Lamentations 5: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The book's last chapter is a prayer asking the LORD to look at what has happened to the people. It lists what they have lost: land taken by strangers, water and wood they now have to buy, forced labor, hunger, women raped, leaders killed or dishonored, and Mount Zion left empty. The prayer says the LORD rules forever, asks why he has forgotten them so long, and asks him to bring them back and make their days new again. It ends without an answer, on the possibility that he has rejected them and is still angry.

Claim by Claim

1. 5:1
   • The speaker asks the LORD to remember what has happened to them.
   • The speaker asks the LORD to look and see their disgrace.
2. 5:2
   • Their inheritance has been turned over to strangers.
   • Their houses have been turned over to foreigners.
3. 5:3
   • They have become orphans, without a father.
   • Their mothers are like widows.
4. 5:4
   • They drink their own water only by paying silver for it.
   • Their own wood comes to them only at a price.
5. 5:5
   • They are pursued closely, upon their necks.
   • They are weary.
   • They are given no rest.
6. 5:6
   • They gave the hand to Egypt.
   • They gave the hand to Assyria.
   • They did this in order to have enough bread.
7. 5:7
   • Their fathers sinned.
   • Their fathers are no more.
   • They themselves have borne their fathers' iniquities.
8. 5:8
   • Slaves rule over them.
   • There is no one to tear them free from the hand of those rulers.
9. 5:9
   • They bring in their bread at the risk of their lives.
   • The danger is the sword of the wilderness.
10. 5:10
    • Their skin is scorched hot like an oven.
    • The cause is the burning heat of famine.
11. 5:11
    • Women were ravished in Zion.
    • Virgins were ravished in the cities of Judah.
12. 5:12
    • Princes were hung up by their hand.
    • The faces of elders were not honored.
13. 5:13
    • Young men were made to carry the grinding mill.
    • Boys staggered under loads of wood.
14. 5:14
    • The elders have ceased from the city gate.
    • The young men have ceased from their music.
15. 5:15
    • The joy of their heart has ceased.
    • Their dancing has been turned into mourning.
16. 5:16
    • The crown has fallen from their head.
    • The speaker cries woe upon them.
    • The reason for the woe is that they have sinned.
17. 5:17
    • Because of this, their heart is sick.
    • Because of these things, their eyes have grown dim.
18. 5:18
    • Mount Zion is desolate.
    • Foxes walk about on it.
19. 5:19
    • The LORD is enthroned forever.
    • The LORD's throne endures from generation to generation.
20. 5:20
    • The speaker asks why the LORD forgets them forever.
    • The speaker asks why the LORD forsakes them for so long a time.
21. 5:21
    • The speaker asks the LORD to turn them back to himself.
    • The speaker says that then they will be turned back.
    • The speaker asks the LORD to renew their days as of old.
22. 5:22
    • It is asserted that the LORD has utterly rejected them.
    • It is asserted that the LORD has been exceedingly angry with them.
    • The Hebrew opening of the verse is ambiguous between an assertion ('for you have utterly rejected us') and a condition ('unless you have utterly rejected us').

Words Worth Explaining

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

5:1

Lamentations mourns the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonian army in 586 BC: the city walls broken, the temple burned, and much of the population killed, scattered, or deported. This last chapter is a prayer spoken by the survivors as a group, "we," not "I." It has exactly 22 lines, matching the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, but unlike the earlier chapters it does not actually run through those letters in order.

5:2

"Inheritance" here means a specific thing: the plot of family land that Israelite law treated as permanently belonging to a household and passing down through its sons. It was not supposed to be sellable away from the family for good. Losing it to outsiders meant losing the family's standing and its means of living, not just a piece of property.

5:3

In this society a household without a living father or husband had no legal representative and no one obliged to defend its claims, so "orphans" and "widows" are terms for people left legally exposed as much as emotionally bereaved. "Our mothers are like widows" says the husbands are dead or deported.

5:4

Water from your own well and wood from your own land cost nothing. Having to buy both means the survivors no longer control the land they live on, the conquerors do, and charge for its use.

5:5

The Hebrew image is compressed and can be taken two ways: pursuers so close they are breathing on the back of the neck, or a yoke pressing down on the neck like an ox's. Either way it pictures people driven without pause.

5:6

"Giving the hand" was a gesture of submission, a formal surrender or pledge of loyalty to a stronger power, made in exchange for food. Assyria's empire had already fallen by this point, so the name is being used the way "Rome" might be used later: the great power of the north and east, whoever currently holds it.

5:7

The complaint is about a principle recognized in ancient law and often protested against: that a generation could suffer the consequences of what an earlier generation did. "Are not" is old English for "are no longer alive."

5:8

"Servants" translates a word meaning slaves or bondmen. The sting is in the social reversal: the men now giving orders in Judah are the lowest-ranking officials and household slaves of the Babylonian administration, not people of rank.

5:9

Going out to the fields or trade routes for food meant leaving the safety of settlements. With no army and no order left, roving raiders in the open country could kill scavengers freely. "Gat" is old English for "got."

5:10

The King James "black like an oven" follows a Hebrew word meaning scorched or shrivelled; the picture is skin gone dark, hot and taut like a clay oven's wall, from the fever and wasting of prolonged starvation.

5:11

Zion is the hill Jerusalem was built on, used throughout this book as a name for the city itself. Mass rape of the women of a captured town was a routine feature of ancient warfare, and the poem is reporting it, not alluding to it.

5:12

Hanging the bodies of captured nobles up in public was a standard act of conquest, the display was the point. The Hebrew can mean hung by their hands or hung by the enemy's hand. "Elders" are not simply old men but the senior heads of families who governed a town; refusing them the customary marks of respect was a deliberate act of humiliation.

5:13

Grinding grain at a hand mill was heavy, monotonous work normally done by women or slaves, so putting young men to it was itself a degradation. "Fell under the wood" means boys made to carry loads of firewood too heavy for them.

5:14

The open space just inside a town's gate was where the elders sat to hear disputes, witness contracts and settle legal cases, the equivalent of the courthouse and the town council. Empty gates mean the community's own government has stopped functioning.

5:15

Dancing here means public celebration at festivals and harvests, not private entertainment; "mourning" means the formal rituals of grief, with wailing and torn clothes.

5:16

A crown falling from the head was a stock image for the loss of honor and authority, here, the end of Judah's own kingship, with the last king taken to Babylon in chains.

5:17

"Eyes grown dim" is a Hebrew idiom for eyes exhausted and clouded from weeping, and by extension for a person worn out to the point of collapse.

5:18

Mount Zion carried the temple, the one place where Israel's sacrifices were offered. Wild animals moving freely over a site are a standard biblical picture of a place so ruined that nobody lives there any more. The Hebrew word covers both foxes and jackals.

5:19

"Throne" stands for rule itself, as "the crown" can stand for a monarchy in English. The line sets God's unbroken reign directly against the fallen crown of verse 16.

5:21

The Hebrew uses one verb twice: turn us back, and we will turn back. The same root covers physically returning to a place, returning to a person, and changing one's course of life, and all those senses are live here.

5:22

The Hebrew particle that opens this verse can be read two ways, and translators have split over it for centuries: "unless you have utterly rejected us" (leaving the prayer of verse 21 hanging on a condition) or a flat statement, "but you have utterly rejected us." The book ends on that unresolved note. In synagogue reading the custom is to repeat verse 21 after verse 22 so the passage does not close on this line.