Lamentations 3:4 Meaning and Explanation

The affliction is described as bodily ruin. His flesh and skin are made old, worn out before their time, the way prolonged grief and hardship age a person from the inside. The body bears the marks of what the soul has endured.

'He hath broken my bones' reaches to the deepest frame of the self. Bones are the inmost structure, what holds a body upright; to have them broken is to be undone at the core. The sufferer holds nothing back in describing his pain. This unflinching catalog of wounds is part of the poem's integrity, and it makes the turn toward hope, when it comes, all the more astonishing.