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.
See, Yahweh; for I am in distress; my heart is troubled; My heart is turned within me; for I have grievously rebelled: Abroad the sword bereaves, at home there is as death.
For these things I weep; my eye, my eye runs down with water; Because the comforter who should refresh my soul is far from me: My children are desolate, because the enemy has prevailed.
My eye runs down with streams of water, for the destruction of the daughter of my people. My eye pours down, and doesn't cease, without any intermission, Until Yahweh look down, and see from heaven. My eye affects my soul, because of all the daughters of my city.
My anguish, my anguish! I am pained at my very heart; my heart is disquieted in me; I can't hold my peace; because you have heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war.
I am poured out like water. All my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax; It is melted within me.
My eye wastes away because of grief; It grows old because of all my adversaries.
Those who are killed with the sword are better than those who are killed with hunger; For these pine away, stricken through, for want of the fruits of the field. The hands of the pitiful women have boiled their own children; They were their food in the destruction of the daughter of my people.
For behold, the days are coming in which they will say, 'Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.'
Then David and the people who were with him lifted up their voice and wept, until they had no more power to weep.
Even the jackals draw out the breast, they give suck to their young ones: The daughter of my people is become cruel, like the ostriches in the wilderness. The tongue of the sucking child cleaves to the roof of his mouth for thirst: The young children ask bread, and no man breaks it to them.
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. 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?
Therefore now thus says Yahweh, the God of hosts, the God of Israel: Why commit you [this] great evil against your own souls, to cut off from you man and woman, infant and suckling, out of the midst of Judah, to leave you none remaining;
Like a swallow [or] a crane, so did I chatter; I did moan as a dove; my eyes fail [with looking] upward: Lord, I am oppressed, be my collateral.
I am weary with my crying. My throat is dry. My eyes fail, looking for my God.
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Matthew Henry Commentary » Commentary on Lamentations 2
Commentary on Lamentations 2 Matthew Henry Commentary
Chapter 2
The second alphabetical elegy is set to the same mournful tune with the former, and the substance of it is much the same; it begins with Ecah, as that did, "How sad is our case! Alas for us!'
The hand that wounded must make whole.
Lam 2:1-9
It is a very sad representation which is here made of the state of God's church, of Jacob and Israel, of Zion and Jerusalem; but the emphasis in these verses seems to be laid all along upon the hand of God in the calamities which they were groaning under. The grief is not so much that such and such things are done as that God has done them, that he appears angry with them; it is he that chastens them, and chastens them in wrath and in his hot displeasure; he has become their enemy, and fights against them; and this, this is the wormwood and the gall in the affliction and the misery.
Lam 2:10-22
Justly are these called Lamentations, and they are very pathetic ones, the expressions of grief in perfection, mourning and woe, and nothing else, like the contents of Ezekiel's roll, Eze. 2:10.