Lamentations 2

The poem opens with an image that turns a familiar mercy inside out: How hath the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger (v. 1). A cloud over Zion should have meant glory - the cloud that filled the tabernacle and the temple, the visible sign that the LORD had come to dwell among His people. Here the same sky has darkened into wrath. The God who once descended in cloud to be near them now descends in cloud to judge them. And the fall is dizzying in scale: He cast down from heaven unto the earth the beauty of Israel, hurling the glory of the nation from the heights to the dust. Most striking of all, He remembered not his footstool in the day of his anger - the footstool is the temple itself, the place of His presence on earth. The chapter begins, then, by refusing every comfortable explanation. This is not Babylon's triumph or history's accident. The opening word, How, is the cry of a mourner standing over a corpse, and the corpse is a city the LORD Himself has struck.³

Verses 2 through 5 fall like hammer blows, and one verb keeps ringing through them: swallowed up. The Lord hath swallowed up all the habitations of Jacob, and hath not pitied (v. 2); he hath swallowed up Israel, he hath swallowed up all her palaces (v. 5). The picture is of something devoured whole, gone past recovery. And the verbs around it are relentless and personal: He has thrown down, cut off, burned, poured out his fury like fire. Hardest of all is the language of weaponry turned the wrong way. The LORD who had fought for Israel now hath bent his bow like an enemy: he stood with his right hand as an adversary (v. 4). That right hand, which Scripture everywhere celebrates as the hand of rescue - the hand that shattered Pharaoh's armies at the sea - is here drawn back from defending His people and raised against them. The poet states it without flinching: hath not pitied. This is the part of the chapter that cannot be made gentle, and the text does not try. It makes us sit with the full weight of a judgment that comes from the very One who had been the nation's shield.

The blow reaches even the holiest ground: The Lord hath cast off his altar, he hath abhorred his sanctuary (v. 7). Notice the possessives - his altar, his sanctuary. These are not pagan shrines being purged; they are the LORD's own house, the place He chose to set His name. He has violently taken away his tabernacle, as if it were of a garden (v. 6) - tearing down what looked permanent as easily as a man clears a booth from a field once the harvest is over. The solemn feasts and sabbaths are made to be forgotten; king and priest alike are despised in His anger. And then a detail almost unbearable in its irony: where the songs of worship once rose, they have made a noise in the house of the LORD, as in the day of a solemn feast (v. 7) - but the voices now filling the temple are the shouts of enemy soldiers, raising in the sanctuary the kind of clamor that once belonged to festival praise. What this teaches is severe and clear: the temple was never a charm that made Jerusalem untouchable. The people had treated God's presence as a guarantee of safety regardless of how they lived. The chapter shows that holiness gives no immunity to a covenant abandoned; the house itself can be given up when those within it have forsaken the One who dwells there.

Lest anyone imagine the ruin slipped past God or exceeded what He intended, the poet is exact about its source: The LORD hath purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion: he hath stretched out a line, he hath not withdrawn his hand from destroying (v. 8). The detail of the line is arresting. A measuring line is a builder's tool, stretched out to lay foundations and raise walls true and straight. Here the same careful instrument is used in reverse - God measures the wall not to build it but to mark it for demolition, deliberate and precise. This is no blind rampage; it is purposed, planned, carried through with terrible thoroughness, His hand not withdrawn until the work is done. And the consequences cut to the heart of the nation's life. Her king and her princes are among the Gentiles: the law is no more; her prophets also find no vision from the LORD (v. 9). King, law, and prophet - the three pillars that ordered the life of the people - all collapse at once. Worst of all is the silence of heaven: the prophets seek a vision and find none. When a people will not hear God in the long day of His patience, there comes a night in which He does not speak.

After the thunder of the first nine verses, the poem suddenly comes down to ground level, to the faces of particular people, and the change is devastating. The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground, and keep silence: they have cast up dust upon their heads; they have girded themselves with sackcloth (v. 10). The elders were the wisdom of the city, the ones who sat in the gate and spoke the deciding word. Now they sit in the dirt and say nothing - their silence is its own eloquence, for grief past a certain depth has no words left. The young women, who should be at the height of life and hope, hang down their heads to the ground. The whole posture of the city has collapsed downward - heads bowed, bodies on the earth, dust where there had been dignity. This is what the abstractions of judgment look like when they land on actual lives. The chapter will not let us contemplate the fall of Jerusalem as a theological proposition only. It makes us look at the old men in the ashes and the girls with their faces in the dust.

