Deeper Commentary
Lamentations 2:1 How has the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in His anger! He has cast down from heaven to the earth the beauty of Israel, and hasn’t remembered His footstool in the day of His anger- It was Jeremiah who was angry (see on Lam. 1:22). But he seems to transfer that anger onto God, and he implies that this Divine anger was too fierce and therefore unmerited. Despite having so often himself demonstrated why God's anger was appropriate and deserved. He was focusing on just one part of the whole picture and obsessing about it. Which is typical depressive behaviour. The cloud between God and Israel was the cloud of their own sins and their incense offered in His temple to other gods. And Israel had used her "beauty" for prostitution and unfaithfulness to Him. Israel had refused to serve Him, preferring the service of idols and the Gentiles; and so they were hardly His footstool, if we understand the people of the footstool as those submissive to Him. God's "footstool" could refer to the holy place; see on :4. Or more generally to the temple- hence the invitations to come worship Yahweh at His footstool (Ps. 99:1,5; 132:7). The covering with a cloud [literally, 'beclouding'] was because of their sins, but that cloud would lift at the restoration, promised after 70 years: "for all whose wickedness I have hidden My face from this city. Behold, I will bring it health and cure, and I will cure them; and I will reveal to them abundance of peace and truth. I will cause the captivity of Judah and the captivity of Israel to return, and will build them, as at the first" (Jer. 33:5-7). But Jeremiah wanted the cloud to lift immediately, and the restoration to happen then rather than after his time. Just as the wonderful promises of the future Kingdom of God mean practically nothing to those who want to see everything resolved here and now. Jeremiah had been told by God to buy a field, to develop his faith that one day, in the restored Kingdom after his resurrection, that field would be personally his. But he hadn't learnt the lesson- he reasons in Lamentations as if that future Kingdom would never come.
Everything in Lam. 2 is thrown down (:1), broken down (:2), brought down (:2), cut down (:3). The whole religious system is to be no more; and the aim was humilitation and thereby personal relationship with God. We too are to humble ourselves under God's mighty hand, that brings us down, that we might be exalted in due time.
I have noted throughout Lamentations the allusions to Job. But both God and Elihu accuse Job of clouding God's "counsel" or intention to save him, by his "words without knowledge". The source of Job's "cloud" between God and himself was his own pride and refusal to repent. And it is the same here. But like Job, Jeremiah wrongly blames that cloud on God. He is not only misinterpreting Job, but he fails to learn the lessons from the book. Jeremiah's focus is upon what God has done to His people- Lam. 2:1-9 contains no fewer than 30 active verbs. But there is only a passing reference to Judah's sin- the focus is so much upon the horror of what God is doing in judging sin. Repeatedly the idea is that God is over reacting and not making a commensurate response to Judah's sins. Despite all of Jeremiah's warning prophecies about these things.
We will read eight times of God's
wrath in this one lament in Lam. 2 (:1 (x2),2,3,4,6).
Any idea that somehow God
isn't really full of wrath is thereby displaced for good. "We have been
saved from [God's] wrath" through the Lord Jesus. But we will have no
wonder in that salvation, nor motivation arising from having received it,
if we have no sense of what we have been saved from.
Lamentations 2:2 The Lord has swallowed up all the habitations of Jacob, and
has not pitied-
LXX "In the day of his wrath the Lord has overwhelmed her as in the sea, and not spared". The image is of Zion being cast into the sea, just as Babylon would be. Likewise :5 LXX "he has overwhelmed Israel as in the sea".
Jer. 16:5 had explained why God appeared to have
withdrawn His pity. The reason
was that
God's covenant, referred to as "kindness and mercy", was broken; they were
not at peace with Him. And so they should not be pitied in their death. And
yet although the covenant was broken by Israel, and God broke His side of it
in response to that... He in fact still treated them as His covenant people.
This is not to say that God is not serious about His statements. He is; but
His love, grace and pity is displayed as the more extraordinary, in that it
leads Him to break the words and threats spoken in justifiable and
understandable wrath. For the same Hebrew phrase "loving kindness and tender
mercies" is used again by Jeremiah in Lam. 3:22, where he reflects that
these have not been withdrawn from God's people, even though Zion is now in
ruins.
He has thrown down in His wrath the strongholds of the daughter of Judah; He has brought them down to the ground- Yet it was Jeremiah who had specifically "thrown down" Jerusalem and her fortifications through his prophetic word; see on Jer. 1:10, where the same word is used: "I have this day set you over the nations and over the kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down and to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant". His lament is therefore at best an indication that like us, he failed to realize the huge potential in God's word that he was preaching, and the eternal consequences which arise from someone hearing it. And even worse, he resented the word he himself had preached when he saw it come true.
