Gold Cannot Purchase Bread

Ekah, “How”, opens a poem for the third time. Gold is the one metal that does not tarnish, so gold grown dim is a picture of the impossible having happened. “The top of every street” is where the children fainted in 2:19; now sacred stones lie in the same place, poured out like water.

Jeremiah had smashed an earthen bottle in the valley of Hinnom and said God would break the city “as one breaketh a potter’s vessel, that cannot be made whole again” (Jeremiah 19:11). Sons once weighed against pure gold are now reckoned at the value of a clay jug, cheap and replaceable.

Job 39:13–16 describes the ostrich who leaves her eggs in the sand where a foot may crush them, “hardened against her young ones, as though they were not her’s.” The comparison is with a creature proverbial for neglecting its brood. Mothers in the city now behave like the bird the wilderness was known for.

The tongue cleaving to the roof of the mouth is the oath of Psalm 137:6, sworn by exiles who would rather lose their voice than forget Jerusalem. Here it is simply thirst. Bread was baked in flat rounds and broken by hand to share; “no man breaketh it” means there is none to break.

Scarlet cloth was dyed from an insect, expensive and the mark of wealth; David said Saul “clothed you in scarlet” (2 Samuel 1:24). The “dunghills” are the ash and refuse heaps outside a town where beggars lay. Hannah had sung of God lifting “the beggar from the dunghill” (1 Samuel 2:8). The movement has run the other way.

The Hebrew words for iniquity and sin can each mean either the wrong or its penalty, so the line can compare the sin of Jerusalem with Sodom’s, or the punishment, as the King James takes it. “No hands stayed on her” probably means no human hands: Sodom fell to God alone, with no siege.

The “sapphire” of the Hebrew Bible was most likely lapis lazuli, deep blue flecked with gold, the stone of the pavement under God’s feet in Exodus 24:10. “Rubies” may be red coral. “Ruddy” is the word used of young David (1 Samuel 16:12). The list is all colour: white, white, red, blue.

Every colour of the previous verse is cancelled. Faces white as snow are now darker than soot, and those marked out for their looks walk unrecognised. Job 19:20 has the same wasted body: “My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh.” “Like a stick” means dried out like firewood.

“Stricken through” is the word used for men pierced by a sword, thrust through (Jeremiah 51:4). The starving are described with the vocabulary of battle wounds, though the weapon is only the lack of “the fruits of the field”, the produce of the farms beyond the besieged walls.

“Sodden” is the old past participle of seethe, meaning boiled. The same verb appears when two women in besieged Samaria agreed to eat their sons and one said, “we boiled my son” (2 Kings 6:28–29). The horror had happened once before in Israel’s memory, under an earlier siege.

“Accomplished his fury” means finished it, spent it to the end; Ezekiel 5:13 uses the phrase, “Thus shall mine anger be accomplished.” Moses’ song had spoken of a fire kindled in God’s anger that “shall set on fire the foundations of the mountains” (Deuteronomy 32:22).

Jerusalem had survived Sennacherib’s siege in 701 BC, when the Assyrian army withdrew without shooting an arrow (2 Kings 19:32–36). That escape bred a confidence Jeremiah heard in the city’s own words: “Who shall come down against us?” (Jeremiah 21:13). The world was as surprised as Jerusalem.

The sentence has no main verb; it runs straight into verse 14. Priests and prophets together had called for Jeremiah’s death (Jeremiah 26:8–11), and King Jehoiakim had the prophet Urijah hunted down in Egypt and killed (26:20–23). Manasseh too “shed innocent blood very much” (2 Kings 21:16).

Deuteronomy 28:29 warned, “thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness.” Blood made anyone who touched it unclean, and priests were bound by strict rules about contact with the dead (Leviticus 21:1–4). The men meant to keep the city clean are now the source of its defilement.

The cry “Unclean, unclean” was the leper’s own warning under Leviticus 13:45. Here passers-by shout it at priests and prophets, driving them off. The last line puts the same rejection into foreign mouths: even among the nations, the fugitives are told they may not stay.

“The anger of the LORD” is literally the face of the LORD. The priestly blessing prayed that his face would shine on the people (Numbers 6:25); here the same face scatters them. Chapter 4, like chapters 2 and 3, sets the pe stanza before the ayin, and this is the pe verse.

“In our watching” uses a noun for a watchtower: they looked out from the walls for an army of relief. The verse names no nation, but Jeremiah 37:5–7 records that Pharaoh’s army marched up during the siege and that Jeremiah said it would turn back to Egypt. It did.

This is the tsade stanza, and it opens with the verb for hunting, as the tsade triad of chapter 3 did in 3:52. “Our end is come” is the cry of Ezekiel 7:2–6, “An end, the end is come”, and of Amos 8:2. The enemy watched the streets so closely that no one could walk them.

Deuteronomy 28:49 had warned of “a nation… as swift as the eagle flieth”, and Jeremiah 4:13 said of the invader, “his horses are swifter than eagles.” The word rendered “eagles” can also mean vultures. Mountains and wilderness were where fugitives hid, and even there the pursuers waited.

Canaanite vassals writing to Pharaoh in the Amarna letters of the fourteenth century BC called him “the breath of my life”, a courtly phrase. “Taken in their pits” pictures an animal caught in a covered trap. Jotham’s fable had the bramble invite the trees to “put your trust in my shadow” (Judges 9:15).

Uz is Job’s homeland (Job 1:1), placed near Edom’s territory. The invitation to rejoice is sarcasm. Jeremiah 25:15–21 lists Edom among the nations made to drink from the cup of God’s fury, and 49:12 says those who were not due the cup have drunk it, so Edom surely will.

“Accomplished” is the Hebrew tam, complete, finished, opening the tav stanza, the last. Isaiah 40:2 uses the same thought: “her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.” “Discover” in 1611 meant uncover or expose. Obadiah 10–14 lists what Edom did while Jerusalem fell.