Lamentations 3: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

A man speaks as one who has suffered under God's anger, describing in detail how he has been hemmed in, broken, mocked, and left without peace. In the middle of the poem he turns to the LORD's steady love and mercies that are new every morning, and speaks about waiting quietly, bearing hardship, and the limits of God's anger. He then calls the people to examine their ways and turn back, admits their sin, weeps over the ruin of the city, recalls being answered from the pit, and asks the LORD to judge and pay back his enemies.

Claim by Claim

1. 3:1
   • The speaker says he is the man who has seen affliction.
   • The affliction came by the rod of his wrath.
   • The one whose wrath it is is not named in the verse.
2. 3:2
   • He has driven the speaker and made him walk.
   • He has made him walk in darkness and not in light.
3. 3:3
   • He has turned his hand against the speaker.
   • He turns his hand against him again and again all the day.
4. 3:4
   • He has worn out the speaker's flesh and skin.
   • He has broken the speaker's bones.
5. 3:5
   • He has built siege works against the speaker.
   • He has surrounded the speaker with bitter poison and hardship.
6. 3:6
   • He has made the speaker dwell in dark places.
   • The speaker dwells there like those long dead.
7. 3:7
   • He has walled the speaker in so that he cannot get out.
   • He has made the speaker's bronze fetters heavy.
8. 3:8
   • Even when the speaker cries out and calls for help, he shuts out the speaker's prayer.
9. 3:9
   • He has blocked the speaker's ways with hewn stone.
   • He has made the speaker's paths crooked.
10. 3:10
    • He is to the speaker like a bear lying in wait.
    • He is to the speaker like a lion in hiding places.
11. 3:11
    • He has turned the speaker aside from his ways.
    • He has torn the speaker in pieces.
    • He has made the speaker desolate.
12. 3:12
    • He has bent his bow.
    • He has set the speaker up as the target for the arrow.
13. 3:13
    • He has driven the arrows of his quiver into the speaker's kidneys.
14. 3:14
    • The speaker became a laughingstock to all his people.
    • The speaker became the subject of their song all the day.
15. 3:15
    • He has filled the speaker with bitter things.
    • He has made the speaker drunk with wormwood.
16. 3:16
    • He has ground the speaker's teeth on gravel.
    • He has pressed the speaker down into ashes.
17. 3:17
    • The speaker's soul has been cast far from peace.
    • The speaker has forgotten what good is.
18. 3:18
    • The speaker said that his endurance has perished.
    • The speaker said that his hope from the LORD has perished.
19. 3:19
    • Remembrance is called for of the speaker's affliction and his homeless wandering.
    • That affliction and wandering are wormwood and bitter poison.
20. 3:20
    • The speaker's soul indeed remembers these things.
    • The speaker's soul is bowed down within him.
21. 3:21
    • The speaker calls this to mind.
    • Because of that, the speaker has hope.
22. 3:22
    • It is because of the LORD's acts of covenant love that we are not consumed.
    • His compassions do not come to an end.
23. 3:23
    • They are new every morning.
    • Your faithfulness is great.
24. 3:24
    • The speaker's soul says the LORD is his portion.
    • Therefore the speaker will hope in him.
25. 3:25
    • The LORD is good to those who wait for him.
    • The LORD is good to the soul that seeks him.
26. 3:26
    • It is good to hope for the salvation of the LORD.
    • It is good to wait for it silently.
27. 3:27
    • It is good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth.
28. 3:28
    • He sits alone and keeps silent.
    • He does so because it has been laid upon him.
29. 3:29
    • He puts his mouth in the dust.
    • Perhaps there is hope.
30. 3:30
    • He gives his cheek to the one who strikes him.
    • He is filled full with reproach.
31. 3:31
    • The Lord will not cast off forever.
32. 3:32
    • Though he causes grief, he will have compassion.
    • His compassion is according to the abundance of his covenant love.
33. 3:33
    • He does not afflict from his heart.
    • He does not grieve the sons of men from his heart.
34. 3:34
    • One deed named is crushing under foot all the prisoners of the land.
35. 3:35
    • Another deed named is turning aside a man's justice before the face of the Most High.
36. 3:36
    • Another deed named is subverting a man in his lawsuit.
    • The Lord does not approve of these deeds.
    • The wording can equally mean that the Lord does not see these deeds.
37. 3:37
    • The question is asked who has spoken and had it come to pass.
    • It is asserted that this does not happen when the Lord has not commanded it.
38. 3:38
    • The question is asked whether both calamity and good do not come from the mouth of the Most High.
39. 3:39
    • The question is asked why a living man should complain.
    • The complaint is set against the man's own sins.
40. 3:40
    • Let us search out and examine our ways.
    • Let us turn back to the LORD.
41. 3:41
    • Let us lift up our heart together with our hands.
    • The lifting is to God in the heavens.
42. 3:42
    • We have transgressed.
    • We have rebelled.
    • You have not pardoned.
43. 3:43
    • You have covered yourself with anger and pursued us.
    • You have slain.
    • You have not pitied.
44. 3:44
    • You have covered yourself with a cloud.
    • The cloud keeps prayer from passing through.
45. 3:45
    • You have made us offscouring and refuse.
    • You have made us so in the midst of the peoples.
46. 3:46
    • All our enemies have opened their mouths against us.
47. 3:47
    • Terror and a pit have come upon us.
    • Devastation and destruction have come upon us.
48. 3:48
    • The speaker's eye runs down with streams of water.
    • The weeping is over the destruction of the daughter of his people.
49. 3:49
    • The speaker's eye pours down and does not stop.
    • There is no relief from the weeping.
50. 3:50
    • The weeping continues until the LORD looks down and sees from heaven.
51. 3:51
    • The speaker's eye brings pain to his soul.
    • The cause is all the daughters of his city.
52. 3:52
    • The speaker's enemies hunted him like a bird.
    • They hunted him without cause.
53. 3:53
    • They cut off the speaker's life in a pit.
    • They cast a stone upon him.
54. 3:54
    • Waters flowed over the speaker's head.
    • The speaker said he was cut off.
55. 3:55
    • The speaker called on the LORD's name.
    • He called from the lowest pit.
56. 3:56
    • The LORD heard the speaker's voice.
    • The speaker asks the LORD not to hide his ear at his gasping and his cry for help.
57. 3:57
    • The LORD drew near on the day the speaker called on him.
    • The LORD said, Do not fear.
58. 3:58
    • The Lord has pleaded the cases of the speaker's soul.
    • The Lord has redeemed the speaker's life.
59. 3:59
    • The LORD has seen the wrong done to the speaker.
    • The speaker asks the LORD to judge his cause.
60. 3:60
    • The LORD has seen all their vengeance.
    • The LORD has seen all their plots against the speaker.
61. 3:61
    • The LORD has heard their reproach.
    • The LORD has heard all their plots against the speaker.
62. 3:62
    • The lips of those who rose against the speaker are against him.
    • Their muttering is against him all the day.
63. 3:63
    • The LORD is asked to look at their sitting down and their rising up.
    • The speaker is their mocking song.
64. 3:64
    • The LORD will repay them a recompense.
    • The repayment is according to the work of their hands.
    • The wording can be read either as a request or as a statement of what the LORD will do.
65. 3:65
    • The LORD is to give them anguish of heart.
    • The LORD's curse is to be upon them.
66. 3:66
    • The LORD is to pursue them in anger and destroy them.
    • They are to be destroyed from under the heavens of the LORD.