He has profaned the kingdom and its princes- But they had profaned themselves; and the princes were those who had conspired to kill Jeremiah (Jer. 37:15; 38:4,25,27) as they did other prophets (Jer. 26:21). It is to Jeremiah's spiritual credit that he did not rejoice at all in the fall of his enemies but rather shared God's broken heart for the lost and the evil.
Lamentations 2:3 He has cut off in fierce anger all the horn of Israel; He
has drawn back His right hand from before the enemy- Jeremiah was
willfully ignorant of the obvious truth of Ps. 75:10: "I will cut off all
the horns of the wicked, but the horns of the righteous shall be lifted
up".
He has burned up Jacob
like a flaming fire, which devours all around-
Lamentations 2:4 He has bent His bow like an enemy, He has stood with His
right hand as an adversary, has killed all that were pleasant to the eye: in
the tent of the daughter of Zion He has poured out His wrath like fire-
see on Lam. 3:13. Jeremiah appears now to be more angry with God than with
the Babylonians, who had literally bent their bows and destroyed the
temple. Jeremiah himself had been full of
God's wrath and had poured it out upon the people in his prophetic words
("The word of Yahweh has become a reproach to them. They have no delight
in it. Therefore I am full of the wrath of Yahweh. I am weary with holding
in. Pour it out on the youths in the street, and on the assembly of young
men together; for even the husband with the wife shall be taken, the aged
with him who is full of days. Their houses shall be turned to others",
Jer. 6:11,12). And now he
apparently laments that, as if he was almost negating his own prophetic
calling. It's as if he had then been on God's side, but was now too much
on the side of his sinful people. What had once been deep within him he
now as it were distances himself from. "The
tent" could specifically refer to the holy place. God's anger was intent
against His own house and holiest places- because they were the scenes of
the worst unfaithfulness by His people. Ezekiel describes how there were
pictures of idols on the inner walls of the holy place and idolatry was
performed there.
God's "right hand" had previously brought salvation to Israel from Egypt (Ex. 15:6). Now that same right hand is used a warrior archer uses the right hand on a bow- the Divine warrior has His own people and temple as His target. As :5 will say, the Lord became an enemy; "as" an enemy is an attempt to soften it. We could render "has become indeed an enemy"; and Jeremiah knew this from his own word in Jer. 30:14 "I have wounded you with the wound of an enemy, with the chastisement of a cruel one, for the greatness of your iniquity". He poured out His wrath upon them like fire. And verses 6-9 speak of God's personal, intentional destruction of all the physical, religious aspects of His religion- walls, temple, altar, feasts. The very things a deity was supposed to protect. In order to bring His people personally to relationship with Him.
Lamentations 2:5 The Lord has become as an enemy, He has swallowed up
Israel; He has swallowed up all her palaces, He has destroyed his
strongholds; He has multiplied in the daughter of Judah mourning and
lamentation- The image of swallowing up portrays God as a beast,
angry and judgmental upon His own people. It was the beast of Babylon who
"swallowed up" Israel (Jer. 51:34 s.w.). The palaces, the great houses of
the wealthy in Jerusalem, had been built on the back of abused labour, as
Jeremiah had pointed out; and those houses were destroyed because
offerings to idols had been made upon their roofs (Jer. 19:13).
Lamentations 2:6 He has violently taken away His tent, as if it were just
in a garden; He has destroyed His place of assembly: Yahweh has caused
solemn assembly and Sabbath to be forgotten in Zion-
This again is a
very positive take on the gatherings held in the temple. Ezekiel was shown
in vision how the priests and elders were solemnly worshipping idols
within the temple. And so God said that He "hated" their "solemn
assemblies" (s.w. Is. 1:14). Yet in depression, Jeremiah laments that
these "solemn assemblies" were no more (Lam. 1:4; 2:6).
God was glad they were no more as they were so
distressing to Him. But Jeremiah is seeing as man sees and not as God
does. The temple system was indeed temporary,the tabernacle was
just a tent in a garden, for God knew it would be replaced in His Son
It is particularly unreasonable for Jeremiah to complain that God had made Zion forget to keep Sabbath. He himself had prophesied that the exile was exactly because of all the Sabbaths which Judah had omitted or forgotten to keep: "He burned down the Temple and the city, with all its palaces and its wealth, and broke down the city wall. He took all the survivors to Babylonia... so what the LORD had foretold through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: "The land will lie desolate for seventy years, to make up for the Sabbath rest that has not been observed"" (2 Chron. 36:19-21).
