12 `Is it' nothing to you, all ye passing by the way? Look attentively, and see, If there is any pain like my pain, That He is rolling to me? Whom Jehovah hath afflicted In the day of the fierceness of His anger.
`And He confirmeth His words that He hath spoken against us, and against our judges who have judged us, to bring in upon us great evil, in that it hath not been done under the whole heavens as it hath been done in Jerusalem,
and Jesus having turned unto them, said, `Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but for yourselves weep ye, and for your children; for, lo, days do come, in which they shall say, Happy the barren, and wombs that did not bare, and paps that did not give suck; then they shall begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us, and to the hills, Cover us; -- for, if in the green tree they do these things -- in the dry what may happen?'
To make their land become a desolation, A hissing age-during, Every passer by it is astonished, And bemoaneth with his head.
The fierceness of the anger of Jehovah Doth not turn back till His doing, Yea, till His establishing the devices of His heart, In the latter end of the days we consider it!
And greater is the iniquity of the daughter of my people, Than the sin of Sodom, That was overturned as `in' a moment, And no hands were stayed on her. Purer were her Nazarites than snow, Whiter than milk, ruddier of body than rubies, Of sapphire their form. Darker than blackness hath been their visage, They have not been known in out-places, Cleaved hath their skin unto their bone, It hath withered -- it hath been as wood. Better have been the pierced of a sword Than the pierced of famine, For these flow away, pierced through, Without the increase of the field. The hands of merciful women have boiled their own children, They have been for food to them, In the destruction of the daughter of my people. Completed hath Jehovah His fury, He hath poured out the fierceness of His anger, And he kindleth a fire in Zion, And it devoureth her foundations.
for there shall be then great tribulation, such as was not from the beginning of the world till now, no, nor may be.
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Matthew Henry Commentary » Commentary on Lamentations 1
Commentary on Lamentations 1 Matthew Henry Commentary
An Exposition, With Practical Observations, of
The Lamentations of Jeremiah
Chapter 1
We have here the first alphabet of this lamentation, twenty-two stanzas, in which the miseries of Jerusalem are bitterly bewailed and her present deplorable condition is aggravated by comparing it with her former prosperous state; all along, sin is acknowledged and complained of as the procuring cause of all these miseries; and God is appealed to for justice against their enemies and applied to for compassion towards them. The chapter is all of a piece, and the several remonstrances are interwoven; but here is,
Lam 1:1-11
Those that have any disposition to weep with those that weep, one would think, should scarcely be able to refrain from tears at the reading of these verses, so very pathetic are the lamentations here.
Lam 1:12-22
The complaints here are, for substance, the same with those in the foregoing part of the chapter; but in these verses the prophet, in the name of the lamenting church, does more particularly acknowledge the hand of god in these calamities, and the righteousness of his hand.