Words Worth Explaining

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

3:1

This chapter is an alphabet poem: sixty-six lines in twenty-two groups of three, and all three lines of each group begin with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet, working through the alphabet in order. The pattern is invisible in English. "The man" translates a Hebrew word for a grown male in his strength, often a soldier, not simply a person.

3:5

"He hath builded against me" is siege language. An army attacking a walled city built ramps and blockading walls around it to seal it off and starve it out. The speaker pictures God doing that to him.

3:6

"They that be dead of old" means the long dead. The darkness is the darkness of the grave, where the Hebrews pictured the dead as remaining.

3:7

A hedge is a thick row of bushes used as a fence. Being "hedged about" means being closed in. Prisoners were locked up with heavy chains.

3:9

Hewn stone is quarried and squared building block, not loose rubble. A wall of it is meant to be permanent.

3:13

The King James "reins" means the kidneys. Hebrew writers located the deepest feelings and the innermost self in the kidneys, much as English speakers locate them in the heart. An arrow there is also a fatal wound.

3:14

Many Hebrew manuscripts read "all my people," but a good number read "all peoples", mocked by his own countrymen, or by everyone. Mocking songs were a recognized form of public humiliation.

3:15

Wormwood is a shrub of the Artemisia family with an intensely bitter taste. In Hebrew it is a stock image for anything bitter to endure.

3:16

Ashes and dust are the standard signs of mourning, a grieving person sat in them or poured them over his head. Here the picture is more violent: being ground down into them.

3:17

"Forgat" is just an old way of writing "forgot."

3:18

When LORD is printed in capital letters, it stands for God's own name, the special name Israel used for him.

