Lamentations 5:3
We have become fatherless orphans; our mothers are widows.
BSB
ASV
We are orphans and fatherless; Our mothers are as widows.
KJV
We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows.
Our mothers are as widows - The particle “as” suggests that the whole verse is metaphorical. Our distress and desolation is comparable only to that of fatherless orphans or wives just bereaved of their husbands.
We - We are all of us without a king, (our common father) we are deprived of thy fatherly protection, and many young children among us are left without an earthly parent.
Rare words are the text's own signal of a deliberate thread: the fewer the occurrences, the more the places it appears belong together.
The walk8
Follow this verse’s cross-references two steps out. Each card is a verse this one points to, and beneath it the verses that one points to in turn. Where several different paths arrive at the same place, that place is listed first: the text keeps returning to it. Every stop shows its own words, and every stop is a page.
Through
Hosea 14:3Assyria will not save us, nor will we ride on horses. We will never again say, ‘Our gods!’ to the work of our own hands. For in You the fatherless find compassion.”
leads to
But You have regarded trouble and grief; You see to repay it by Your hand. The victim entrusts himself to You; You are the helper of the fatherless.
A father of the fatherless, and a defender of the widows, is God in His holy habitation.
Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, who rely on horses, who trust in their abundance of chariots and in their multitude of horsemen. They do not look to the Holy…
I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.
When Ephraim saw his sickness and Judah his wound, then Ephraim turned to Assyria and sent to the great king. But he cannot cure you or heal your wound.
Through
Exodus 22:24My anger will be kindled, and I will kill you with the sword; then your wives will become widows and your children will be fatherless.
leads to
I will make their widows more numerous than the sand of the sea. I will bring a destroyer at noon against the mothers of young men. I will suddenly bring upon them anguish and…
Reached by 2 independent paths from here.
May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.
Through
Jeremiah 18:21Therefore, hand their children over to famine; pour out the power of the sword upon them. Let their wives become childless and widowed; let their husbands be slain by disease, their young men struck…
leads to
May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.