Hope Speaks from Inside the Affliction

The word for “man” is geber, a man in his strength, the able-bodied fighting male, which makes the confession of helplessness sharper. “His wrath” has no antecedent: God is not named until verse 18. This chapter is a triple acrostic, and all three of these opening verses begin with aleph.

“Led” is the Hebrew verb for driving a flock, the word used when Moses “led the flock” to Horeb (Exodus 3:1). The shepherd here herds his sheep the wrong way. “Darkness, but not light” is almost word for word what Amos 5:18 said the day of the LORD would be.

“Surely” renders a small Hebrew word meaning only, or nothing but: against me alone he turns. The hand that “turneth” is turned back and forth, repeatedly, the picture of blow after blow. “All the day” is the first of several time markers in the chapter that make the suffering continuous.

“Made old” is the verb for a garment wearing thin, used of the clothes that did not wear out in the wilderness (Deuteronomy 8:4). Broken bones as the work of God’s hand come also in Hezekiah’s psalm: “as a lion, so will he break all my bones” (Isaiah 38:13).

“Builded against me” is the siege vocabulary of Jeremiah 52:4, where Babylon “built forts against” Jerusalem. The materials of this siege are strange: gall, a bitter poison, and travail, hardship or weariness. The man is walled in by bitterness and exhaustion rather than by earth and timber.

The second half of this verse is repeated almost exactly in Psalm 143:3: “he hath made me to dwell in darkness, as those that have been long dead.” The “dark places” are the realm of the dead, and “dead of old” means those who died so long ago that nobody remembers them.

Job made the same complaint: “He hath fenced up my way that I cannot pass” (Job 19:8). The word for “chain” is literally bronze, and it is the metal of the fetters in which Zedekiah was bound, “with fetters of brass”, and led to Babylon (2 Kings 25:7).

“Shutteth out” is the verb for stopping up a well, as the Philistines stopped up Abraham’s wells with earth (Genesis 26:15). The prayer is not refused after a hearing; the channel is blocked so it cannot flow at all. “Cry and shout” are the words for a call for help, as to a rescuer.

Hewn stone is ashlar, squared and dressed masonry, the expensive stone of Solomon’s temple and palace (1 Kings 5:17; 7:9). The barrier was built to last. “Made my paths crooked” is the reverse of Isaiah 40:4, where the crooked is made straight for God’s coming.

Amos 5:19 used the bear and the lion together for the day of the LORD: a man flees a lion and a bear meets him. Here they are not chance encounters but ambushes. The bear is “lying in wait” and the lion hidden, the language of an attacker who planned the spot.

The verb behind “pulled me in pieces” occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible; it seems to mean tearing apart, as the bear and lion of the previous verse maul their prey. “Desolate” in Hebrew also carries the sense of being appalled, stunned into stillness.

The word for “mark” is the one Jonathan used when he shot arrows beside David’s hiding place, “as though I shot at a mark” (1 Samuel 20:20). Job said God “set me up for his mark” (Job 16:12). Being made the target, rather than struck by a stray arrow, is the whole weight of the verse.

“The arrows of his quiver” is literally the sons of his quiver, a Hebrew idiom in which arrows are the quiver’s children. The he triad begins here. The image of the archer continues from verse 12 without a break, so the aiming of one verse becomes the wound of the next.

Some Hebrew manuscripts and the Syriac read “all peoples” rather than “all my people”; the standard text makes the mockery come from his own nation. Job said “now am I their song” (Job 30:9), and Psalm 69:12 speaks of being “the song of the drunkards”.

“Bitterness” is merorim, the bitter herbs eaten with the Passover lamb (Exodus 12:8). Wormwood is a bitter shrub, and Jeremiah had used it as a threat: “I will feed them … with wormwood” (Jeremiah 9:15; 23:15). “Drunken” here means filled to saturation, soaked through.

Bread gritty with stone is the picture, the flour of famine ground on crude stones or mixed with sand. Proverbs 20:17 says bread of deceit is sweet, but “afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel.” The verb rendered “covered” occurs only here and probably means pressed down, made to cower.