And has despised in the indignation of His anger the king and the priest- "Despise" is usually translated "provoke". Jeremiah was really hurt and provoked by the opposition of his family (Jer. 23:17); and in that again he manifested Yahweh, who was likewise provoked by Israel (s.w. Dt. 31:20; 32:19). So Jeremiah seems to have forgotten all that and appears to object to God being provoked by His people; even though he had earlier lived out the same feelings of being provoked by the same group. Again we have the impression that now he is out of step with Yahweh, and yet even in this, he is manifesting the unreasonable pity of Yahweh for His condemned people.
In Lam. 2:6-9 and Lam. 4:12-20,
Jeremiah mentions the king, the priests and the prophets. The same three
groups, prophet, priest and king, are mentioned in Jer. 26,27 as totally
wicked, and deserving the punishment of a thief caught in the act, rather
than deserving the pity Jeremiah has for them: "Just as a thief is
disgraced when caught, so all you people of Israel will be disgraced—your
kings and officials, your priests and prophets. You will all be
disgraced—you that say that a tree is your father and that a rock is your
mother. This will happen because you turned away from me instead of
turning to me" (GNB).
Prophets and priests were the very ones who had tried to kill Jeremiah. On one hand, we marvel at his grace in identifying with them and mourning the destruction of his enemies. On another hand, he is surely forgetting the import of his own words about the seriousness of their sin in Jer. 26:7,8,11: "The priests, the prophets, and all the people heard me saying these things in the Temple, and as soon as I had finished all that the LORD had commanded me to speak, they grabbed me and shouted, "You ought to be killed for this! Then the priests and the prophets said to the leaders and to the people, "This man deserves to be sentenced to death because he has spoken against our city".
Lamentations 2:7 The Lord has cast off His altar, He has abhorred His
sanctuary; He has given up into the hand of the enemy the walls of her
palaces: they have made a noise in the house of Yahweh, as in the day of a
solemn assembly-
Jeremiah knew full well why that altar had been destroyed, but he is now in denial: "They have placed their idols, which I hate, in my Temple and have defiled it. In Hinnom Valley they have built an altar called Topheth, so that they can sacrifice their sons and daughters in it" (Jer. 7:30,31 GNB). He indeed had "cast off" the altar, the external forms of religion- but He had promised that He would never cast away the true seed of Jacob and David: "If My covenant of day and night fails, if I have not appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth; then will I also cast away the seed of Jacob, and of David My servant, so that I will not take of his seed to be rulers over the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: for I will cause their captivity to return" (Jer. 33:25,26). Jeremiah had been given specific prophecies about the Messiah and His Kingdom- but he hardly ever refers to them in Lamentations. The things of the Kingdom and the Lord Jesus were overlooked by him in his focus upon wanting resolutions in the here and now.
As explained on :6, the feasts and holy place had been abused by Judah. They had made it no longer a "sanctuary", a holy place, but rather a profane place. Jeremiah himself had made that point in his prophecies (e.g. Jer. 7:11-14). But he chose, in his depression, to hold on to the old narrative, as we all do- in this case, that the temple site was holy space, and God had been wrong to allow the Gentiles to enter and profane it. But Isaiah as well as Jeremiah had often demonstrated that the holy place was within human hearts, and not any more to be understood in physical terms. Because the holy space had been made unholy by Israel. Jeremiah had taught in Jer. 7:12 and often that they were wrong to consider the temple a sacred space which somehow automatically preserved them from any prosecution for their sins. They had been reminded that God doesn't operate sacred spaces like that. God's earlier sacred space in Shiloh had been destroyed because of the wickedness of the people, and the Jerusalem temple was not going to be any different.
We note here and in :8 Jeremiah's particular concern for the walls of the temple being destroyed, the wall of Zion (:8). But Ez. 23:14 says that they had used those walls to portray images of their idols. Jeremiah surely knew this. He was intent upon seeing just one aspect of a picture, repeating to himself a narrative which was seriously incomplete to the point of being wrong; and that was what his people were also doing.
Lamentations 2:8 Yahweh has purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter
of Zion-
This was exactly as Jeremiah had
prophesied: "that which I have built will I break down, and that which I
have planted I will pluck up" (Jer. 45:4).
He has stretched out the line, He has not withdrawn His hand from
destroying-
He has made the rampart and wall to lament; they languish together-
The Biblical record contains a large number of references to the
frequent tears of God’s people, both in bleeding hearts for other people,
and in recognition of their own sin. And as we have seen, these things are
related. Consider:
- “My eye pours out tears to God” [i.e. in repentance?]
