Lamentationschapter 2
22 verses · BSBLamentations book hub →
Speaks with:Lamentations 1×5Psalms 119×3Lamentations 3×3Psalms 89×2Lamentations 2×2Psalms 74×2
Summary
Chapter summary
The second acrostic, and the hardest to read, because the destroyer is named. The Lord has covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger, swallowed up her habitations, broken down her strongholds, and bent his bow like an adversary: 'The Lord hath become as an enemy.' The festival is forgotten, king and priest despised, the altar cast off. Elders sit on the ground in silence with dust on their heads; virgins hang down their heads. The prophets find no vision from Jehovah, seeing false burdens instead. Worst is the street scene: children and sucklings swooning, asking their mothers, Where is grain and wine? The call is to pour out the heart like water before the face of the Lord.
Context
Poetry · Jeremiah — Lamentations overview
- A. 1–10 The Lord Become as an Enemy to Zion
- B. 11–17 Children Fainting in the Streets; the Prophets Saw Vain Things
- C. 18–22 Pour Out Thy Heart Like Water Before the Lord
The outline
A.The Lord Become as an Enemy to Zionvv. 1 to 10
Read vv. 1 to 10 →B.Children Fainting in the Streets; the Prophets Saw Vain Thingsvv. 11 to 17
Read vv. 11 to 17 →C.Pour Out Thy Heart Like Water Before the Lordvv. 18 to 22
Read vv. 18 to 22 →
The world behind this chapter
Lamentations 2The history
This chapter is another alphabet poem, and its subject is not the Babylonians. Almost every line has God as the one acting: he has swallowed up, he has broken down, he has bent his bow like an enemy, he has scorned his altar and disowned his sanctuary. The army that came over the wall barely appears.
Two images treat the temple as something small. His footstool is a way of speaking about the ark and the sanctuary — God's throne is heaven, and this is where his feet rest. And he has laid waste his booth like a garden hut: farmers built a rough shelter of branches in a field for the harvest weeks and abandoned it when the picking was done. The most sacred building in the nation is compared to a temporary shed.
The mourning is described from life. The elders sit on the ground in silence, throwing dust on their heads and wearing sackcloth — coarse dark goat-hair cloth worn next to the skin. The young women bow their heads to the ground. Eyes are worn out with weeping.
The famine of the siege is here too, in the hardest lines in the book: children and infants faint in the streets of the city, asking their mothers where there is bread and wine, and pouring out their lives on their mothers' bosom. The chapter blames the prophets directly — they saw for you false and deceptive visions, and did not expose your sin to restore your fortunes.
What it meant to them
The first hearers were being kept from two easy escapes. They could not say Babylon was too strong, and they could not say God had lost. He had done this, and he had done it justly.
The chapter ends by telling them to pray anyway: pour out your heart like water before the face of the Lord, lift your hands to him for the lives of your children. The one being addressed as the destroyer is the only one worth crying to.
Sources cited
- Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions
- Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament: Jeremiah and Lamentations
The text of this chapter
This page carries no textual note on Lamentations 2. Where this site has examined a place the manuscripts differ, the examination is in the manuscripts room. Every place this site examines →
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Notes on the Old Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.