Lamentations 2: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

A poem describing how the Lord himself acted against Jerusalem in anger: he tore down her walls and strongholds, rejected his own altar and sanctuary, ended the appointed festivals, and sent her king and leaders into exile. The speaker describes children fainting from hunger in the streets, elders sitting silent in dust, whether women should eat their own children, and enemies mocking the ruined city. He says the prophets gave false visions instead of exposing the people's sin, and that the Lord has carried out what he planned long before. The poem ends by calling the city to cry out to the Lord day and night and by laying the whole scene before him.

Claim by Claim

1. 2:1
   • The Lord has covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger.
   • He has cast the splendor of Israel down from heaven to the earth.
   • He did not remember his footstool in the day of his anger.
2. 2:2
   • The Lord has swallowed up all the dwellings of Jacob.
   • He has not pitied.
   • In his wrath he has torn down the strongholds of the daughter of Judah.
   • He has brought them down to the ground.
   • He has profaned the kingdom and its princes.
3. 2:3
   • In fierce anger he has cut off every horn of Israel.
   • He has drawn back his right hand from before the enemy.
   • He has burned against Jacob like a flaming fire.
   • That fire devours everything around it.
4. 2:4
   • He has bent his bow like an enemy.
   • He has set his right hand like a foe.
   • He has killed all who were pleasing to the eye.
   • He poured out his fury like fire in the tent of the daughter of Zion.
5. 2:5
   • The Lord has become like an enemy.
   • He has swallowed up Israel.
   • He has swallowed up all her palaces.
   • He has ruined his strongholds.
   • He has multiplied mourning and lamentation in the daughter of Judah.
6. 2:6
   • He has violently torn down his booth as though it were a garden shelter.
   • He has ruined his place of appointed meeting.
   • The LORD has caused appointed feast and sabbath to be forgotten in Zion.
   • In the indignation of his anger he has spurned king and priest.
7. 2:7
   • The Lord has rejected his altar.
   • He has abhorred his sanctuary.
   • He has delivered the walls of her palaces into the hand of the enemy.
   • They raised a shout in the house of the LORD as on the day of an appointed feast.
8. 2:8
   • The LORD purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion.
   • He stretched out a measuring line.
   • He did not withdraw his hand from destroying.
   • He made the rampart and the wall lament.
   • Rampart and wall languished together.
9. 2:9
   • Her gates have sunk into the ground.
   • He has destroyed and shattered her bars.
   • Her king and her princes are among the nations.
   • There is no law.
   • Her prophets also find no vision from the LORD.
10. 2:10
    • The elders of the daughter of Zion sit on the ground.
    • The elders keep silence.
    • They have put dust on their heads.
    • They have girded themselves with sackcloth.
    • The virgins of Jerusalem have bowed their heads to the ground.
11. 2:11
    • The speaker's eyes fail with tears.
    • The speaker's inward parts churn.
    • The speaker's liver is poured out on the ground.
    • This is because of the destruction of the daughter of his people.
    • Children and nursing infants faint in the streets of the city.
12. 2:12
    • The children say to their mothers, Where is grain and wine?
    • They faint like wounded men in the streets of the city.
    • Their life is poured out into their mothers' bosom.
13. 2:13
    • The speaker asks what he can call to witness for the daughter of Jerusalem.
    • The speaker asks what he can liken to her.
    • The speaker asks what he can compare to her, so that he may comfort her, the virgin daughter of Zion.
    • Her ruin is as great as the sea.
    • The speaker asks who can heal her.
14. 2:14
    • Her prophets saw for her visions that were empty and whitewashed.
    • They did not expose her iniquity.
    • Exposing her iniquity would have turned back her captivity.
    • They saw for her oracles that were false and misleading.
15. 2:15
    • All who pass by the way clap their hands at her.
    • They hiss and shake their heads at the daughter of Jerusalem.
    • They ask whether this is the city that was called the perfection of beauty.
    • They ask whether this is the city that was called the joy of the whole earth.
16. 2:16
    • All her enemies have opened their mouth against her.
    • They hiss and gnash their teeth.
    • They say, We have swallowed her up.
    • They say this is surely the day they waited for.
    • They say they have found it and seen it.
17. 2:17
    • The LORD has done what he devised.
    • He has fulfilled his word, which he commanded from days of old.
    • He has thrown down and has not pitied.
    • He has made the enemy rejoice over her.
    • He has raised up the horn of her adversaries.
18. 2:18
    • Their heart cried out to the Lord.
    • The wall of the daughter of Zion is told to let tears run down like a torrent day and night.
    • She is told to give herself no relief.
    • She is told not to let the pupil of her eye rest.
19. 2:19
    • She is told to arise and cry out in the night.
    • She is to do so at the beginning of the night watches.
    • She is told to pour out her heart like water before the face of the Lord.
    • She is told to lift up her hands to him for the life of her young children.
    • Her young children faint from hunger at the head of every street.
20. 2:20
    • The LORD is called to look and consider to whom he has done this.
    • It is asked whether women should eat their own offspring, the infants they have tenderly reared.
    • It is asked whether priest and prophet should be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord.
21. 2:21
    • The young and the old lie on the ground in the streets.
    • The speaker's virgins and young men have fallen by the sword.
    • God has slain them in the day of his anger.
    • God has slaughtered and has not pitied.
22. 2:22
    • God has summoned the speaker's terrors from every side as on the day of an appointed feast.
    • In the day of the LORD's anger no one escaped or survived.
    • The enemy has consumed those the speaker swaddled and raised.