(Job 16:20)
- Isaiah drenches Moab with tears (Is. 16:9)
- Jeremiah is a fountain of tears for his people (Jer. 9:1;
Lam. 2:8)
- David’s eyes shed streams of tears for his sins (Ps.
119:136; 6:6; 42:3)
- Jesus wept over Jerusalem (Mt. 23:37)
- Blessed are those who weep (Lk. 6:21)
- Mary washed the Lord’s feet with her tears (Lk. 7:36-50)
- Paul wept for the Ephesians daily (Acts 20:19,31).
We have to ask whether there are any tears, indeed any true emotion, in
our walk with our Lord. Those who go through life with dry eyes are surely
to be pitied. Surely, in the light of the above testimony, we are merely
hiding behind a smokescreen if we excuse ourselves by thinking that we’re
not the emotional type. Nobody can truly go through life humming to
themselves “I am a rock, I am an island…and an island never cries”. The
very emotional center of our lives must be touched. The tragedy of our
sin, the urgency of the world’s salvation, the amazing potential provided
and secured in the cross of Christ…surely we cannot be passive to these
things. We live in a world where emotion and passion are decreasing. Being
politically correct, looking right to others… these things are becoming of
paramount importance in all levels of society. The passionless,
postmodernist life can’t be for us, who have been moved and touched at our
very core by the work and call and love of Christ to us. For us there must
still be what Walter Brueggemann called “the gift of amazement”, that
ability to feel and say “Wow!” to God’s grace and plan of salvation for
us.
Lamentations 2:9 Her gates are sunk into the ground; He has destroyed and
broken her bars: her king and her princes are among the nations where the
law is not; yes, her prophets find no vision from Yahweh-
We note the detailed mention of how
every physical element in the religious system was dismantled by God:
palaces, walls, gates, bars (:5,7,9). They were left with no religion,
only personal relationship with God. GNB "The law is no longer taught".
Again Jeremiah exaggerates. It was not taught properly before the exile.
No surprises the prophets had no vision from God- because they had falsified visions and prophetic words from Him. Jeremiah wants to see things all one way, without any wider context. The Jews had come to believe that Jerusalem was literally the eternal city and the Davidic line of kingship would continue eternally. They failed to have a Kingdom perspective- to realize that this was only true conditionally in this life, and the promises of the eternal Kingdom were yet future and required the coming of Messiah. In essence, it is this lack of an eternal, Kingdom perspective that leaves many lamenting their sufferings in this life. And it is the same with those who lose the religious aspect of their Christianity, through the collapse of the local church, persecution, mobility issues, uncaring pastors, wrongful exclusion from the local community, coming to a doctrinal position that is unacceptable to their church, or their church changing their doctrinal position etc. For the Jews, the Babylonian invasion left them without altar, prophets, priests and temple. They were therefore left without connection with God- in religious terms. But so many of the psalms guide them to the possibility of relationship with God without any religious forms, often alluding to David's close fellowship with God whilst on the run from Saul and Absalom, when he too was left without access to any religious line of communication with God.
Jeremiah's lament that they had no prophets needed to be understood by him within the simple truth of what he had already declared: "you have murdered your prophets" (Jer. 2:30). Jeremiah's lament for the prophets was overlooking his own words about them in Jer. 23:14: "But I have seen the prophets in Jerusalem do even worse: they commit adultery and tell lies; they help people to do wrong, so that no one stops doing what is evil. To me they are all as bad as the people of Sodom and Gomorrah" (GNB).
It was
little use lamenting that Israel were now amongst those who didn't live by
Yahweh's law; for they had despised that law, and broken it completely-
bearing in mind that it was the marriage contract between God and
themselves. The silence of Yahweh through the prophets is unsurprising.
And yet God had spoken at length through Jeremiah as a prophet. But here
he seems to mentally associate himself completely with the people in their
unGodly self lamentation.
Lamentations 2:10 The elders of the daughter of Zion sit on the ground,
they keep silence; they have cast up dust on their heads; they have
clothed themselves with sackcloth: the virgins of Jerusalem hang down
their heads to the ground- see on Job 2:12. The elders here are of
Zion rather than of Jerusalem, so perhaps the priesthood is in view.
Jeremiah had frequently denounced them, and they had plotted his death.
But now his heart bleeds for them- perhaps because as a priest he was
related to them. Their grief for the loss of their temple was real enough.
But they treated it as a mere talisman; Jeremiah had almost mocked their
attachment to it earlier, in Jer. 7:4 Don’t trust in lying words by saying, Yahweh’s temple, Yahweh’s
temple, Yahweh’s temple, are these". But now he feels so heartbroken for
those who thought and felt like that. His identification at this time is
completely with the people and not with the Divine, prophetic perspective.
