21 -- For the breach of the daughter of my people am I crushed; I go mourning; astonishment hath taken hold of me.
And thou shalt say this word unto them: Let mine eyes run down with tears, night and day, and not cease; for the virgin daughter of my people is broken with a great breach, with a very grievous blow.
Before them the peoples are in anguish: all faces turn pale.
My bowels! my bowels! I am in travail! [Oh,] the walls of my heart! My heart maketh a noise in me; I cannot hold my peace: for thou hearest, my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the clamour of war.
Oh that my head were waters, and mine eye a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!
I say [the] truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing witness with me in [the] Holy Spirit, that I have great grief and uninterrupted pain in my heart, for I have wished, I myself, to be a curse from the Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen, according to flesh;
And I said to the king, Let the king live for ever! Why should not my countenance be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers' sepulchres, lies waste, and its gates are consumed with fire?
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that made us wail [required] mirth, [saying,] Sing us [one] of the songs of Zion. How should we sing a song of Jehovah's upon a foreign soil? If I forget thee, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget [its skill]; If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to my palate: if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
I am black, but comely, daughters of Jerusalem, As the tents of Kedar, As the curtains of Solomon. Look not upon me, because I am black; Because the sun hath looked upon me. My mother's children were angry with me: They made me keeper of the vineyards; Mine own vineyard have I not kept.
But as for me, I have not hastened from being a shepherd in following thee, neither have I desired the fatal day, thou knowest: that which came out of my lips was before thy face.
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Matthew Henry Commentary » Commentary on Jeremiah 8
Commentary on Jeremiah 8 Matthew Henry Commentary
Chapter 8
The prophet proceeds, in this chapter, both to magnify and to justify the destruction that God was bringing upon this people, to show how grievous it would be and yet how righteous.
Jer 8:1-3
These verses might fitly have been joined to the close of the foregoing chapter, as giving a further description of the dreadful desolation which the army of the Chaldeans should make in the land. It shall strangely alter the property of death itself, and for the worse too.
Jer 8:4-12
The prophet here is instructed to set before this people the folly of their impenitence, which was it that brought this ruin upon them. They are here represented as the most stupid senseless people in the world, that would not be made wise by all the methods that Infinite Wisdom took to bring them to themselves and their right mind, and so to prevent the ruin that was coming upon them.
Jer 8:13-22
In these verses we have,