Here the poet's own composure breaks, and the most wrenching image in the chapter arrives. Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people (v. 11). The Hebrew reaches for the inward organs - eyes, bowels, liver - because the grief is not a mood but a physical undoing; he feels it churn in the deepest part of him. And the cause is named without mercy: because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city. It is the children that finally undo him. In the famine of the siege, the littlest ones grow faint, and they turn to the only source of help they have ever known: They say to their mothers, Where is corn and wine? (v. 12) - a child's simple question, asking for bread, when there is no bread to give. They swooned as the wounded in the streets, their lives ebbing into their mothers' bosom, in the very arms that could no longer feed them. The chapter has shown us God's anger and the ruin of the holy places; now it shows us a starving child asking its mother for food. Both are true. The judgment is just - and the cost of sin, when it finally comes due, falls on the small and the innocent in ways that should make us weep as the poet weeps.

The poet turns to comfort the city and finds, agonizingly, that he cannot. What thing shall I take to witness for thee? what thing shall I liken to thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? what shall I equal to thee, that I may comfort thee? (v. 13). To comfort someone in grief, we usually reach for a comparison - others have suffered as you do; this too has been survived. The poet searches for such a parallel and comes up empty. There is nothing to set beside this sorrow that would make it bearable, no precedent that fits, no example that helps. For thy breach is great like the sea: who can heal thee? The wound is as wide as the sea - vast, boundless, beyond any human power to close. And the question hangs there unanswered: who can heal thee? The honesty of this is itself important. The chapter does not rush to a cheap reassurance; it admits there is a grief no human comfort can reach and a wound no human hand can heal. That unanswered question - who can heal thee? - is left open on purpose. It is precisely the question the rest of Scripture will spend itself answering, for there is a Healer the poet cannot yet name, whose own wounds are the closing of this breach.

Before the chapter reaches its center, it names one of the deep causes of the ruin: false comfort. Thy prophets have seen vain and foolish things for thee: and they have not discovered thine iniquity, to turn away thy captivity; but have seen for thee false burdens and causes of banishment (v. 14). These were the popular prophets, the ones who told the people what they wanted to hear - peace, security, no judgment coming. Their failure is described with terrible precision: they have not discovered thine iniquity. They did not expose the sin. And because they covered the wound instead of opening it, they could not turn away thy captivity - their flattery left the disease untreated, and so the exile came. There is a sharp warning here about the kind of counsel we welcome. The prophets who would have saved Jerusalem were the ones who named her sin plainly, and the city had hated them for it. The prophets who doomed her were the ones who soothed. A word that only ever reassures, that never names what is wrong, is not kindness; it is a vain and foolish thing that leaves a person walking comfortably toward a cliff. Love that will not tell the truth is finally a kind of cruelty.

Now the watching world has its say, and its scorn lands on the city's former glory. All that pass by clap their hands at thee; they hiss and wag their head at the daughter of Jerusalem, saying, Is this the city that men call The perfection of beauty, The joy of the whole earth? (v. 15). Passersby clap and hiss and shake their heads - gestures of contempt and astonishment - and their mockery takes the form of a cruel question: this, this heap of rubble, was the city the whole earth admired? The titles they throw back are real ones; Jerusalem had truly been called the perfection of beauty and the joy of the earth. The taunt twists the old honor into a jeer. Then the enemies speak more savagely still: We have swallowed her up: certainly this is the day that we looked for; we have found, we have seen it (v. 16). They take the credit and the satisfaction; they had longed for this day and now gloat that they have lived to see it. And here is the bitter irony the chapter sets up: the enemies boast we have swallowed her up - using the very verb the poet has already used of God twice over (vv. 2, 5). The conquerors imagine the triumph is theirs. The poem has already told us whose hand was truly behind it. Babylon thinks it has won; it has only been the instrument.