And yet it was this identification with them which led him to spurn the
good life in Babylon and instead choose to live and die with the
impenitent people in Egypt. We too are caught between our natural
identification with humanity, and our knowledge of their sin and rejection
of God's ways.
Lamentations 2:11 My eyes do fail with tears, my heart is troubled; my
liver is poured on the earth, because of the destruction of the daughter
of my people, because the young children and the infants swoon in the
streets of the city- This and :12 appear to refer to the sufferings
of the people during the famine in the siege, which Jeremiah himself had
prophesied several times. His ministry had begun with the assurance that
his words would have the power of destruction; and he had been
psychologically strengthened for that ministry. But now the reality of
what he preached swamped him to the point of apparent regret he had had
anything to do with this destruction. The obvious, glaring point is that
the people had willfully ignored all his appeals for repentance, had
despised God's patience and grace- and so this had come because of that.
Lamentations 2:12 They ask their mothers for grain and wine, whilst they
swoon as the wounded in the streets of the city, with their soul poured
out into their mothers’ bosom- We must remember that Jer. 7:11 and
several times in Ezekiel have convicted the people of
offering
their children as sacrifices to idols in Yahweh's temple. The tragic
picture painted here of suffering children and distressed parents must be
balanced by that fact; a society who allowed that to happen and trusted in
those idols was now receiving an appropriate judgment. But Jeremiah
struggles with this. He focuses on the narrative formed by his own gut
reactions, rather than the prophetic word he had himself uttered.
The famine that was slaying the children was in line with the curses for breaking the covenant. And many of Jeremiah's own prophecies, e.g. "I proclaim to you a liberty, says Yahweh, to the sword, to the plague and to the famine" (Jer. 34:17).
The complaint that innocent children were being killed needed to be seen in the context of Jeremiah's own knowledge that Judah had themselves done just the same: "Stop taking advantage of aliens, orphans, and widows. Stop killing innocent people in this land" (Jer. 7:6). "You have filled this place with the blood of innocents" (Jer. 19:6). And remember that Jeremiah had wished these things on the Jewish leadership who tried to kill him. Judgment day is when we will receive all we secretly wished for: "But now, LORD, let their children starve to death; let them be killed in war. Let the women lose their husbands and children; let the men die of disease and the young men be killed in battle. Send a mob to plunder their homes without warning; make them cry out in terror. They have dug a pit for me to fall in and have set traps to catch me" (Jer. 18:21,22 GNB).
Lamentations 2:13 What shall I testify to you? What shall I liken to you,
daughter of Jerusalem? What shall I compare to you, that I may comfort
you, virgin daughter of Zion? For your breach is great like the sea: who
can heal you?-
Jeremiah earnestly wishes to comfort them, and is frustrated that he cannot- despite surely being aware of Isaiah's prophecy that Yahweh would comfort Zion at the restoration (s.w. Is. 51:3,12 "I, even I, am He that comforts you"; Is. 66:13 "so will I comfort you"; Is. 40:1; 49:13; 52:9). "Comfort" is the same word as "repent"; and God had said that He would repent (s.w.) if Judah repented (Jer. 18:8; 26:3). The real problem was that Judah had not repented, and Jeremiah refused to factor that into his feelings; see on Lam. 1:9.
The reasoning here is psychologically credible. People do tend to compare their sufferings and hard experiences with those of others; but Judah's sufferings had no analogy, in that no other nation had lost exclusive relationship with Yahweh. That is, in her opinion. In her view she was a virgin who had been breached, broken in rape. But God saw otherwise; see on Lam. 1:17.
The complaint that their suffering is unprecedented [also in Lam. 1:12 "see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow"] must be compared with Jeremiah's earlier explanation of their unprecedented sin, the unique awfulness of their treatment of Yahweh: "Go west to the island of Cyprus, and send someone eastward to the land of Kedar. You will see that nothing like this has ever happened before. No other nation has ever changed its gods, even though they were not real. But my people have exchanged me, the God who has brought them honor, for gods that can do nothing for them" (Jer. 2:10,11 GNB).
Lamentations 2:14 Your prophets have seen for you false and foolish
visions; they did not expose your sin to ward off your captivity, but have
seen for you false oracles and causes of banishment-
God's word exposes sin: "But as for me, I am
full of power by the Spirit of Yahweh, and of judgment, and of might, to
declare to Jacob his disobedience, and to Israel his sin" (Mic. 3:8). The
same word is used of what Jeremiah wished would happen to Judah's abusers,
"He will expose / uncover your sins" (Lam. 4:22). Those who preach God's
word to others must bear this in mind; but when they are paid by their
audience, there's a natural interest to not offend the audience. And so
things have gone wrong, and "church" has often become a place for self
affirmation rather than conviction of sin.
