The Sanctuary Is Not Spared

Ekah, “How”, opens this poem as it opened the first. The “footstool” is the ark of the covenant, which David called the footstool of our God (1 Chronicles 28:2), and “the beauty of Israel” may be the temple itself, as Isaiah 64:11 calls it “our holy and our beautiful house”.

“Polluted” is the Hebrew for profaning, treating a holy thing as common. The kingdom of David had been set apart by covenant; now it is handled like anything else. “Swallowed up” is the chapter’s signature verb, used five times, in verses 2, 5 twice, 8 and 16.

A horn is the strength of a bull or ram, so “all the horn of Israel” is every kind of strength she had. The withdrawn right hand undoes the Song of the Sea, where “thy right hand, O LORD” dashed the enemy in pieces (Exodus 15:6). The hand is still there; it has stopped standing in front of her.

The word rendered “tabernacle” is the ordinary Hebrew for a tent, used here of the city, as if Jerusalem were a camp struck in a single night. “All that were pleasant to the eye” seems to mean the young and the precious. Fire being “poured out” mixes two images deliberately: fury that flows and burns at once.

“Mourning and lamentation” is a rhyming pair in Hebrew, taaniyah vaaniyah, the same pair Isaiah 29:2 uses of Ariel, a name for Jerusalem. The sound is part of the sense: the words moan. “His strong holds” calls the fortresses his, which makes their destruction his own act against his own property.

“His tabernacle, as if it were of a garden” is literally his booth, like the flimsy hut a watchman put up in a vegetable plot. Isaiah 1:8 had already pictured Zion “as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers”. The temple is pulled down as easily as a field shelter after harvest.

The verb behind “abhorred” appears only once more in the Hebrew Bible, in Psalm 89:39, where God is charged with having “made void the covenant” with David. The same two things, sanctuary and dynasty, are renounced in both places. “Cast off” is the verb of Psalm 74:1, another lament over a burned temple.

2 Kings 21:13 had warned that God would stretch over Jerusalem “the line of Samaria”, measuring it for the same fate as the northern capital. The “rampart” is the outer earthwork and the wall the main circuit; both are made to mourn. “From destroying” is literally from swallowing, the chapter’s verb again.

The verb for “sunk” is the one used of Pharaoh’s captains, “drowned in the Red sea” (Exodus 15:4), as though the earth has swallowed the gates. The loss of vision matches Ezekiel 7:26: “then shall they seek a vision of the prophet; but the law shall perish from the priest.”

Dust on the head, sackcloth and silence on the ground are exactly what Job’s three friends did when they first saw him: they sat with him seven days and nights, “and none spake a word” (Job 2:12–13). The elders of Zion keep that same mourners’ silence for their own city.

Hebrew placed the deepest feeling in the inner organs, and this is the only verse where the liver is poured out in grief. “The daughter of my people” is Jeremiah’s own recurring phrase for Judah in its wounds (Jeremiah 8:21; 9:1), one of the links that made readers hear his voice in this book.

“Corn” in 1611 meant any grain; the children want bread and wine, the ordinary staples of the table. They swoon “as the wounded”, collapsing like battle casualties though no weapon has touched them. Their soul is “poured out” just as the speaker’s liver was poured out in the verse before.

The speaker asks three questions with three verbs: witness, liken, equal. Each is a way comforters worked, by offering a precedent or a comparison showing others have survived worse. None is found. “Who can heal thee?” recalls Jeremiah’s own question, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” (Jeremiah 8:22).

The word rendered “foolish” is tafel, whitewash, the same word Ezekiel 13:10–15 uses for the “untempered morter” false prophets daubed on a flimsy wall. “Burdens” is the technical term for oracles, a pun Jeremiah 23:33–40 had turned against the prophets who used it too easily.

Clapping, hissing and wagging the head are gestures of scorn, not applause. The passersby quote Israel’s own hymns back at her: “the perfection of beauty” is Psalm 50:2 and “the joy of the whole earth” is Psalm 48:2. The praise Zion sang of herself has become the taunt.

This stanza belongs to the letter pe, and here it comes before ayin, the reverse of the order in chapter 1; chapters 3 and 4 follow this order too. Pe is also the Hebrew word for mouth, and the stanza opens with enemies opening their mouths wide.

“His word that he had commanded in the days of old” points back to the covenant curses of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. The horn cut off from Israel in verse 3 is now set up for her adversaries: strength has changed hands. “Not pitied” is said for the second of three times, after verse 2.

The opening line is difficult Hebrew, and many translators emend it to read “cry aloud to the Lord”. “The apple of thine eye” is literally the daughter of the eye, the pupil; “apple” was the English word for the round pupil. The wall is told not to let its eye rest from weeping.

The Old Testament night was divided into three watches (Judges 7:19 names the middle one), so “the beginning of the watches” means at the start of each, all night long. Like 1:7, this stanza runs to four lines. “The top of every street” is the street corner, where the crowds once were.

Mothers eating their children is the extremity threatened in Leviticus 26:29 and Deuteronomy 28:53–57, and by Jeremiah (19:9). “Children of a span long” reads a word that means children being tenderly cared for; it shares its root with “swaddled” in verse 22.

The address has turned to God directly: “thou hast slain them”. “Not pitied” closes the triad begun in verses 2 and 17. Young men and virgins fall together, as in 1:18, where they went into captivity. Here they are not led away but lie in the streets, beside the old.

“My terrors round about” echoes the phrase that ran through Jeremiah’s preaching, “fear on every side” (Jeremiah 6:25; 20:10), which he once gave as a nickname to the priest Pashur (20:3). The assembly called “as in a solemn day” is summoned, but what gathers is terror.