Lamentations 5:10 Meaning and Explanation

'Our skin was black like an oven.' The famine's effects are written on their bodies. Their skin has grown dark and burning, scorched as the inside wall of an oven, whether from fever, from the parching heat of starvation, or from the ravages of hunger upon the flesh. The body itself testifies to the severity of the famine.

'Because of the terrible famine.' The cause is named plainly: a famine so severe it has transformed their very skin. Throughout these poems the suffering of the body has been described with unflinching honesty, and here again the poet refuses to soften it. The blackened, burning skin is the physical evidence of an agony that words can only approach. The people lay even this before God, asking him to behold what the famine has done to them.