Study

a Bible passage

Click a verse to see commentary

Select a resource above

2. Lord's Anger Against His People

¹ This chapter is an acrostic poem, the verses of which begin with the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet.How the Lord has covered Daughter Zion
   with the cloud of his anger Or How the Lord in his anger / has treated Daughter Zion with contempt!
He has hurled down the splendor of Israel
   from heaven to earth;
he has not remembered his footstool
   in the day of his anger.

    ² Without pity the Lord has swallowed up
   all the dwellings of Jacob;
in his wrath he has torn down
   the strongholds of Daughter Judah.
He has brought her kingdom and its princes
   down to the ground in dishonor.

    ³ In fierce anger he has cut off
   every horn Or off / all the strength; or every king Horn here symbolizes strength. of Israel.
He has withdrawn his right hand
   at the approach of the enemy.
He has burned in Jacob like a flaming fire
   that consumes everything around it.

    ⁴ Like an enemy he has strung his bow;
   his right hand is ready.
Like a foe he has slain
   all who were pleasing to the eye;
he has poured out his wrath like fire
   on the tent of Daughter Zion.

    ⁵ The Lord is like an enemy;
   he has swallowed up Israel.
He has swallowed up all her palaces
   and destroyed her strongholds.
He has multiplied mourning and lamentation
   for Daughter Judah.

    ⁶ He has laid waste his dwelling like a garden;
   he has destroyed his place of meeting.
The LORD has made Zion forget
   her appointed festivals and her Sabbaths;
in his fierce anger he has spurned
   both king and priest.

    ⁷ The Lord has rejected his altar
   and abandoned his sanctuary.
He has given the walls of her palaces
   into the hands of the enemy;
they have raised a shout in the house of the LORD
   as on the day of an appointed festival.

    ⁸ The LORD determined to tear down
   the wall around Daughter Zion.
He stretched out a measuring line
   and did not withhold his hand from destroying.
He made ramparts and walls lament;
   together they wasted away.

    ⁹ Her gates have sunk into the ground;
   their bars he has broken and destroyed.
Her king and her princes are exiled among the nations,
   the law is no more,
and her prophets no longer find
   visions from the LORD.

    ¹⁰ The elders of Daughter Zion
   sit on the ground in silence;
they have sprinkled dust on their heads
   and put on sackcloth.
The young women of Jerusalem
   have bowed their heads to the ground.

    ¹¹ My eyes fail from weeping,
   I am in torment within;
my heart is poured out on the ground
   because my people are destroyed,
because children and infants faint
   in the streets of the city.

    ¹² They say to their mothers,
   “Where is bread and wine?”
as they faint like the wounded
   in the streets of the city,
as their lives ebb away
   in their mothers’ arms.

    ¹³ What can I say for you?
   With what can I compare you,
   Daughter Jerusalem?
To what can I liken you,
   that I may comfort you,
   Virgin Daughter Zion?
Your wound is as deep as the sea.
   Who can heal you?

    ¹⁴ The visions of your prophets
   were false and worthless;
they did not expose your sin
   to ward off your captivity.
The prophecies they gave you
   were false and misleading.

    ¹⁵ All who pass your way
   clap their hands at you;
they scoff and shake their heads
   at Daughter Jerusalem:
“Is this the city that was called
   the perfection of beauty,
   the joy of the whole earth?”

    ¹⁶ All your enemies open their mouths
   wide against you;
they scoff and gnash their teeth
   and say, “We have swallowed her up.
This is the day we have waited for;
   we have lived to see it.”

    ¹⁷ The LORD has done what he planned;
   he has fulfilled his word,
   which he decreed long ago.
He has overthrown you without pity,
   he has let the enemy gloat over you,
   he has exalted the horn Horn here symbolizes strength. of your foes.

    ¹⁸ The hearts of the people
   cry out to the Lord.
You walls of Daughter Zion,
   let your tears flow like a river
   day and night;
give yourself no relief,
   your eyes no rest.

