Lamentations 4

¹How the gold has grown dim, how the pure gold is changed! The sacred stones lie scattered at the head of every street.
²The precious children of Zion, worth their weight in fine gold — how they are reckoned as earthen pots, the work of a potter’s hands!
³Even the jackals offer the breast and nurse their young, but my people has become cruel, like the ostriches in the wilderness.
⁴The tongue of the infant sticks to the roof of its mouth for thirst; the children beg for food, but no one gives them anything.
⁵Those who feasted on delicacies perish in the streets; those who were brought up in purple cling to ash heaps.
⁶For the chastisement of my people has been greater than the punishment of Sodom, which was overthrown in a moment, though no hand was laid on it.
⁷Her princes were purer than snow, whiter than milk; their bodies were more ruddy than coral, their hair like sapphire.
⁸Now their visage is blacker than soot; they are not recognized in the streets. Their skin has shriveled on their bones; it has become as dry as wood.
⁹Happier were those pierced by the sword than those pierced by hunger, whose life drains away, deprived of the produce of the field.
¹⁰The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children; they became their food in the destruction of my people.
¹¹The LORD gave full vent to his wrath; he poured out his hot anger, and kindled a fire in Zion that consumed its foundations.
¹²The kings of the earth did not believe, nor did any of the inhabitants of the world, that foe or enemy could enter the gates of Jerusalem.
¹³It was for the sins of her prophets and the iniquities of her priests, who shed the blood of the righteous in the midst of her.
¹⁴Blindly they wandered through the streets, so defiled with blood that no one was able to touch their garments.
¹⁵“Away! Unclean!” people shouted at them; “Away! Away! Do not touch!” So they became fugitives and wanderers; it was said among the nations, “They shall stay here no longer.”
¹⁶The LORD himself has scattered them, he will regard them no more; no honor was shown to the priests, no favor to the elders.
¹⁷Our eyes failed, ever watching vainly for help; we were watching eagerly for a nation that could not save.
¹⁸They dogged our steps so that we could not walk in our streets; our end drew near; our days were numbered; for our end had come.
¹⁹Our pursuers were swifter than the eagles in the heavens; they chased us on the mountains, they lay in wait for us in the wilderness.
²⁰The LORD’s anointed, the breath of our life, was taken in their pits — the one of whom we said, “Under his shadow we shall live among the nations.”
²¹Rejoice and be glad, O daughter Edom, you that live in the land of Uz; but to you also the cup shall pass; you shall become drunk and strip yourself bare.
²²The punishment of your iniquity, O daughter Zion, is accomplished, he will keep you in exile no longer; but your iniquity, O daughter Edom, he will punish, he will uncover your sins.

Grief, despair, and depression are natural responses to traumatic events, and the destruction endured by the people of Jerusalem would have shattered the foundational beliefs of this once proud citizens of Zion. They can look at the way the deprivations of the siege of Jerusalem stripped them of their humanity and made them act like animals. Society broke down under the strain of starvation. Death reigned in the city and now in the aftermath they are a broken people who look at themselves wondering what they have become. They grieve the city, the life, and the friends and family that they have lost. Their world looks hopeless, and the briefly summoned hope of the previous chapter has been swallowed by despair. There is an exhaustion to this fourth poem which is one third shorter than the previous three. It still attempts to maintain the orderly composition of the acrostic form, but now each letter has two lines instead of three. The intensification of the form in the previous poem now relapses into a gasping poem of diminishment. Things once beautiful have become ugly, the noble has become not only common but cruel, the hope of the future has been consumed by the needs of the present. As Yael Ziegler describes this poem,

Despair colors this chapter in dark hues; the lustrous gold, shining white, and rosy-cheeked vigor of Jerusalem’s bright past fade, giving way to dark tones, the shadowy color of despondency. Blackened by hunger and desiccated by thirst, people no longer recognize their fellows. Lack of recognition metaphorically suggests antisocial behavior; society breaks down as hunger predominates, and every individual seeks his or her own survival at the expense of another. (Ziegler, 2021, pp. 341-342)

Yet, the poet attempts to bring some order to their disordered world. To honestly assess the present and look for something to hold onto but in the end the only thing the poet finds is a hope for revenge.