The paradox here is that Jeremiah laments that the prophets hadn't exposed Judah's sins to her. But he had done; and yet now he is reasoning as if he hadn't, and Judah are unfairly suffering as if they had never been prophetically warned about their behaviour. Jeremiah seems to be cutting out part of his own mental and physical history- anything, so as not to face up to the truths of God's word which he knew. And his argument that the people hadn't been warned is just not true...
There were many false prophets at the time of Jeremiah and Ezekiel; when in fact the true word of prophecy could have 'turned away' the captivity, if the exiles and the people left in Judah had responded to it (Lam. 2:14). Indeed it could have been that Zedekiah returned as "the prince" of the restored kingdom; see on Ez. 12:12. Ezekiel prophesied to the exiles in Babylon of what was going to happen to the Jews still in the land, exactly so that the exiles' repentance might avert those in the land suffering further. An ameliorated program of judgment and events would have been possible if they had repented.
This is one of many cases of self-justification in Lamentations (Lam. 1:2,19; Lam. 2:14; 4:13; 5:7), which contradicts the prophetic position, whereby blame is placed upon Judah, whereas now Jeremiah laments the situation as if Judah is being hard done by, with the masses suffering because of their false prophets- when Jeremiah himself has earlier said that the masses were as guilty as the false prophets, who only taught what the people wanted to hear.
The whole exile and return need never have happened- the prophecies of this need not have come true in the way they did, for even before the Babylonian invasion, Judah had been offered the prospect of eternally remaining in their land, if they repented (Jer. 7:7). And after it happened, Jeremiah commented: “Your prophets… did not expose your sin to ward off your captivity” (Lam. 2:14 NIV). It could have been ‘warded off’ by the peoples’ repentance. Note how Jeremiah, himself a prophet at the time, so wishes to take the blame upon himself for not pleading more powerfully with the people. Perhaps we will have similar feelings when the time of tribulation breaks forth in the very last days.
Lamentations 2:15 All that pass by clap their hands at you. They hiss and
wag their head at the daughter of Jerusalem saying, Is this the city that
men called The perfection of beauty, The joy of the whole land?-
Jeremiah had foretold this (Jer. 19:8; 22:8), but now he seems stunned to
see it happen. And yet he was so certain of the fulfillments of the
prophecies that he often speaks in the past tense of those things which
were yet future.
Lamentations 2:16 All your enemies have opened their mouth wide against
you; they hiss and gnash the teeth; they say, We have swallowed her up;
certainly this is the day that we looked for; we have found, we have seen
it!- But Jeremiah earlier had portrayed these enemies as the "lovers"
of Judah, to whom they had desperately prostituted themselves. They had
sought their help against Babylon, making exclusive covenants with each of
them, promising to worship their gods in the Jerusalem temple. And then
the lovers realized that they were not the exclusive love of Judah, and
therefore in anger turned against her and joined the Babylonians in
destroying the temple which symbolized her adultery and unfaithfulness,
both to God and man. But here again, Jeremiah is seeing things only from
the perspective of what is immediately before his eyes; all he saw was
these people as angry, exalting enemies. He shut his mind to the reasons
why and the background. He is really a case study of man in depression.
Clearly Solomon was disobedient, and so the promise that people would "hiss" at the temple would obviously be fulfilled (1 Kings 9:8). Yet Jeremiah laments bitterly that men were 'hissing' at the ruined temple (Lam. 2:15,16) and complains God has been unreasonable. Jeremiah had clearly failed to accept the real extent of Judah's sin, and had shared in David and Solomon's wilful misunderstanding that the temple would be eternal. He failed to accept that Divine judgment is just, because he devalued human sin. And that is the root cause for all human complaint about suffering in this world.
Lamentations 2:17 Yahweh has done that which He purposed; He has fulfilled
His word that He commanded in the days of old; He has thrown down, and has
not pitied: He has caused the enemy to rejoice over you-
Jeremiah here resents that his own prophecies
had been fulfilled. God had expressed His purpose of judging Judah ["I
have purposed it", Jer. 4:28], but in the gap between proclamation and
fulfilment, they could have repented and changed the outcomes. Jeremiah
spells this out so clearly. But despite the lack of repentance, Jeremiah
presents as angry that God had carried through His stated purpose. He
seems to therefore have understood God as a dog whose bark is worse than
his bite, and whose threats cannot be taken seriously.