3:19

"Gall" translates a Hebrew word for a bitter, poisonous plant (its exact identity is uncertain, poppy and hemlock have both been suggested). Paired with wormwood it is a set phrase for bitter suffering.

3:22

"Mercies" here translates the Hebrew word *chesed*: loyal, committed love, the kind owed within a binding relationship rather than a passing feeling. The Hebrew of this verse is difficult; some ancient versions read "the LORD's acts of love never cease" instead of "we are not consumed."

3:24

A "portion" was a person's allotted share of the land, the inheritance he lived off. The priests and Levites were given no land of their own; the LORD was said to be their portion instead. To call him "my portion" is to claim him as one's entire holding.

3:26

"Salvation" in the King James usually carries its older, ordinary sense: rescue or deliverance from danger, not a term about the afterlife.

3:27

A yoke is the wooden frame laid across the necks of oxen to harness them to a plow or cart. It is the standard image for a burden or a discipline imposed from outside.

3:29

Putting the mouth or face to the ground was the physical gesture of total submission, how a defeated man or a subject approached a king. "If so be" means "perhaps"; the hope is uncertain.

3:30

A blow to the cheek was an insult before it was an injury; the point was public shaming rather than damage.

3:33

The Hebrew is literally "not from his heart", not out of his own inclination or desire.

3:34

Verses 34, 35 and 36 form a single sentence, and it does not finish until the end of verse 36: these three things are what the Lord does not approve.

3:35

"The right of a man" means his legal rights in a court case. Courts met in the open at the city gate, and God was understood to be present there as a witness, so cheating someone in court was done in plain sight of the Most High.

3:36

A "cause" is a problem brought to judges to be settled. To "subvert" it means to cheat so the wrong side wins.

3:38

"Evil" in the King James commonly means disaster, harm or calamity rather than moral wickedness. The pairing here is bad fortune and good fortune.

3:39

The King James line is compressed. "A man for the punishment of his sins" means a man who is being punished for sins he committed, and the phrase "a living man" carries weight: he is still alive, so he has not lost everything.

3:41

Standing with hands raised and open was the ordinary posture of prayer. "Lift up our heart with our hands" asks that the inward attitude match the outward gesture.

3:42

"Transgressed" means broke God's rules.

3:44

Elsewhere in Israel's story a cloud is where God appears and speaks to people. Here the same image is turned inside out: the cloud is a ceiling the prayers strike and cannot pass.

3:45

"Offscouring" is what you scrape off a dirty dish and "refuse" is what you sweep up and throw away. Both words mean waste, and applying them to a whole people means being treated as something to be gotten rid of.

3:46

Opening the mouth wide at someone was a recognized gesture of contempt, a jeer made with the face as well as the voice.

3:47

The Hebrew pairs two near-identical sounding words, *pachad* and *pachat*, terror and pit. The "snare" is a concealed pit dug to trap animals.

3:48

"The daughter of my people" is a Hebrew idiom in which a city or a nation is spoken of as a woman. It carries affection, like calling a community "my poor people."

3:49

"Without any intermission" means without ever stopping, not even for a minute.

3:51

Ambiguous in the Hebrew. "The daughters of my city" may mean the women of Jerusalem, or it may use the common idiom by which the villages surrounding a city are called its daughters.

3:53

The King James "dungeon" is a cistern, a bottle-shaped pit cut into rock to store water. Empty ones were used as makeshift prisons, and a stone was rolled over the narrow mouth to seal a prisoner in.

3:54

Water rising over the head is a standing image for death and the grave, and here also the literal danger of a cistern that still holds water.

3:56

"My breathing" translates a word for the gasp or sigh of someone gulping for air, which is why modern versions render it as a cry for relief.

3:58

The whole verse is courtroom language: God takes the role of the advocate who argues the case. "Redeemed" translates a word from family law, the nearest male relative was obliged to buy back a kinsman's land or freedom, and to take up his cause. That relative was the redeemer.

3:60

"Imaginations" here means plans they thought up. It does not mean pretending.

3:62

A "device" here is a plan someone makes. It does not mean a machine.

3:63

"Their sitting down and their rising up" is a Hebrew way of saying everything they do, all the time. "I am their musick" means he is the subject of their mocking songs.

3:64

"Render a recompence" is legal and commercial language for paying back exactly what is owed. "The work of their hands" means what they actually did, so what is being asked for is a matching penalty rather than an unlimited one.

3:65

The Hebrew word behind "sorrow of heart" occurs nowhere else and its meaning is uncertain. It seems to mean a covering laid over the heart, which could be dullness, hardness, or anguish.

3:66

"From under the heavens of the LORD" means wiped off the face of the earth, gone from every place the sky covers.