The characteristic of gold is that it does not tarnish like most other metals, and that is one of the properties that makes it valuable. Yet, the opening image is of gold dimming and being transformed to have the properties of a common metal. Sacred stones, perhaps the impressive stones used in the construction of the temple, now litter the streets as rubble. Yet, the gold and the sacred stones are now metaphorically related to the children of Zion—once its most valuable possession but now thrown away like the commonest of pot. It is the fate of the children of Zion which forms one of the central concerns of this poem.

Something has happened to transform this people which prized their children above all things into a people unfavorably compared with jackals and ostriches. The language of the book of Job seems a natural place to search for language that voices the suffering of the poet and the people of Zion in general, and Job 39: 13-18 portrays the ostrich (although it uses a different Hebrew word for this bird) as an uncaring mother who delivers her eggs onto the sand but may just as carelessly step on them. Throughout the Hebrew scriptures jackals are the inhabitants of ruins[1]and jackals and ostriches often appear together in the metaphors for judgment.[2] Now the people have become less maternal than the jackal and the ostrich during and after the siege of Jerusalem and infants and children suffer hunger and thirst by adults unable to see past their own hunger and struggle.

Another unhappy parallel for Jerusalem is Sodom. In Ezekiel 16 the infidelity of Judah is compared with Samaria and Sodom, and she is found worse than both destroyed societies. Yet, Sodom with its destruction by the LORD for its sins[3] is now viewed as favorable to the punishment Jerusalem has received. The rapid destruction of Sodom in the Genesis narrative does not have the dehumanizing effect that the siege and starvation of Jerusalem has had on the people. Sodom may be the representation of both wickedness and judgment in scriptures and is frequently used by the prophets as a warning for Israel, Jerusalem, and the prophets who have failed to faithfully communicate God’s word.[4]

The poet of Lamentations likely came from the nobility and priests of Jerusalem. He may have been an unwelcome voice to the nobles, like Jeremiah was, but he still can see in the diminishment of the nobles the dimming of the people. Those who ate fine food now perish in the street, and those who wore scarlet (NRSV purple)[5] now cling to the ash heap. The city which provided their position and privilege now lies broken and burning, and without Zion they are nothing. Princes and nobles whose skin was fairer and their hair clean and black[6] and compared to the dark blue sapphire or lapiz lazuli now are described as similar to Job with blackened skin which has shriveled on their bones. (Job 30:30) For both Job and the nobles God is the cause of their desperate situation where they suffer with the people they were supposed to lead.

Death by violence seems a preferrable state than what the residents of Jerusalem were reduced to. The cannibalistic action of the compassionate women who boil their own children may be hyperbolic, but the subject of mothers eating their own children comes up multiple times in relation to sieges in the Hebrew Scriptures.[7] Being reduced to survival by eating one’s own child, perhaps that has already died of salvation, is a horrific and inhuman image. These compassionate women are no longer titled as mothers. They, and by extension the rest of the people, have been reduced to animalistic actions by their starvation and deprivation.

The pillars of the Zionistic hope: the Davidic king, the city, the temple, and the land have all been consumed in the fiery wrath of God’s action against the people. There is a belief that God will not abandon the temple, the city, or the Davidic king. Yet, those very things have been destroyed or taken into exile in shackles. The poet turns to the prophets and priests who failed the people. Priests and prophets in Jeremiah were willing to shed his blood, but ultimately the people judge he has done nothing worthy of death[8] and Jeremiah earlier makes an accusation that the “blood of the innocent” being spilled in this place (the temple) is one of the things that the people of Jerusalem must turn from.[9] Ezekiel can declare that Jerusalem has become “the bloody city” by its unjust and violent ways.[10] Both prophets would have agreed with Lamentations identifying the priests and prophets as being active contributors to the judgement of the city. Now these priests and prophets who are supposed to embody holiness for the people have been reduced to the uncleanness of lepers. “Away! unclean!” is what lepers are required to shout in Leviticus 13: 45.