“I forgat prosperity” is literally I forgot good, and good is the word that will open each of verses 25, 26 and 27. What the man cannot remember here is exactly what the chapter will name three times over later. “Peace” is shalom, well-being in every sense, not only the end of war.

For the first time in the chapter God is named, and the name comes inside a sentence of despair. “Strength” renders netsach, a word for endurance, what lasts; it is used of God himself in 1 Samuel 15:29, “the Strength of Israel will not lie.”

The Hebrew word rendered “Remembering” can equally be an imperative, “Remember”, and many translators take it as a plea to God: remember my affliction. The pairing of wormwood and gall gathers up verses 5 and 15, the two bitter substances of the siege and the drinking.

“Hath them still in remembrance” doubles the Hebrew verb, remembering it remembers. One ancient scribal tradition lists this verse among places where the scribes changed a pronoun out of reverence, so that an original “thy soul”, speaking of God remembering, became “my soul”. The claim cannot be verified from surviving manuscripts.

“Recall to my mind” is literally bring back to my heart, using the verb for turning or returning, the same verb as “turn again” in verse 40. “This” points forward to what verse 22 will say, not back to the misery just described. It is the last line of the zayin triad.

“Mercies” is the plural of chesed, loyal covenant love, and “compassions” is rachamim, a word built on the root for the womb, a mother’s kind of pity. Some ancient translations read the line “his mercies are not finished” instead of “we are not consumed”; the Hebrew differs by one letter.

“Faithfulness” is emunah, steadiness, firmness, from the same root as amen. Thomas Chisholm took the phrase as the title of his 1923 hymn, which carried this verse into churches that may never have read the chapter around it. The address has turned directly to God: “thy faithfulness”.

When Israel’s land was divided, the priests received none, and God told Aaron, “I am thy part and thine inheritance” (Numbers 18:20). The same claim is made in Psalms 16:5 and 73:26. “Therefore will I hope” repeats the close of verse 21 and closes the heth triad.

Each verse of the teth triad begins with the word good. The verb for “wait” is qavah, whose root is linked with a stretched cord; the noun for hope from the same root is the scarlet “line” Rahab tied in her window (Joshua 2:18). Waiting is pictured as holding on to a taut rope.

“Quietly” is literally in silence. “The salvation of the LORD” recalls Moses at the Red Sea: “Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD” (Exodus 14:13). There, too, the people were told to be quiet while God acted: “ye shall hold your peace.”

The word for “man” is geber again, the word of verse 1, so the speaker of the chapter’s opening is now described from outside, in the third person. Many of the exiles of 597 BC were young, Jehoiachin himself only eighteen. Later Jewish writers spoke of “the yoke of Torah” as the yoke worth bearing.

“Sitteth alone” uses badad, the word for the “solitary” city of 1:1. The man takes up in his own body the posture of Jerusalem herself, and the silence of the elders who sat on the ground in 2:10. The yod triad begins here.

Putting one’s mouth in the dust is full prostration, face to the ground, the posture of a vassal before a conqueror; the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser shows Jehu of Israel bowing face down in just this way. Psalm 72:9 says the enemies of the king “shall lick the dust.”

Striking the cheek was an insult more than an injury, as when a prophet smote Micaiah on the cheek before Ahab (1 Kings 22:24). Isaiah 50:6 has the servant give “my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair”. Jesus’ “turn to him the other also” in Matthew 5:39 echoes this language.

The kaph triad begins, and each of its three verses opens with “For”, so the chapter’s argument is built on the letter. “Cast off” answers 2:7, where the Lord had “cast off his altar”. Psalm 77:7 asks “Will the Lord cast off for ever?”; this line answers that question.

The grief is not denied; the Hebrew grammar grants it, then sets compassion over against it. “The multitude of his mercies” is chesed again, the covenant love of verse 22, now counted as abundant. Psalm 106:45 uses the same phrase of God relenting over Israel in exile.

This is the seventy-seventh verse of the book’s 154, which puts it at the exact centre of Lamentations. “The children of men” widens the claim beyond Judah to humanity. The second verb, grieve, is the one used in 1:5 and 1:12 for what the LORD had done to Zion.