Here is the verse that interprets the whole chapter, the still point at its center: The LORD hath done that which he had devised; he hath fulfilled his word that he had commanded in the days of old (v. 17). Everything the poem has described - the cloud of anger, the swallowing up, the cast-off altar, the broken wall - is gathered into this one sentence and given its meaning. This was not Babylon's achievement, nor history's accident, nor the failure of a God too weak to protect His own. It was devised - purposed long beforehand - and it was commanded in the days of old. Generations earlier, the covenant had set before the people, in unmistakable terms, the blessings of faithfulness and the curses of forsaking the LORD; the sword and the siege and the scattering were spelled out plainly, with a warning to choose life (Deut. 28). What falls in Lamentations 2 is that ancient word, kept to the letter. And this changes how the whole disaster must be read. A God who fulfils what He warned of across centuries is not capricious; He is faithful - faithful even in judgment, true to His word when His word is terrible. That is, strangely, the seed of hope buried in this hardest verse. The same God who keeps His warnings also keeps His promises. The faithfulness that did not flinch from the curse will not flinch from the mercy He has also sworn.

Having stared the judgment full in the face, the poet now does the one thing still left to do, and it is the turning point of the whole poem: he tells the broken city to pray. Their heart cried unto the Lord, O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears run down like a river day and night: give thyself no rest; let not the apple of thine eye cease (v. 18). Notice that this is not a quiet, composed prayer. The tears are to run like a river, ceaselessly, day and night. The city is told to give thyself no rest - to let the weeping go on, the eye never drying, until heaven answers. This is grief turned Godward and refusing to stop. There is something bracing in it. The chapter does not counsel the sufferer to pull herself together, to put on a brave face, to get over it. It counsels her to weep without ceasing - but to weep unto the Lord. The difference between despair and this kind of lament is not the amount of tears; it is the direction they run. Despair weeps into the void. Lament weeps toward the face of God. The same anguish, turned toward Him, becomes prayer.

The summons rises to its height in the most quoted line of the chapter: Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches pour out thine heart like water before the face of the Lord (v. 19). Every word is doing work. Arise - do not lie still in the grief; get up and act. In the night… in the beginning of the watches - the darkest hours, when sleep will not come and the heart is most exposed; pray then, exactly then. And the central image: pour out thine heart like water. Do not bring God a measured, edited, presentable portion of your sorrow. Pour out the whole of it, like a vessel emptied and turned upside down until nothing is held back - the fear, the anger, the bewilderment, the grief, all of it, before the face of the Lord. Then: lift up thy hands toward him, the ancient posture of a beggar before a king, of empty hands reaching up to be filled. And the prayer has a content - it is for the life of thy young children, that faint for hunger. This is intercession at its rawest: a city with nothing left, lifting empty hands in the dark, crying out not even for itself but for its starving children. The chapter that has shown the wrath of God most starkly also shows, here, that the door to His presence is not shut. The very hands sin had emptied are told to lift themselves toward Him.

The poem ends not with resolution but with the prayer itself, flung up into the dark - and it is startlingly bold. Behold, O LORD, and consider to whom thou hast done this (v. 20). The city dares to ask God to look at what His judgment has wrought, to consider the horror of mothers and children and the priest and prophet slain in the sanctuary. It does not tidy the grief or excuse it; it lays the full, terrible scene before Him and asks Him to see. The young and the old lie on the ground in the streets… thou hast slain them in the day of thine anger; thou hast killed, and not pitied (v. 21). And the final verse closes the circle the chapter opened: so that in the day of the LORD'S anger none escaped nor remained: those that I have swaddled and brought up hath mine enemy consumed (v. 22). The dirge ends in the dark, with no comfort yet given, no answer yet spoken. And this restraint is part of its truthfulness. Real grief is not always resolved by the end of the day; some nights close with the cry still hanging unanswered in the air. Yet the very last act of the poem is a prayer addressed to God by name - O LORD. The covenant name is on the lips of the sufferer at the end. Even with no answer in hand, the city is still speaking to Him. And that, the next chapter will reveal, is exactly where mercy comes to meet her: It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not (Lam. 3:22). But that dawn is not yet. Tonight there is only the honest cry - and the God who hears it.