neck.
    • He has made her strength fail.
    • The Lord has delivered her into the hands of those before whom she cannot rise up.
15. 1:15
    • The Lord has trodden down all her mighty men in her midst.
    • He has called an appointed assembly against her.
    • The assembly was called to crush her young men.
    • The Lord has trodden the virgin daughter of Judah as in a winepress.
16. 1:16
    • For these things she weeps.
    • Her eye runs down with water.
    • A comforter who would restore her soul is far from her.
    • Her children are desolate.
    • The enemy has prevailed.
17. 1:17
    • Zion spreads out her hands.
    • There is no one to comfort her.
    • The LORD has commanded concerning Jacob that those around him be his adversaries.
    • Jerusalem has become an unclean thing among them.
18. 1:18
    • The LORD is righteous.
    • The speaker has rebelled against his command.
    • The speaker calls on all peoples to hear.
    • The speaker calls them to behold her sorrow.
    • Her young women have gone into captivity.
    • Her young men have gone into captivity.
19. 1:19
    • The speaker called for her lovers.
    • They deceived her.
    • Her priests and her elders perished in the city.
    • They perished while seeking food to keep themselves alive.
20. 1:20
    • The speaker asks the LORD to behold, for she is in distress.
    • Her inward parts are in turmoil.
    • Her heart is turned over within her.
    • She has grievously rebelled.
    • Outside, the sword bereaves.
    • Inside the house, it is like death.
21. 1:21
    • They have heard that she groans.
    • There is no one to comfort her.
    • All her enemies have heard of her trouble.
    • They are glad that God has done it.
    • God will bring the day he has announced.
    • Her enemies will become like her.
22. 1:22
    • The speaker asks that all their wickedness come before God.
    • The speaker asks God to deal with them as he has dealt with her.
    • God dealt with her for all her transgressions.
    • Her groans are many.
    • Her heart is faint.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

1:1

Lamentations is a set of funeral poems over Jerusalem after the Babylonian army broke into the city, burned it and its temple, and deported much of the population in 587/586 BC. This chapter is an acrostic: its twenty-two verses begin with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in order, a pattern that cannot be carried into English. Throughout, the city is spoken about as a woman. A widow in this society lost her legal protector and her standing, and was often left destitute: that is the force of the image. Tribute was the forced payment a conquered people owed its conqueror year by year; the Hebrew word can also mean gangs of forced laborers.

1:2

In the prophets, a city's 'lovers' are normally the foreign nations it courted as allies with treaties, gifts and payments. Talking about alliances in the language of courtship and infidelity was a standard convention, not a description of anyone's private life.

1:3

Judah was the southern of the two Israelite kingdoms, with Jerusalem as its capital. Being 'carried away' means deportation: conquering empires moved defeated populations far from home to break any further resistance.

1:4

Zion was first the name of the ridge Jerusalem stood on, then a name for the city itself. Israelite men were expected to travel to Jerusalem three times a year for the appointed festivals (Passover, Weeks and Booths), so these roads would normally have been crowded with pilgrims. The open ground just inside a city's gates was its marketplace and its courtroom, the busiest spot in town; empty gates mean a dead city.

1:5

"Her adversaries are the chief" means her enemies are now the ones in charge of her, the head rather than the tail. "Her children" means the people of the city, who are being driven ahead of the army on the long march into exile.

1:6

'Daughter of Zion' is a Hebrew way of naming the city itself, not a person living in it, something like 'poor Zion'. The same construction gives 'daughter of Judah' in verse 15.

1:7

The Hebrew word behind 'homelessness' is uncertain; it may mean wandering, or restlessness. The last line is disputed as well: the Hebrew word for her downfall closely resembles the word for 'sabbaths', which is why the King James Version has the enemies mocking at her sabbaths.

1:8

A captured city was routinely pictured as a woman stripped in public, and public stripping was also a shaming penalty. Seeing someone's nakedness was a stock image for total, irreversible disgrace rather than a charge about anything sexual.

1:9

Under Israel's purity laws, menstrual blood on a woman's clothes left her ritually unclean and untouchable for a set time, a temporary state, not a crime. The poem borrows that image for the city. From the last sentence of this verse the city herself starts speaking; the chapter alternates between an onlooker's voice and hers.

1:10

The 'holy place' is the temple in Jerusalem, which ordinary Israelites could only enter to a set point and foreigners not at all. The law in Deuteronomy 23 barred certain neighboring peoples even from the public assembly of Israel; the shock here is that those same outsiders have now walked into the temple itself.

1:11

The 'treasures' are household valuables of any kind, sold off for food. This reflects the long Babylonian siege, during which the city was sealed off and starving.

1:12

The speaker is calling out to travelers on the road past the ruins. Addressing passers-by this way was a normal device in ancient laments and in the inscriptions carved on tombs.

1:13

Hunters spread nets flat on the ground and drove animals onto them. The whole verse casts God in the role of the hunter, and the speaker as the trapped animal that turns back only to find its escape closed.

1:14

A yoke was the wooden bar strapped across the necks of oxen to harness them to a plow or a cart. It was the ordinary image for being under another's control.

1:15

The word translated 'called out an army' is the same one used for summoning people to the appointed festivals in verse 4; the poem uses it bitterly, since this is the gathering Jerusalem now gets. A winepress was a basin cut into rock where grapes were crushed underfoot, the juice running out red, which made treading a winepress a standard image for slaughter.

1:16

"None to comfort her" is the refrain of this chapter, returning in verses 2, 9, 17 and 21. In Hebrew mourning custom, comforters were the relatives and neighbors who came and sat with the bereaved; having no one to come is a way of saying every relationship the city had is gone.

1:17

Holding out the hands, palms up, was the usual posture for prayer and for begging. 'Jacob' is an ancestor's name used for the whole nation descended from him. Calling Jerusalem an unclean thing is again the vocabulary of ritual impurity: something others must keep their distance from.

1:18

"The LORD is righteous" uses courtroom language: it means he is in the right in the dispute between them, and the speaker is admitting the verdict rather than praising him in general.

1:19

Elders were the senior men who governed a town and settled its legal disputes, meeting in the open area at the city gate.

1:20

Hebrew places strong emotion in the inner organs where English uses the heart or the stomach. The last line describes life under siege: enemy soldiers kill anyone out in the streets, while starvation and disease kill those who stay inside.

1:21

The prophets spoke of a coming 'day of the LORD', a day of reckoning announced in advance against the surrounding nations as well as against Jerusalem. That announced day is what is being invoked here.

1:22

A prayer asking God to bring harm on enemies is called an imprecation, and it is a normal, frequent feature of Hebrew poetry, especially in the Psalms. The speaker is not taking revenge herself; she is handing the case over and asking that the same measure be applied to the people who did this.