1How has the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger!
He has cast the beauty of Israel down from heaven to the earth,
and hasn’t remembered his footstool in the day of his anger.
2The Lord has swallowed up all the dwellings of Jacob
without pity.
He has thrown down in his wrath the strongholds of the daughter of Judah.
He has brought them down to the ground.
He has profaned the kingdom and its princes.
3He has cut off all the horn of Israel in fierce anger.
He has drawn back his right hand from before the enemy.
He has burned up Jacob like a flaming fire,
which devours all around.
4He has bent his bow like an enemy.
He has stood with his right hand as an adversary.
He 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.
5The 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 mourning and lamentation in the daughter of Judah.
6He has violently taken away his tabernacle,
as if it were a garden.
He has destroyed his place of assembly.
Yahweh has caused solemn assembly and Sabbath to be forgotten in Zion.
In the indignation of his anger, he has despised the king and the priest.
7The Lord has cast off his altar.
He has abhorred his sanctuary.
He has given the walls of her palaces into the hand of the enemy.
They have made a noise in Yahweh’s house,
as in the day of a solemn assembly.
8Yahweh has purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion.
He has stretched out the line.
He has not withdrawn his hand from destroying;
He has made the rampart and wall lament.
They languish together.
9Her gates have 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.
10The 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.
11My eyes fail with tears.
My heart is troubled.
My bile 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.
12They ask their mothers,
“Where is grain and wine?”
when they swoon as the wounded in the streets of the city,
when their soul is poured out into their mothers’ bosom.
13What 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 as big as the sea.
Who can heal you?
14Your prophets have seen false and foolish visions for you.
They have not uncovered your iniquity,
to reverse your captivity,
but have seen for you false revelations and causes of banishment.
15All 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 earth’?”
16All your enemies have opened their mouth wide against you.
They hiss and gnash their teeth.
They say, “We have swallowed her up.
Certainly this is the day that we looked for.
We have found it.
We have seen it.”
17Yahweh has done that which he planned.
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.
He has exalted the horn of your adversaries.
18Their heart cried to the Lord.
O wall of the daughter of Zion,
let tears run down like a river day and night.
Give yourself no relief.
Don’t let your eyes rest.
19Arise, 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,
who faint for hunger at the head of every street.
20“Look, Yahweh, and see to whom you have done thus!
Should the women eat their offspring,
the children that they held and bounced on their knees?
Should the priest and the prophet be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord?
21“The youth and the old man lie on the ground in the streets.
My virgins and my young men have fallen by the sword.
You have killed them in the day of your anger.
You have slaughtered, and not pitied.
22“You have called, as in the day of a solemn assembly, my terrors on every side.
There was no one that escaped or remained in the day of Yahweh’s anger.
My enemy has consumed those whom I have cared for and brought up.
The anguish expressed in the book of Lamentations is observed in 2:19-20 (and elsewhere), in which the agony of the destruction experienced by the fall of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. During the war with Babylonia, and particularly the siege of Jerusalem, the Jewish people experienced in 587-586 B.C. It is estimated that the southern kingdom of Judah had approximately more than one hundred thousand people, but by the time of the sixth century had fallen more than seventy percent. David Janzen, in his article "Trauma and the Failure of Narrative in Lamentations,"[1] comments that most modern scholars consider the various verses expressing suffering and various horrors the result of siege warfare, starvation within the city of Jerusalem, and the agonies that followed the overthrow of Jerusalem in which rape of women, slaughter within the city, and the attendant aftermath that comes with savage treatment by conquerors.[2] The kind of treatment of the vanquished in war, such as Jerusalem's with Babylon or the capture and torture of the Jews by Nazis in the middle of the 20th century, reveals the level of trauma that has been experienced by people in times of conquest and torture of people in the world. The type of response is well illustrated by the words of a survivor of the Holocaust, which would probably be reflected, I would think, were we to have the records of the Jews in the destruction of Jerusalem. This survivor said, "It was terrible. No one can describe it. No one can recreate what happened here. Impossible? And no one can understand it." The author of Lamentations expresses the horror of the Babylonian war due to the rebellion of the Jewish people (spoken of by Jeremiah): "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, who faint for hunger at the head of every street. Look, Yahweh, and see to whom you have done thus! Should the women eat their offspring, the children that they held and bounced on their knees? Should the priest and the prophet be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord?" (Lam 2:19, 20)
David Janzen, "Trauma and the Failure of Narrative in Lamentations," The BIble and Interpretation, https://bibleinterp.ariona.edu/articles/trauma-and-failreu-narrative-lamentations (referenced 4/2/2024).