Lamentations 2:21 Meaning and Explanation

The streets are strewn with the dead of every age, the young and the old together on the bare ground. The young women and young men, who should have carried the nation's future, have fallen by the sword. No age was spared; the judgment swept across the generations all at once.

The poet again lays it before God in stark words: 'thou hast slain them in the day of thine anger; thou hast killed, and not pitied.' He does not soften God's part in it. This unsparing honesty is the strange integrity of biblical lament: it tells God the truth of how things look from the dust, even when that truth is almost too heavy to speak. Faith here is not pretending the pain is less, but refusing to take it anywhere but to God.