Psalms 102:9
For I have eaten ashes like bread and mixed my drink with tears
BSB
ASV
For I have eaten ashes like bread, And mingled my drink with weeping,
KJV
For I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping,
For I have eaten ashes like bread. I dipped my bread in ashes, and so ate it. If therefore the prophet says this, what should we do? And I mingled my drink with weeping. Nothing was sweet to me, neither bread, nor drink: but I longed only for the heavenly bread, that is, Christ.
Bread - The sense is, dust and ashes are as familiar to me as the eating of my bread; I cover my head with them; I sit, yea, lie down in them, as mourners often did.
For I have eaten ashes like bread. He had so frequently cast ashes upon his head in token of mourning, that they had mixed with his ordinary food, and grated between his teeth when he ate his daily bread. One while he forgot to eat, and then the fit changed, and he ate with such a hunger that even ashes were devoured. Grief has strange moods and tenses. And mingled my drink with weeping. His drink became as nauseous as his meat, for copious showers of tears had made it brackish.
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
Psalms 42:3My tears have been my food both day and night, while men ask me all day long, “Where is your God?”
leads to
You fed them with the bread of tears and made them drink the full measure of their tears.
Reached by 2 independent paths from here.
Why should the nations ask, “Where is their God?” Before our eyes, make known among the nations Your vengeance for the bloodshed of Your servants.
Why should the nations say, “Where is their God?”
Let the priests who minister before the LORD weep between the portico and the altar, saying, “Spare Your people, O LORD, and do not make Your heritage a reproach, an object of scorn among…
Like the crushing of my bones, my enemies taunt me, while they say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
Through
Psalms 80:5You fed them with the bread of tears and made them drink the full measure of their tears.
leads to
The Lord will give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, but your Teacher will no longer hide Himself—with your own eyes you will see Him.
My tears have been my food both day and night, while men ask me all day long, “Where is your God?”
Through
Isaiah 44:20He feeds on ashes. His deluded heart has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?”
leads to
Let him not deceive himself with trust in emptiness, for emptiness will be his reward.