The lamed triad strings three infinitives, “to crush… to turn aside… to subvert”, and makes all three the object of one verb at the end of verse 36. Kings of the ancient Near East were shown with a foot on a captive’s neck, as Joshua’s captains did to the five kings (Joshua 10:24).

Courts gave judgment in God’s name; Exodus 21:6 sends a case “unto the judges”, literally to God. To twist a man’s right “before the face of the most High” is to do it in God’s own courtroom. “Most High” is Elyon, the title Melchizedek used in Genesis 14:18–20.

“Subvert” means to make crooked, the verb of Ecclesiastes 1:15, “That which is crooked cannot be made straight.” “Approveth not” is literally does not see. Many read the clause as a question, “Does the Lord not see?”, which makes it a statement that he does see.

Deuteronomy 18:22 gave the test of a prophet: if the thing he says does not come to pass, the LORD has not spoken. This verse turns the test around. Nothing anyone announces happens unless the Lord has commanded it; Psalm 33:9 says of him, “he spake, and it was done.”

Job asked his wife, “shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” (Job 2:10). Here the order is reversed: evil first, then good, fitting a speaker who has received the evil and is waiting for the good. Amos 3:6 makes the same claim about calamity in a city.

“Complain” is a rare verb found also in Numbers 11:1, when the people in the wilderness “complained” and fire broke out in the camp. “A living man” is the point: to be alive at all is the mercy verse 22 claimed. The word for man is geber once more.

The voice becomes “us”, the whole community. “Search” is the verb for digging through a place for something hidden, as Laban searched Jacob’s tent (Genesis 31:35), and “try” means to probe to the bottom. “Turn again” is shuv, the Hebrew word for repentance, a turning back.

The Hebrew preposition is unusual, and the same two consonants read with other vowels would give “our heart, not our hands”. Either way the contrast is between the lifted palms that anyone could see and the heart that no one could. Joel 2:13 makes a similar contrast: “rend your heart, and not your garments.”

Both pronouns are spelled out in Hebrew for emphasis: we, we have transgressed; thou, thou hast not pardoned. The verb for “pardon” is used in the Old Testament only with God as subject; human beings never do it. The nun triad ends on the unanswered half.

“Covered with anger” is literally wrapped thyself in anger, as in a cloak, the same verb as the covering cloud of the next verse. “Thou hast not pitied” takes up the refrain from 2:2, 17 and 21. The samekh triad begins here with God dressed for battle.

In the tabernacle the cloud was the sign of God’s presence (Exodus 40:34), and at the temple’s dedication Solomon prayed that prayers made toward the house would be heard (1 Kings 8:30). The house is now burned, and the cloud has become a screen that prayer cannot pierce.

“Offscouring” is a word found only here, meaning scrapings, what is scraped off and thrown away; “refuse” means what is rejected. The King James uses the same English word when Paul says the apostles are made “the offscouring of all things” (1 Corinthians 4:13).

The line is lifted almost whole from 2:16, where the enemies also gaped and hissed. Here it opens the pe triad, which again comes before ayin. Repeating the words from the city’s lament and putting them into the mouth of the whole people ties the man’s voice to Zion’s.

“Fear and a snare” is a sound pair in Hebrew, pachad vapachat, and “desolation and destruction” is another, hashet vehashaver. Isaiah 24:17 and Jeremiah 48:43 use the first pair with a third word, “Fear, and the pit, and the snare.” The words fall like a trap springing.

“Rivers of water” is palgei mayim, irrigation channels, the phrase of Psalm 1:3, where the righteous man is a tree “planted by the rivers of water”. The channels that once watered orchards now describe tears. The man returns to the first person singular after the communal “we”.

The letter of this triad, ayin, is also the Hebrew word for “eye”, and two of its three verses open with “Mine eye”. “Without any intermission” translates a rare word meaning respite or rest. The eye that trickles is the one Zion was told in 2:18 not to let rest.