The purpose of God to do these things had been expressed by Jeremiah himself. But he somehow distances himself from that, saying that this was stated "in the days of old". He imagines that it was the curses of Moses which were coming true. And that was long ago; and likewise he must have seen his own words of judgment as uttered as it were in another life, in olden days. He had forgotten his own prophetic mission.
He has exalted the horn of your adversaries- "Exalted" is the Hebrew word which forms part of the name "Jeremiah", 'Yah will exalt'. Jeremiah in depression is as it were mocking his own name, which he had assumed meant that Yahweh would finally exalt Israel, when now it seemed He was exalting her enemies. For "thrown down", see on :2.
Lamentations 2:18 Their heart cried to the Lord: wall of the daughter of
Zion, let tears run down like a river day and night; give yourself no
respite; don’t let the apple of your eye cease- Here we see a
movement towards a more spiritual pole after the self absorption of the
previous verses. But he doesn't yet make explicit that the crying
to the Lord should be in repentance, not simply for relief from present
suffering.
Jeremiah wanted his
grief to be reflective of the grieving prayer of the remnant to their God:
“Cry aloud to the Lord! O wall of daughter Zion! Let tears stream down
like a torrent day and night! Give yourself no rest, your eyes no
respite!” (Lam. 2:18 RSV). His grief really was and is to be the pattern
for others. Doubtless it influenced the Lord Himself, who wept over Zion
(Lk. 19:41), inevitably holding Jeremiah in His mind.
Isaiah had prophesied that God would not rest until Zion be restored.
Watchmen would be set upon Zion’s walls who would give Him no rest until
the walls be rebuilt (Is. 62:1,6,7). At this time, Zion was felt by God to
be the “apple of his eye” (Zech. 2:8). This prophesy started to be
fulfilled straight after the Babylonian invasion when Jeremiah urged the
desolated people to pray: “O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears run
down like a river day and night: give thyself no rest; let not the apple
of thine eye cease” (Lam. 2:18). The prayerful remnant gave themselves
no rest; and thus was fulfilled the prophecy that God would
have no rest. Sincere prayer according to God’s will meant that there was
a strange mutuality between the Father and those who prayed to Him. Both
He and they considered Zion to be the apple of their eye; and thus the
prayers were ultimately answered and Zion was restored.
Lamentations 2:19 Arise, cry out in the night, at the beginning of the
watches; pour out your heart like water before the face of the Lord: lift
up your hands toward Him for the life of your young children, that faint
for hunger at the head of every street-
This appeal to pray to God runs counter
to the several commands to Jeremiah not to pray for the people. Because
God would not hear their prayers once the judgments came. He had been a
rebellious prophet throughout the book of Jeremiah. He at one point
refused to speak God's word, and was threatened with being fired as a
prophet. Or consider his brief dialogue with God in Jer. 47:6,7: "'Sword
of the LORD! How long will you go on slashing? Go back to your scabbard,
stay there and rest!'. [God replies:] But how can it rest, when I have
given it work to do? I have commanded it to attack".
Uplifted hands spoke of intense prayer. It is fitting that the Lord died with hands and arms lifted up above his head, rather than spread out in a crucifix form, seeing that uplifted hands is a symbol of God's promises being confirmed (Ez. 20:5,6,15; 36:7; 47:14), as well as intense prayer (Lam. 2:19; 1 Tim. 2:8; 2 Chron. 6:12,13; Ps. 28:2), which Christ was engaged in on the cross (Heb. 5:7).
And yet the intense prayer was for the lives
of their children, rather than in repentance. We could argue
[although see on Lam. 3:1] that as the Lamentations
progress, the desire to pray to God becomes more focused upon repentance,
and comes to a climax at the very end in Lam. 5:16-21.
Jeremiah had a lot to say about children in his prophecies, especially
about the way the people offered their infants to the idols, and the way
in which Zedekiah's refusal to repent would lead to the suffering of
innocent children. Although Jeremiah is getting 'warmer' by
appealing for prayer to God, he is still not asking for the repentance
toward God which was so essential. But as the Lamentations progress, that
will come.
Lamentations 2:20 Look, Yahweh, and see to whom You have done thus! Shall the women eat their fruit, the children that are dandled in the hands? Shall the priest and the prophet be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord?- The rhetorical question 'To whom have You done this?' is really a criticism of Yahweh. There is the tacit hope that He will 'see' the point and respond by arresting and reversing it all in a moment. This, Jeremiah argues, is just not how You treat Your own children, even if they have misbehaved. He shows no cognition of the reasons for these sufferings, which he had been preaching for over 40 years. Jeremiah's 'prayers' have no realistic aim- he just wants God to stop it all and reverse it in a moment. And in line with Jeremiah's own prophecies, that is not going to happen by the nature of what Divine judgment means.
