Lamentations5chapter 5

Lamentations 5:1-2

Lamentations 5 closes the book as a plain communal prayer of twenty-two verses, the length of the Hebrew alphabet kept but the letter-by-letter form abandoned, grief finally too tired for the acrostic discipline the first four chapters kept, as the bench reads the loosening. The poem opens as direct address rather than description, remember, O Lord, what is come upon us, consider and behold our reproach, and moves straight into loss: the inheritance is turned to strangers and the houses to aliens, foreign hands now holding what the covenant had given.

Lamentations 5:3-4

Verse 3 states the plainest fact of famine and slaughter, we are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows, a whole generation left without its fathers. Verse 4 measures the siege in commerce turned cruel, drinking water bought for money and wood sold at a price, the poorest necessities now taxed by an occupying hand.

Lamentations 5:5-6

Verse 5 pictures forced labor under the yoke, our necks are under persecution, we labour and have no rest, the language of Egypt's bondage returned on the people once delivered from it. Verse 6 names the diplomacy that failed, giving the hand to the Egyptians and to the Assyrians to be satisfied with bread, alliances sought for survival that the prophets had already warned against before the fall.

Lamentations 5:7-8

Verse 7 states generational consequence honestly, our fathers have sinned and are not, and we have borne their iniquities, the fathers dead and the children left carrying what they began, read by the bench alongside Jeremiah 31:29-30's repeal of the same proverb rather than against it, present suffering held with future personal accountability. Verse 8 completes the humiliation, servants have ruled over us, there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand, the covenant people governed by those they once governed.

Lamentations 5:9-10

Verse 9 puts a price on daily bread, gotten at the peril of life because of the sword of the wilderness, foraging parties risking raiders to feed the city's survivors. Verse 10 reads the famine on the body itself, our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine, the same wasting chapter 4 already pictured in its Nazarites.

Lamentations 5:11-12

Verse 11 names an atrocity of the conquest without euphemism, women ravished in Zion and maids in the cities of Judah, a war crime the older commentators read as literal history rather than figure. Verse 12 adds a second outrage against rank, princes hanged up by their hand and the faces of elders not honoured, the city's leadership humiliated along with its women.

Lamentations 5:13-15

Verse 13 sets the young men to a slave's labor at the millstone and the children stumbling under loads of wood, work once done by servants now forced on the free. Verse 14 empties the city gate of its elders and its music of its young men, the two institutions of civic and social life silenced together, and verse 15 states the result in one line, the joy of our heart is ceased, our dance is turned into mourning, celebration itself gone out of the city.

Lamentations 5:16-18

Verse 16 names the cause plainly against every excuse the sufferers might offer, the crown is fallen from our head, woe unto us, that we have sinned, confession rather than complaint. Verse 17 answers in the body, a faint heart and dim eyes, and verse 18 lands the grief on a specific hill, because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes walk upon it, the temple mount itself gone wild, read by the bench as the poem's lowest point.

Lamentations 5:19-20

Verse 19 turns from the ruined mountain to the throne that cannot fall, thou, O Lord, remainest for ever, thy throne from generation to generation, the one fixed point named in the whole poem. Verse 20 immediately questions the distance between that permanence and the present abandonment, wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time, an honest complaint the bench reads as faith still speaking rather than faith broken.

Lamentations 5:21-22

Verse 21 prays the same turning the book has asked for since chapter 3, turn thou us unto thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned, renew our days as of old, repentance requested as a gift rather than produced by will. The book's own last line refuses a tidy ending, but thou hast utterly rejected us, thou art very wroth against us, and the commentators note the ancient reading custom of repeating verse 21 aloud after verse 22 so the public reading does not close there, a practice named as reception history and not a change to the text itself.