Lamentations 5
Lamentations 5 is the prayer that closes the book. The four chapters before it were acrostics - each one marching through the Hebrew alphabet, grief given an ordered shape. This last chapter drops the acrostic but keeps the count: twenty-two verses, one for each letter, as though the whole alphabet of sorrow had been gathered up and at last turned into a single petition. It opens by asking God simply to see: Remember, O LORD, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach (v. 1). What follows is not accusation but testimony - an inventory of everything that has been lost, laid out plainly before the only One who can do anything about it.3
The catalogue is unsparing. The inheritance has passed to strangers and the houses to aliens (v. 2); the people are orphaned and their mothers widowed (v. 3); even water and firewood must now be bought (v. 4); necks are bent under a yoke with no rest (v. 5). Princes are hanged, elders dishonoured, young men set to grinding like beasts, the music gone silent in the streets (vv. 12-14). And at the bottom of it all comes the confession that names the wound honestly: The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned! (v. 16). The prayer does not pretend the catastrophe fell out of a clear sky. It owns its share.
Then, with everything earthly in ruins, the prayer reaches for the one thing that still stands: Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation (v. 19). On that unshaken ground rises the book's last great request - Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old (v. 21). It is a prayer that holds God's initiative and the heart's real turning together in a single breath, asking for grace that does not bypass the soul but moves it. And then the book ends where honest grief sometimes must: But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us (v. 22). The ache is not papered over. Yet even that last hard sentence is addressed to God - and a grief that keeps speaking to Him has not let go of hope.
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Lamentations 5:1-9Remember, O LORD, What Is Come Upon Us
1Remember, O LORD, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach. 2Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens. 3We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows. 4We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us. 5Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest. 6We have given the hand to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread. 7Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities. 8Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand. 9We gat our bread with the peril of our lives because of the sword of the wilderness.
The whole book has wept; now it turns and speaks directly to God, and its first word is a plea to be seen: Remember, O LORD, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach (v. 1). Three verbs stack on top of one another - remember… consider… behold - and they are not asking God for information He lacks. To remember, in the language of Scripture, is not the opposite of forgetting a fact; it is to turn attention toward someone and to act on their behalf. When God “remembered” Noah in the flood, or Hannah in her barrenness, the word marked the moment He moved to help. So this is a prayer that God would not merely register the ruin but lean toward it - that He would behold our reproach, the shame heaped on a people stripped of everything. There is something quietly bold in beginning here. The people in the dust do not start by defending themselves or by demanding an explanation. They ask, first, to be regarded by the One whose regard is their only hope.3
Then the prayer lays out the loss, and its specificity is part of its honesty: Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens. We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows (vv. 2-3). Each line names a particular grief rather than a vague sadness. The inheritance was no mere property; it was the land tied to covenant and family, handed down through generations as the visible sign of belonging - and now it is held by foreigners. The household has collapsed into the very categories Israel's law singled out for special protection: the orphan, the fatherless, the widow. A people who were meant to care for the vulnerable have themselves become the vulnerable. The prayer does not rush past these losses or spiritualize them into lessons. It states them plainly, one after another, because they are real and they deserve to be mourned by name. Grief honestly named before God is not unbelief; it is the form love takes when what it loved has been taken away.
The catalogue presses on into the body and the daily grind of survival: We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us. Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest (vv. 4-5). The indignity is total. Even water - the freest gift of the land - must now be bought; even firewood, once gathered without a thought, is sold back to them at a price. The image of necks under persecution is the image of a yoke laid on an animal, of a people driven and worked with no Sabbath rest left to them - the rest that had been woven into the very rhythm of their covenant life. And the prayer is candid about how they came to this pass: We have given the hand to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread (v. 6). They had reached to the old powers for help and security rather than to the LORD, and the reaching had not saved them. Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand (v. 8). The social order is upended, and - the hardest line of all - there is none to deliver. They are out of human options. That emptiness is exactly where the prayer is driving.
One verse in this opening movement has troubled readers for centuries: Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities (v. 7). On the surface it sounds like a complaint - the previous generation sinned and died, and now the children are paying for it. The cry is real and the Scriptures take it seriously; the people genuinely feel the weight of a disaster long in the making, the slow harvest of choices that were not all their own. Yet the prayer does not finally hide behind that complaint, and that is the crucial thing to watch. Within a few verses it will stop pointing back at the fathers and say, of itself, woe unto us, that we have sinned (v. 16). The two confessions sit side by side without contradiction. There is a true sense in which a community inherits the consequences of generations before it; and there is a true sense in which each heart must own its own part. A mature prayer can hold both - feeling honestly the burden it did not choose, and refusing to use that burden as an excuse. The road from verse 7 to verse 16 is the road from “this was done to us” to “we too have sinned,” and the prayer walks it without losing its honesty at either end.
Lamentations 5:10-18The Crown Is Fallen From Our Head
10Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine. 11They ravished the women in Zion, and the maids in the cities of Judah. 12Princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of elders were not honoured. 13They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood. 14The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick. 15The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning. 16The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned! 17For this our heart is faint; for these things our eyes are dim. 18Because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes walk upon it.
