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For Lam 2:14

¹⁴Thy prophets have seen vain and foolish things for thee: and they have not discovered thine iniquity, to turn away thy captivity; but have seen for thee false burdens and causes of banishment.

In the Book of Lamentations, as in some other biblical books, the theme sounds of God rejecting and punishing His people. At first glance these assertions may seem... Read more

In the Book of Lamentations, as in some other biblical books, the theme sounds of God rejecting and punishing His people. At first glance these assertions may seem too human; God appears in them as someone like an angry earthly ruler. But on closer consideration, behind them one discovers spiritual depth and the awareness of certain very important laws of spiritual life.

The matter, of course, is not punishments in the human sense of the word. Sometimes, however, God may use rather severe methods of influence on a person in order to bring him into the needed spiritual state, but even here the matter is not punishment, but precisely a rather strong and sometimes unexpected spiritual influence for the person, which the person himself may at first perceive as something undesirable for himself. But more often it is different.

God has His plan for every person and every people. Or more precisely, He has His own plan for humanity, in which every person and every people can take part if they wish: there is a place in God's plan for everyone. All the more will there be such a place for the people of God, whose very existence is inseparable from God's plan. But what if an individual person or a whole people refuses to participate, does not want to use the opportunity to occupy the place God has assigned him in God's plans?

Then, obviously, such a person or people will find themselves where they were not meant to be, with all the consequences that follow from this. And then no longer God's will, but chance, will determine the existence of such a person or such a people. Not Providence, but fate, doom. And if this is destructive for any people, it is doubly destructive for the people of God, since their very existence is possible only within the framework of Providence. This very fact was what the people-community had to realize in captivity.

For Lam 2:1-22

¹How hath the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger, and cast down from heaven unto the earth the beauty of Israel, and remembered not his footstool in the day of his anger!

²The Lord hath swallowed up all the habitations of Jacob, and hath not pitied: he hath thrown down in his wrath the strong holds of the daughter of Judah; he hath brought them down to the ground: he hath polluted the kingdom and the princes thereof.

³He hath cut off in his fierce anger all the horn of Israel: he hath drawn back his right hand from before the enemy, and he burned against Jacob like a flaming fire, which devoureth round about.

⁴He hath bent his bow like an enemy: he stood with his right hand as an adversary, and slew all that were pleasant to the eye in the tabernacle of the daughter of Zion: he poured out his fury like fire.

⁵The Lord was as an enemy: he hath swallowed up Israel, he hath swallowed up all her palaces: he hath destroyed his strong holds, and hath increased in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation.

⁶And he hath violently taken away his tabernacle, as if it were of a garden: he hath destroyed his places of the assembly: the LORD hath caused the solemn feasts and sabbaths to be forgotten in Zion, and hath despised in the indignation of his anger the king and the priest.

⁷The Lord hath cast off his altar, he hath abhorred his sanctuary, he hath given up into the hand of the enemy the walls of her palaces; they have made a noise in the house of the LORD, as in the day of a solemn feast.

⁸The LORD hath purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion: he hath stretched out a line, he hath not withdrawn his hand from destroying: therefore he made the rampart and the wall to lament; they languished together.

⁹Her gates are sunk into the ground; he hath destroyed and broken her bars: her king and her princes are among the Gentiles: the law is no more; her prophets also find no vision from the LORD.

¹⁰The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground, and keep silence: they have cast up dust upon their heads; they have girded themselves with sackcloth: the virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads to the ground.

¹¹Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people; because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city.

¹²They say to their mothers, Where is corn and wine? when they swooned as the wounded in the streets of the city, when their soul was poured out into their mothers' bosom.

¹³What thing shall I take to witness for thee? what thing shall I liken to thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? what shall I equal to thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of Zion? for thy breach is great like the sea: who can heal thee?

¹⁴Thy prophets have seen vain and foolish things for thee: and they have not discovered thine iniquity, to turn away thy captivity; but have seen for thee false burdens and causes of banishment.

¹⁵All that pass by clap their hands at thee; they hiss and wag their head at the daughter of Jerusalem, saying, Is this the city that men call The perfection of beauty, The joy of the whole earth?

¹⁶All thine enemies have opened their mouth against thee: 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.

¹⁷The LORD hath done that which he had devised; he hath fulfilled his word that he had commanded in the days of old: he hath thrown down, and hath not pitied: and he hath caused thine enemy to rejoice over thee, he hath set up the horn of thine adversaries.

¹⁸Their heart cried unto the Lord, 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.

¹⁹Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches pour out thine heart like water before the face of the Lord: lift up thy hands toward him for the life of thy young children, that faint for hunger in the top of every street.

²⁰Behold, O LORD, and consider to whom thou hast done this. Shall the women eat their fruit, and children of a span long? shall the priest and the prophet be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord?

²¹The young and the old lie on the ground in the streets: my virgins and my young men are fallen by the sword; thou hast slain them in the day of thine anger; thou hast killed, and not pitied.

²²Thou hast called as in a solemn day my terrors round about, so that in the day of the LORD's anger none escaped nor remained: those that I have swaddled and brought up hath mine enemy consumed.

Apparently, the author of the Book of Lamentations either witnessed the events of 587 himself, or heard a detailed account... Read more

Apparently, the author of the Book of Lamentations either witnessed the events of 587 himself, or heard a detailed account of them; in any case, he describes the destruction of the city and the Temple vividly and in detail (vv. 5-9). And the most terrible event for him was undoubtedly the complete destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, down to its foundations: after all, this was the house of God, the place where Yahweh manifested His presence to the people, so that now, together with the end of the Temple, the history of the Jewish people as God's people must also come to an end. If God has left His house, does this not mean that He has also left the people who built that house for Him?

At first glance, everything looked exactly that way, and there was nothing to hope for. Yet hope remained, though of course it was not connected with what the organizers of the anti-Babylonian revolt had hoped for, the revolt that brought Jerusalem and all Judea to final catastrophe. Their calculation was purely political: they hoped for help from Egypt, which for a whole range of reasons never came.

The author of the Book of Lamentations understands that the destruction of the Temple is not accidental, that God turns away from Jerusalem because even earlier Jerusalem had turned away from God, listening not to true servants of God, such as Jeremiah, to whom tradition ascribes the book's authorship, but to "prophets" whose whole merit consisted in flattering the people by telling them what they wanted to hear (v. 14). And all this had been foretold in the Torah, in the Book of Deuteronomy, whose author speaks clearly of exile as punishment for apostasy (Deut 29:22-28). As we can see, the punishment consists not in God Himself bringing calamities down on the heads of His people, but in His leaving them to their fate; this proves enough for the people to suffer a true catastrophe, not only spiritual but also political.

At the same time, however, the Torah also gave hope: in the case of repentance and turning back, God could again return the exiles to the land of their fathers (Deut 30:1-10). The prophets said the same, including Jeremiah: the exile and the destruction of Jerusalem are not yet the end. Everything that follows depends entirely on the spiritual state of the people, on their readiness to comprehend what happened, repent of the sins committed, and turn again to the One in whom they can hope and who will not fail them as the Egyptians failed the rebellious Jerusalemites.