The siege of Jerusalem takes place in the context of the plotting of the leaders of Jerusalem to align themselves with Egypt rather than Babylon. The help they await during the siege was expected to come from their ally Egypt, but Egypt was unable to break the siege or to successfully challenge Babylon. Jeremiah challenges the reliance on Egypt by the leaders in Jerusalem, and there seems to have been the hope of a regional alliance against Babylon. Yet, many of these nations who may have been a part of the ‘regional alliance’ seem to have betrayed Jerusalem and sided with Babylon, like Edom who will be mentioned as deserving God’s revenge at the end of the poem. The Babylonians and their allies overwhelmed the defenders of Jerusalem and made daily life under the siege unbearable. Even when nobles and others attempted to escape through breaches in the wall they were captured and imprisoned by the Babylonians.

The LORD’s anointed, the Davidic king, is mentioned for the first time in the poem. The psalms of enthronement[11] draw this anointed king into a close relationship with the divine, standing as the LORD’s representative on earth. The language of these psalms will later be used by the New Testament to speak of Jesus, and they helped form the expectation of a messiah in post-exilic Judaism, but here this poem uses the evocative phrase the breath (ruach) of our life. Elsewhere the ruach of life is the spirit, wind, or breath of God which animates both in creation and in Ezekiel 37. Now the removal of the Davidic king is like the removal from the air from the lungs of the people. They have lost many of the things that defined their community and the foundational images of their life and it may have felt like in combination with the presence of death seen in the starvation and conflict that their way of life was dying as well.

Ultimately, this fourth poem ends like the first and third poems calling for God to judge others as harshly as they have been judged. Now the target is Edom, who has earned the rancor of God in numerous prophets.[12] The entire book of Obadiah, only one chapter, is against Edom. Edom apparently took advantage of Jerusalem’s fall and abused the people and city at its lowest point. Now the poet asks for the punishment to pass to them and that they would know shame, here represented by Edom’s nakedness. In the cup passing to Edom there is a moment of hope for the poet that now Jerusalem’s judgment may come to an end, that the exile may be now longer as God’s anger is redirected at Edom.

Having worked through Jeremiah and Ezekiel there are significant sections dedicated to the desire for revenge upon the enemies of the people. It is important to realize that these are the words of defeated people with no power to act upon this desired revenge and the vengeance that would belong to the LORD. Much like the imprecatory psalms[13] they bring their anger and commit it into the LORD’s hands. Lamentations is not easy reading but one of the gifts of our faith is the ability to take all our emotions and bring them into our relationship with God.

[1] Jeremiah 9:11.

[2] Job 30:29; Micah 1:8.

[3] In Genesis the sins of Sodom are primarily sins of inhospitality, the way it abused strangers in its midst.

[4] In addition to Ezekiel 16, mentioned above, Isaiah 1:9-10; 3:9; 13:19; Jeremiah 23:14; Amos 4:11; and Zephaniah 2:9.

[5] Scarlet has the association with royalty that purple does which is probably why the NRSV switches to this better known correlation.

[6] Fairer skin and clean and dark indicates a lifestyle out of the sun and which was viewed as a sign of prosperity and attractiveness in the ancient world, hence the shame of the female speaker in Song of Solomon over her darkness from being forced to work the fields (Song of Solomon 1: 5-6).

[7] 2 Kings 6: 26-30 in the siege of Samaria and Ezekiel 5:10 about the siege of Jerusalem. Although this language may be for shock, it may also report the desperate actions that people took during starvation.

[8] Jeremiah 26:15.

[9] Jeremiah 7:5-6.

[10] Ezekiel 24.

[11] E.g. Psalm 2, Psalm 110.

[12] Jeremiah 49:17-22; Ezekiel 25: 12-14; 35; Joel 3:19; Amos 1:11; Obadiah; Malachi 1:4.

[13] E.g. Psalm 58 and 109.