Lamentations2chapter 2

Lamentations 2:1-3

This chapter is a second twenty-two verse acrostic, the same alphabet discipline turned now toward a harder question, not what the enemy did but who stood behind the enemy. How hath the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger, and remembered not his footstool, the ark's own resting place, in the day of his anger: the temple itself is named as forgotten before the destruction is even described. The Lord is the subject of every verb in this opening unit, he hath cut off, he hath drawn back his right hand, the horn of Israel broken by the hand that once raised it.

Lamentations 2:4-6

He hath bent his bow like an enemy, he stood with his right hand as an adversary, the covenant God described in the very terms Judah's invaders used against her, a reversal the bench takes as the chapter's hardest claim. The tabernacle is taken away as if it were of a garden, a temporary shelter rather than an eternal house, and the solemn feasts and sabbaths are caused to be forgotten in Zion by the Lord's own hand, not merely interrupted by Babylon's siege. Wesley reads the unit as Jeremiah refusing any comfort that blames the enemy alone, the deeper cause named at every turn.

Lamentations 2:7-9

The Lord hath cast off his altar, he hath abhorred his sanctuary, and the enemy's shouting fills the house of the Lord as if it were itself a feast day, worship's own form used to mock the God once worshipped there. The city's defenses fail in the same breath as its worship, the wall made to lament, the gates sunk into the ground, and the exile of the monarchy is stated flatly, her king and her princes are among the Gentiles. The law is no more and the prophets find no vision from the Lord names a silence as much a judgment as the fallen walls, the ordinary channels of guidance shut along with the gates.

Lamentations 2:10-12

The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground and keep silence, dust on their heads and sackcloth girded on, mourning too deep for the speech that normally belonged to elders at the gate. The virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads beside them, grief crossing every rank of the city at once. The chapter's hardest picture follows, children and sucklings swooning in the streets, asking their mothers where is corn and wine while their life is poured out into their mothers' bosom, a scene the bench reads as the siege's famine stated without any figure standing between the reader and the fact.

Lamentations 2:13-17

The poet's own voice breaks in, what thing shall I take to witness for thee, what shall I equal to thee, admitting that no comparison is equal to a breach as great as the sea. The false prophets are named directly as a cause, they have not discovered thine iniquity to turn away thy captivity, but have seen for thee false burdens, the failure of true prophetic warning set against the passersby who now hiss and clap their hands where the city once stood as the perfection of beauty. The unit closes on the hardest line of the chapter's theology, the Lord hath done that which he had devised, the enemy's triumph read as the fulfilment of a word spoken long before, not an accident of history.

Lamentations 2:18-19

Their heart cried unto the Lord, O wall of the daughter of Zion, is addressed as much to the reader as to the wall itself, an instruction to let tears run down like a river day and night rather than seek a quicker comfort. Arise, cry out in the night, pour out thine heart like water before the face of the Lord, gives grief a discipline of its own, prayer in the watches rather than despair without an object. The last plea in the unit names exactly who the prayer is for, the life of thy young children that faint for hunger in the top of every street, the famine's victims kept in view rather than left as background.

Lamentations 2:20-22

Behold, O Lord, and consider to whom thou hast done this pushes the poem's argument to its final question, addressed to the God the poet has named as the destroyer through the chapter. Shall the women eat their fruit, and children of a span long names the siege's worst horror plainly, a famine that drove mothers to their own children, the calamity Moses had warned the covenant curses would bring and that Israel's own history had already seen repeated in an earlier siege. The chapter ends where it began, the day of the Lord's anger, with the swaddled infants once brought up now consumed, grief given its final and hardest sentence before the acrostic runs out of letters.