Words Worth Explaining

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

2:1

"Daughter of Zion" is a standard Hebrew way of speaking about Jerusalem: the city and its people addressed as though they were a single woman. Zion was the hill the temple stood on, and the name came to stand for the whole city. The "footstool" is the temple, or the ark of the covenant inside it, spoken of as the footstool of a throne whose seat is in heaven. In Hebrew this chapter is an alphabet poem: each stanza begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, twenty-two letters for twenty-two verses. That pattern cannot survive translation.

2:2

Jacob and Judah are both names for the people being mourned. Jacob was the ancestor also called Israel, and his name stands for the whole nation descended from him; Judah was the southern kingdom, with Jerusalem as its capital. "Daughter of Judah," like "daughter of Zion," pictures the territory and its people as a woman.

2:3

Where the King James says "horn," the image is an animal's horn as the seat of its power, a bull or ram fights with them. To cut off a nation's horn is to break its fighting strength; to raise a horn (verse 17) is to make it strong. The "right hand" is the fighting hand: God is pictured pulling back the arm that used to defend Israel just as the attack came.

2:4

"Tabernacle" in the King James simply means tent. Here the tent stands for the temple, and by extension for Jerusalem itself, the place God was said to dwell among his people.

2:5

The King James word here is "lamentation." A lamentation is a very sad song, the kind people sang when someone died. This whole book is made of songs like that.

2:6

The garden hut is a shelter of branches that a watchman threw together in a field or vineyard for the few weeks of harvest and abandoned afterwards: flimsy, and built to be taken down. The "solemn feasts" of the King James are not solemn in the modern sense of gloomy; they are the fixed annual festivals (Passover, Weeks and Booths) that brought crowds to Jerusalem. The Sabbath was the seventh day, kept free of work. Note also the two words for God kept distinct here and elsewhere: LORD in capitals stands in for the personal name of Israel's God, which Jewish readers did not pronounce aloud, while Lord translates an ordinary Hebrew word meaning master.

2:7

The sanctuary is the temple building itself, the one place Israel believed God had chosen to be present. The bitter point at the end is about sound: the enemy soldiers roaring in triumph inside the temple make exactly the noise the festival crowds used to make there.