The lament reaches its harshest verses, and the prayer does not look away. Famine has blackened the skin like the scorched wall of an oven (v. 10); the most defenseless have been violated (v. 11); princes are hanged up and the honored faces of the elders count for nothing (v. 12); the young men are set to the grinding usually done by slaves or beasts, and children stagger under loads of wood (v. 13). It is an inventory of a world turned upside down, where everything that should have been protected - the vulnerable, the leaders, the children - is broken or degraded. The Scriptures do not flinch from recording it, and the prayer does not soften it into something easier to hear. There is a kind of false comfort that hurries past suffering like this, eager to get to the hopeful part. Lamentations refuses that hurry. It insists that the wound be looked at honestly and at length, because a hope that has not first reckoned with the real depth of the loss is too small to be of any use. Only a prayer brave enough to name the worst is brave enough to ask for everything.
Two losses in these verses cut deeper than they first appear: The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick. The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning (vv. 14-15). The gate was the heart of a city's common life - where elders sat to judge disputes, where business was done, where the wisdom of the old steadied the young. Its silence means the whole framework of ordered community has collapsed. And the musick of the young men, the dance, the joy of our heart - these name something even more inward. It is not only that the people have lost their land and their leaders; they have lost the capacity to rejoice. The songs have stopped. The dancing has curdled into grief. This is one of the truest things suffering does, and the prayer is honest enough to say it: deep loss does not merely take away what we had; it can take away our very ability to be glad about anything. When the joy of the heart has ceased, the absence of song is itself a wound to be mourned - and, as the prayer will dare to ask, a wound only God can heal.
At the bottom of the descent stands the verse the whole prayer has been moving toward: The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned! (v. 16). The fallen crown gathers up every loss at once - the crown of the king, the crown of the city set on its holy hill, the crown of a people's dignity and calling, all of it tumbled into the dust. But notice what the prayer does not say. It does not say merely “woe unto us, that this has happened to us.” It says woe unto us, that we have sinned. Here the catalogue of suffering turns, in a single clause, into confession. The people stop describing the disaster as something done to them and own their part in it. This is the hinge of the chapter and one of the most important moments in the whole book. The earlier complaint - our fathers have sinned (v. 7) - does not vanish, but it is no longer the last word. The mature thing, the healing thing, is to be able to say of one's own ruin: we have sinned. Only here, with the crown in the dust and the truth told, is the prayer finally ready to ask for what it most needs. For this our heart is faint; for these things our eyes are dim (v. 17). The honesty has cost them everything - and it has cleared the ground for grace.
Lamentations 5:19-22Turn Thou Us Unto Thee, O LORD
19Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation. 20Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time? 21Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old. 22But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.
With every earthly thing in ruins - land, city, king, temple, crown - the prayer suddenly lifts its eyes and finds the one reality that has not fallen: Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation (v. 19). After eighteen verses cataloguing what has been lost, the contrast is breathtaking. Jerusalem's throne lies empty; God's throne stands. The crown has fallen from the people's head; the LORD reigns still. This is the bedrock the whole book has been searching for - not a denial of the ruin, but something underneath it that the ruin cannot touch. Earlier the prophet found one foothold in the wreckage: It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed… great is thy faithfulness (Lam. 3:22-23). Here that foothold becomes a throne. When everything that can be shaken has been shaken, what remains is the LORD Himself, unchanged from generation to generation. And it is no accident that the next verse dares to ask a hard question - Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time? (v. 20). Only because the throne is eternal is the question worth asking at all. You do not plead with a God who has fallen with you; you plead with the One who still reigns.3
Out of that unshaken ground rises the book's last great request, and it is the most important sentence in Lamentations: Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned (v. 21). Everything the prayer has confessed comes to rest here. The people have admitted they sinned (v. 16); they have admitted there is none to deliver them (v. 8); and now they admit the deepest thing of all - that they cannot even turn themselves back. The turning they need is beyond their own reach. So they ask God to do it: Turn thou us - You do the turning - and we shall be turned. But hear the whole sentence, for it holds two truths together that we are forever tempted to pull apart. It is not a prayer of passive helplessness, as if the people will simply be moved like stones with no part of their own; the verse fully expects that they shall be turned, that a real turning of the heart will follow. Nor is it a boast of self-rescue, as if they could repent by gritting their teeth; the first word is Thou. God must begin it, and when He begins it, the heart truly turns. This is grace that does not bypass the soul but moves it - the LORD drawing, and the drawn one coming home. The same plea is heard in the prophets, where God says of His wayward people, Turn thou me, and I shall be turned; for thou art the LORD my God (Jer. 31:18). To ask God to turn us, and to mean it, is already the turning beginning.