    ¹⁹ Arise, cry out in the night,
   as the watches of the night begin;
pour out your heart like water
   in the presence of the Lord.
Lift up your hands to him
   for the lives of your children,
who faint from hunger
   at every street corner.

    ²⁰ “Look, LORD, and consider:
   Whom have you ever treated like this?
Should women eat their offspring,
   the children they have cared for?
Should priest and prophet be killed
   in the sanctuary of the Lord?

    ²¹ “Young and old lie together
   in the dust of the streets;
my young men and young women
   have fallen by the sword.
You have slain them in the day of your anger;
   you have slaughtered them without pity.

    ²² “As you summon to a feast day,
   so you summoned against me terrors on every side.
In the day of the LORD’s anger
   no one escaped or survived;
those I cared for and reared
   my enemy has destroyed.”

The Prophet himself now speaks, and says that his eyes were consumed with tears, while weeping on account of the calamities of the people: even in the deepest grief tears at length dry up; but when there is no end of weeping, the sorrow, which as it were never ripens, must necessarily be very bitter. Jeremiah then expresses now the vehemence of his grief when he says that his eyes failed through shedding tears. He said in Jeremiah 9, “Who will give me eyes for fountains?” that is, who will make my eyes to turn into fountains, that they may continually flow? and this he said, because he saw how dreadful a vengeance of God impended over the obstinate. But now, when he sees accomplished what he had dreaded, he says, that his eyes were consumed with weeping.

To the same purpose is what he adds, that his bowels were disturbed. It is the same verb as we have seen before, חמרמרו, chemermeru; which some render “bound,” as we also said then. I know not why one expositor has changed what he had elsewhere said rightly; he puts here, “swollen have my bowels.” But I see no reason why the verb should be taken here in a different sense, for it immediately follows, my liver is poured forth on the ground. He may, indeed, have included other parts of the intestines by stating a part for the whole. The word here properly means the liver, as when Solomon says,

“He hath pierced my liver.” (Proverbs 7:23.)

But Jeremiah, in short, shews that all his faculties were so seized with grief, that no part was exempt. He then says that his liver was poured forth, but in the same sense in which he said that his bowels were disturbed. They are indeed hyperbolical expressions; but as to the meaning, Jeremiah simply expresses his feelings; for there is no doubt but that he was incredibly anxious and sorrowful on account of so great a calamity; for he not only lamented the adversity in no ordinary way, but he also considered how wicked was that obstinacy in which the people had hardened themselves for almost fifty years; for he had spent himself in vain, not for a short time, but for nearly fifty years he never ceased to speak to them. He then, no doubt, thought within himself what the people had deserved, so that he had no common dread of God’s vengeance. This, then, was the reason why he said that his bowels were disturbed and his liver poured forth. ¹⁵⁸¹⁵⁸     The verbs here are all in the past tense, and the versions so render them. Our version is wrong, as well as that of Blayney and Henderson, in rendering them in the present tense; for the Prophet is describing how he felt when he witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem, —

   11. Consume with tears did my eyes, agitated were my bowels,
Poured out on the ground was my liver, for the breach of the daughter of my people, When faint did the child and the suckling in the streets of the city.
    — Ed. He, however, mentions the cause of his sorrow, even the breach or destruction of the daughter of his people; and he mentions one thing in particular, because the little one and he who sucked the breasts vanished away in the streets of the city; for so I render the verb עתף, otheph, which properly means to cover; but its secondary meaning is to vanish away, as we shall again presently see. It was, indeed, a miserable sight, when not only men and women were everywhere slain, but when, through famine, little children also fainted. We, indeed, know that infants move our pity, for the tears of a child in hunger penetrate into our inmost souls. When, therefore, little children and those who hung on their mothers’ breasts, cried through the streets of the city, it must have touched the most iron hearts. It was then not without reason that Jeremiah referred to this in particular, that little children and sucklings vanished away, not in a deserted and barren land, but in the very streets of the city. It follows, —