All these questions "Shall...?" suggest this is a quotation from an earlier prayer of Jeremiah's, that these things not happen. But clearly at this point they have happened, and Jeremiah is complaining that the judgment he predicted has come. GNB "Why are you punishing us like this? Women are eating the bodies of the children they loved!". The obvious answer is that 'Because this is exactly what was predicted in Dt. 28 if you broke the covenant'. It was also the result of refusing to do what Jeremiah had told them to do- to surrender to Babylon, to accept their guilt and just punishment. Otherwise, they and their children would die of famine. And they refused to surrender. Women eating their own children is indeed a fulfilment of the curses of Dt. 28 and Lev. 26. But it's also a judgment that makes us ponder what woman would actually do that... because it is a normal parental instinct to sacrifice their life for their child. It's only a narcissist who would feed themselves on their own child. A normal mother will suffer anything so that her child can eat. This curse is therefore more on the psychology of these women, and is a curse they surely had to bear responsibility for. Lam. 4:3 will make this clear: "Serpents have drawn out the breasts, they give suck to their young, but the daughters of my people are incurably cruel". Women eating their own babies is therefore due to their cruelty; and yet in Jer. 19:9 God makes them do it: "And I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and all shall eat the flesh of their neighbours in the siege". He confirms them in their chronic narcissism, and the reversal of the natural order whereby a woman naturally feeds her baby rather than feeding off it. But that is not how man naturally is. Attempting to reach the South Pole, Captain Scott and his men risked and lost their own lives to pull their injured comrade Evans with them, rather than abandonning him to death, let alone eat his corpse [as a child I cried when my dear mother read me the story from a Ladybird book and commented to the effect "this is what real men do"]... and so many other real life stories. To eat your own child says more about the woman who does so than God's curse. They were the same women who had offered their children to Baal... The curses of Deuteronomy are more describing what would happen rather than God purposefully doing it purely on His own account. To blame it all [including women who kill their own kids and eat them] on God as Jeremiah does... is not OK. What we see in Lamentations is that becoming a spiritually minded person is to see from God's perspective, to not live in a constant present tense, experiencing life as it is; and to live with the perspective of the coming Messiah, our Lord Jesus, and His Kingdom. Anything less is to have the intellectual and emotional misery and endless roadblocks with God which Jeremiah experienced.
This seems a placing of false guilt on God. The Jeremiah prophecies
have repeatedly stated that judgment was really but an extension of the
things they themselves did. They had offered their children to Gentile
idols, and so their children would be slain by the Gentiles. The women
were driven to eating their children in the famine, but they had earlier
sacrificed their children to Baal. The prophets in view were the false
prophets, who were responsible for teaching Judah to sin; and who had
tried to murder Jeremiah. Jeremiah flips back into seeing things solely
from the point of view of human tragedy, without factoring in all the
background which he himself had been preaching for some years.
"The priest and the prophet" may be a reference to a priest who
was also a prophet; possibly Zechariah son of Jehoiada is in view.
Lamentations 2:21 The youth and the old man lie on the ground in the
streets; my virgins and my young men are fallen by the sword: You have
killed them in the day of Your anger; You have slaughtered, and not
pitied- This had been the specific fate predicted by Jeremiah for
their choosing to listen to false prophets rather than to him (Jer. 14:16).
Lamentations 2:22 You have called, as in the day of a solemn assembly, my
terrors on every side; there was none that escaped or remained in the day
of Yahweh’s anger: those that I have dandled and brought up has my enemy
consumed-
At the point of Jer. 16:2, Jeremiah was
told not to marry and have children, so we tend to think that this is a
statement of total identity with those who had lost their own children. Like Job, perhaps Jeremiah lost his own children, hence his
bitterness. But he could still be understood here as being totally
identified with his own people, feeling their suffering as if it were his
very own. Although in a sense he goes too far in this, his sense of
identity with his sinful people is in another sense commendable. Seeing he
had suffered so much from them and very nearly died at their hands, his
love and identity toward them is a reflection of a truly spiritual heart.
The terrors on every side were God's judgments on the people for how they
had treated Jeremiah. Jer. 20:10 "Terror
everywhere (GNB) / on every side" is one meaning of "Magormissabib "in
Jer. 20:3. The terror to come upon Judah was partly because of their
defamation of Jeremiah, who had spoken God's word to them.
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