The second half of the verse asks for something the first half makes possible: renew our days as of old (v. 21). It is worth weighing the words carefully, because the prayer is not simply asking to rewind the clock. The days as of old were the days before the fall - but those exact days cannot be handed back; the city is rubble and the dead are not raised by nostalgia. What the prayer asks is to be renewed: not a return to an unspoiled past, but a making-new of the worn-out present - the recovery of the very things this chapter has mourned as lost. The joy that ceased (v. 15), the song that fell silent (v. 14), the dignity of the fallen crown (v. 16) - let these be made new. It is a larger and humbler request than mere restoration. The people are not asking God to undo history; they are asking Him to do the one thing only He can do, which is to make worn and broken things live again. And there is a hope buried in the asking. A God who can turn the heart that could not turn itself is a God who can also renew the days that no human effort could bring back. The two halves of the verse belong together: the One who turns us is the One who renews us.
And then the book ends - not on the prayer for renewal, but on a line that refuses to pretend: But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us (v. 22). It is a startling close. We expect the prayer to resolve, to land on a note of assurance, to tie the grief off with a promise. Instead it ends with the ache still raw, the rejection still felt, the wrath still real. This is the deep honesty of Lamentations, and it is worth receiving rather than explaining away. The book will not give a tidy ending to a grief that is not yet tidy. The exile is not over; the comfort has not arrived; the people still feel cast off. And yet - look closely - even this last hard sentence is spoken to God. It is not a verse about God muttered to the air; it is a verse addressed to Him: thou hast rejected, thou art wroth. A grief that has truly given up does not keep talking to the One it has given up on. The very act of pressing this complaint into God's presence is an act of stubborn faith - a refusal to let go of Him even while feeling let go. (The ancient custom of reading verse 21 again after verse 22, so the book is not left on its darkest word, grew out of exactly this instinct: the hope of being turned is meant to have the final echo, even when the last written line is hard.) The prayer ends unresolved - but it ends in God's presence, still speaking, still there. And a hope that keeps praying from the bottom has not died.
Further study
- The Hebrew text of Lamentations 5 with Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and other classical commentators side by side - useful for zakhar (v. 1, the “remember” that opens the prayer), for hashivenu (v. 21, “turn thou us,” from the root shuv), and for the much-noted custom of repeating verse 21 after verse 22 so the book does not close on its hardest line.
- Lamentations 5 ↔ Psalm 102 · Hebrews 1 · Jeremiah 31Intertextual BibleTraces the threads tying Lamentations 5 to the rest of Scripture - the everlasting throne of verse 19 read alongside thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever (Heb. 1:8), and the prayer turn thou us (v. 21) set beside the promise of a heart God Himself will turn and renew (Jer. 31:18, 33; Ezek. 36:26).
- Lamentations 5 - Translators' NotesNET BibleThe NET Bible's detailed footnotes on Lamentations 5 - the plea to “remember” that opens the chapter (v. 1), the catalogue of dispossession in verses 2-5, the fallen “crown” of verse 16, and the grammar of verse 21 that binds God's turning of the people to their being truly turned.
Where this echoes in Scripture
Remember, O LORD, What Is Come Upon Us
- Psalm 137:1By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.The same exile, the same grief turned Godward - the loss that verses 1-5 lay before the LORD.
- Lamentations 3:19-20Remembering mine affliction and my misery... My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me.The same plea to remember (v. 1), made earlier in the book and turned, there, into hope.
- Exodus 2:24And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.What “remember” means when God is its subject (v. 1) - the turning toward a people that began the exodus.
- Matthew 11:28Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.The rest the bent necks of verse 5 had lost - held out by the One who came to the heavy-laden.
- Psalm 136:23Who remembered us in our low estate: for his mercy endureth for ever.The answer the prayer reaches for - a God who remembers the lowly, just as verse 1 asks.
The Crown Is Fallen From Our Head
- Job 19:9He hath stripped me of my glory, and taken the crown from my head.The same image as verse 16 - the crown of honor fallen, glory stripped away in suffering.
- Jeremiah 13:18Say unto the king and to the queen... your principalities shall come down, even the crown of your glory.The fall foretold - the crown of glory brought down, which verse 16 now mourns as fallen.
- John 19:2And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head.The crown the Gospel answers verse 16 with - the crown of the curse taken up by the One who bore the sin.
- Psalm 51:4Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight.The confession of verse 16 - the turn from blaming the disaster to owning the sin behind it.
- 1 Peter 5:4ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away.The crown restored - the fallen crown of verse 16 answered by one that can never fall.
Turn Thou Us Unto Thee, O LORD
- Hebrews 1:8But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom.The everlasting throne of verse 19 - heard by the New Testament as addressed to the Son.
- Jeremiah 31:18turn thou me, and I shall be turned; for thou art the LORD my God.The same plea as verse 21, word for word - God’s turning and the heart’s real turning held together.
- Psalm 102:25-27They shall perish, but thou shalt endure... but thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.The contrast of verse 19 - the world wears out and falls; the LORD remains unchanged.
- 2 Corinthians 5:17if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.The renewal verse 21 prays for - not a rewound past, but worn things made new.
- Hebrews 12:28we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace.The unshaken throne of verse 19 - a kingdom that, unlike fallen Zion, cannot be moved.