2:8

A measuring line is a builder's cord, stretched out to lay a wall straight. The grim point is that it is being stretched out for demolition instead: the ruin is measured and deliberate, not random. The "rampart" is the earth bank or lower outer wall built in front of the main city wall.

2:9

The gates were a walled city's strong point and its weak point at once; heavy beams, the "bars," dropped across them to hold them shut. Gates sunk into the ground means the whole gateway has collapsed into rubble. The king and leaders "among the nations" (the King James says "Gentiles," which simply means the non-Jewish nations) refers to the deportations after Babylon captured Jerusalem in 586 BC, the disaster this whole book mourns. "The law is no more": the Hebrew word is torah, meaning instruction, with temple and priesthood destroyed there was no one left to teach it or give rulings from it.

2:10

These are the recognized public signs of grief: sitting on the bare ground, staying silent, throwing dust or ashes on the head, and putting on sackcloth, coarse dark cloth woven from goat hair, deliberately uncomfortable and worn against the skin. The elders were the older men who governed the city and settled disputes at the gate; their silence in the dust is the collapse of ordinary public life.

2:11

The King James follows the Hebrew literally: "my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth." Hebrew located strong feeling in the inner organs the way modern English locates it in the heart or the stomach. No physical injury is being described.

2:12

"Corn" in the King James means grain of any kind, wheat or barley, not the maize that the word now means in American English. Grain and wine were the basic food and drink of daily life, so the children are asking for an ordinary meal.

2:13

The word rendered "wound" (the King James has "breach") is also the word for a gap smashed through a city wall, the injury to the woman and the hole in the fortifications are the same word. Calling Zion a "virgin" daughter does not describe her inhabitants; applied to a city it means one never before broken into by an enemy.

2:14

"Discovered" in the King James means uncovered or exposed, not found out for the first time. A "burden" was a technical term for a prophet's message, usually one announcing disaster; the complaint is that these prophets delivered such oracles but they were made up.

2:15

Clapping, hissing through the teeth and shaking the head were gestures of scorn and appalled amazement, not applause. "The perfection of beauty, the joy of the whole earth" quotes the language the temple songs used about Jerusalem in better days (Psalms 48 and 50); passers-by are throwing the city's own praise back at it.

2:16

Grinding the teeth is a gesture of rage and threat, like an animal baring them. Opening the mouth wide pictures a beast about to swallow prey, which is what the enemies then claim to have done.

2:17

"The word he gave long ago" points back to the warnings attached to the covenant in the law of Moses, which set out siege, ruin and exile as the consequences of abandoning it (Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28). "Raised up the horn" is the reverse of verse 3: their attackers' strength has been increased.

2:18

The King James phrase is "let not the apple of thine eye cease." "Apple of the eye" is an old English name for the pupil; the Hebrew calls it "the daughter of the eye." The line means: do not let your eyes stop weeping. The verse also switches who is being spoken to, first the people, then the city wall itself, addressed as a mourner.

2:19

The night was divided into watches for the men standing guard, and the first watch began at nightfall. Lifting the hands, palms turned upward, was the ordinary bodily posture for prayer, the way kneeling or folding hands is in other traditions.

2:20

"Children of a span long" in the King James uses a span (the distance from thumb to little finger on a spread hand, about nine inches) as a measure of size, describing newborns small enough to hold in one hand. The Hebrew is disputed and may instead mean "the children they have nursed and cared for"; both readings are current, and the rendering keeps both in view. Mothers eating their own children is not invented horror: it is recorded of ancient sieges, where a besieged city starved for months, and it appears by name in the covenant warnings of the law.

2:21

"Fallen by the sword" means killed in the fighting. The sword was the main weapon soldiers carried.

2:22

Two images are joined. A herald would go out to summon people from every direction to one of the fixed festivals; here what is summoned from every direction is terror. "Swaddled" refers to wrapping a newborn tightly in strips of cloth, the normal care given to an infant, so the last line means the children she nursed and raised herself.