The verb for “look down” means to lean out and look down, as from a window; Abimelech “looked out at a window” and saw Isaac with Rebekah (Genesis 26:8). Deuteronomy 26:15 prays, “Look down from thy holy habitation, from heaven.” The tears have a term set: until God looks.

“Affecteth mine heart” is literally my eye deals severely with my soul, using the gleaning verb that Jerusalem used of what was done to her in 1:22. Weeping itself is now a wound. “The daughters of my city” may be its young women or the villages that depended on it, called daughters of a mother city.

Birds were caught with nets, snares and throw-sticks, and David said Saul hunted him “as when one doth hunt a partridge in the mountains” (1 Samuel 26:20). “Chased me sore” doubles the verb, hunting they hunted me. The tsade triad begins with the hunter.

The word for “dungeon” is bor, a pit or cistern, the word for the cistern into which Jeremiah was let down with ropes (Jeremiah 38:6). But that cistern had “no water, but mire”, and no stone over it, so the details here do not fit his experience exactly. A stone over a pit was also how a grave was sealed.

Jonah prayed from the deep, “all thy billows and thy waves passed over me” (Jonah 2:3). “Cut off” is nigzarti, the word of Psalm 88:5, the dead “cut off from thy hand”, and of Isaiah 53:8, “cut off out of the land of the living”.

“The low dungeon” is literally the pit of the lowest places, the phrase of Psalm 88:6, “Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit.” That psalm ends in darkness with no answer. This line begins the qoph triad, and it is the first time in the chapter the man calls on God by name.

Whether the verbs of verses 55 to 63 describe a rescue already experienced or are prayers for one is debated; Hebrew can use the perfect tense in urgent petition, as in “thou hast heard”. The King James reads them as memory, and the next verse supports that reading.

“Fear not” are the only words spoken by God anywhere in the Book of Lamentations, and they are reported by the sufferer rather than heard directly. Two Hebrew words, al tira, the same words God spoke to Abram (Genesis 15:1) and to Israel in exile (Isaiah 41:10).

Two legal roles are joined: the advocate who “pleaded the causes”, and the redeemer, go’el, the next of kin who bought back a relative’s land or freedom, as Boaz did for Ruth. Jeremiah 50:34 joins them too: “Their Redeemer is strong… he shall throughly plead their cause.”

“My wrong” is from the verb of verse 36, the subverting of a man in his cause. The injustice the Lord was said not to approve has now happened to this speaker, and he brings it to the same judge. “Judge thou my cause” is the petition of a plaintiff in court.

“Vengeance” here means their vindictiveness, the revenge they intend, not God’s. “Imaginations” in 1611 meant schemes, plans laid, not fantasies. The resh triad ends with the Lord as a witness who has seen the evidence for himself.

The phrase “all their imaginations against me” is carried over word for word from the end of verse 60, linking the resh and shin triads like two links of a chain. “Thou hast heard” sets hearing beside the seeing of verses 59 and 60; the case now has both kinds of witness.

“Their device” is higgayon, muttering or murmured meditation, the word of Psalm 19:14, “the meditation of my heart”. What the psalm used for prayer is here the low talk of plotters. “All the day” matches verses 3 and 14, the man’s suffering and his mockery both running all day.

“Sitting down and rising up” is a pairing that means everything they do, as in Psalm 139:2, “Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising.” “Musick” is the 1611 spelling; the Hebrew word, found only here, means a mocking song, the taunt sung at his expense.

The tav triad, the last letter, begins here. Psalm 28:4 prays almost the same words: “Give them according to their deeds… render to them their desert.” Jeremiah 51:56 calls God “the LORD God of recompences”, in the oracle against Babylon.

The Hebrew for “sorrow of heart” uses a word found only here, which most interpreters now take to mean a covering or veil over the heart: dullness, an inability to understand. The King James read it as grief. Either way, the curse falls on the inner life.

“Persecute” is the verb for pursuing, the same as “persecutors” in 1:3 and “the pursuer” in 1:6. “From under the heavens” is the language of total removal used of Amalek, whose remembrance was to be blotted out “from under heaven” (Deuteronomy 25:19).