Lamentations 3:54

Lamentations was written after the Babylonian army laid siege to Jerusalem and destroyed it in 586 BC. The people had gone through famine, slaughter and a long siege, the temple was destroyed, and those who survived were taken away into exile in Babylon. For Israel this was a crisis of faith as well as a defeat in war, because the temple stood for God’s dwelling among his people and for the promises of his covenant.

The book has long been credited to the prophet Jeremiah, who had warned of this judgment for decades and lived to see it come. Chapter 3 is its longest and most carefully built chapter, an acrostic of twenty-two stanzas. Each stanza has three verses that all begin with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The other chapters mostly mourn for the city as a whole, and here one man speaks in his own voice. Whether he is Jeremiah himself or a man who speaks for the nation, what he suffers stands for what all his people suffer, and in verse 48 he names them as the reason for his tears.

The ruin he weeps over was the LORD’s judgment on Judah’s long unfaithfulness. “Jerusalem hath grievously sinned” (Lamentations 1:8), and “The LORD hath accomplished his fury” (Lamentations 4:11). The law had warned of such a day in the curses for a broken covenant (Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 28). In the verses just before these, the speaker has confessed that sin to God. Earlier in this same chapter he has also written the words for which Lamentations is best loved: “This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:21–23). So these seven verses come from a man who already holds to God’s faithfulness and still weeps, still remembers his enemies, and still waits for God to look down.

“Mine eye runneth down with rivers of water” takes the tears of one man and pictures them as rivers. The word for eye, ʻayin, is the eye that sees, and by a natural likeness it is also used for a spring or fountain, “the eye of the landscape”. Here the eye is a spring that keeps flowing. The verb yârad, “runneth down”, is the ordinary word for going or coming down, and here it is the tears coming down his face. Rivers of water are an overstatement on purpose, a picture of grief too great and too constant to measure. The prophet surely shed a great many tears, and the rivers tell us how deep his sorrow went.

He weeps “for the destruction of the daughter of my people.” The word for destruction, sheber, means a breaking, an injury or a disaster. Jerusalem has been broken: its people killed, its city and temple torn down, its life under the covenant thrown into ruin, and its people scattered. What the LORD breaks he can also bind up, and Isaiah speaks of “the day that the LORD bindeth up the breach of his people, and healeth the stroke of their wound” (Isaiah 30:26).

“The daughter of my people”, in Hebrew bat-‘ammī, is a tender way of speaking of the whole nation as a beloved daughter. The word bath is the ordinary word for a daughter, which Strong’s traces to a verb meaning to build, as the feminine of the word for son. By calling Judah his daughter, the speaker grieves as a man grieves for his own child. He is one of them, and their ruin is his own loss.

Jeremiah’s book has the same cry. “Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!” (Jeremiah 9:1). “Let mine eyes run down with tears night and day, and let them not cease” (Jeremiah 14:17). Weeping was also a public duty in Israel at a time of national disaster, and the LORD told the people to call for the mourning women, to “take up a wailing for us, that our eyes may run down with tears” (Jeremiah 9:17–18). The exiles carried the same grief to Babylon: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion” (Psalm 137:1).

Verse 49 says it twice more, so that we know the tears go on. “Mine eye trickleth down” uses nâgar, to flow, to pour out or to run, the picture of a steady stream. “And ceaseth not” uses dâmâh, a verb for being silent or still, and here it is negated: his eye is never still. “Without any intermission” uses hăphugâh, an intermission or respite. The weeping runs on with no pause in which he might recover. David knew nights like this: “all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears” (Psalm 6:6). Another psalmist says, “My tears have been my meat day and night” (Psalm 42:3).

Verse 50 finishes the sentence that verse 49 began. His eye weeps “without any intermission, Till the LORD look down, and behold from heaven.” The word “till” (ʿad) sets the limit of his weeping. He will weep until God looks, and so his tears are also a prayer that waits for an answer. He calls on God by his name, Yᵉhôvâh, the LORD, the eternal God of Israel who had made his covenant with them and acted for them again and again.

The verb for “look down”, shâqaph, means to lean out, as from a window, and so to look or gaze. It pictures God bending from his dwelling to look closely at the earth. “Behold” is râʼâh, the usual word for seeing, and beside “look down” it asks God to look at the sufferer and take in all that is there. “From heaven”, shâmayim, is the sky above and the high place where God dwells. The man who is weeping on the earth asks the God who is highest of all to turn his eyes to him.

Scripture often speaks of the LORD looking from heaven. “The LORD looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God” (Psalm 14:2). “The LORD’s throne is in heaven: his eyes behold, his eyelids try, the children of men” (Psalm 11:4). “The LORD looketh from heaven; he beholdeth all the sons of men” (Psalm 33:13–14). Isaiah prays in nearly the words of this verse: “Look down from heaven, and behold from the habitation of thy holiness and of thy glory” (Isaiah 63:15).

“Mine eye affecteth mine heart because of all the daughters of my city.” The eye that weeps in verses 48 and 49 is also the eye that watched the city fall, and what it has seen hurts him within. The verb ʻâlal means to deal with something thoroughly. It is used of gleaning a field to the end, and in a bad sense it means to deal harshly with someone, to maltreat or to pain. The KJV’s “affecteth” is a gentle word for it. The sight of the city’s suffering works on him painfully and all the way through.

“Heart” here translates nephesh, the breathing creature, the life, soul or self. The pain reaches his whole person, and the more he sees, the deeper it goes.

The “daughters of my city” are the women and girls of Jerusalem. When a city fell in that age, its women and children suffered the worst of it: starvation through the siege, then violence, rape and slavery. Lamentations names them elsewhere: “behold my sorrow: my virgins and my young men are gone into captivity” (Lamentations 1:18). What happened to them shamed the whole city and showed how completely it had been brought down. Strong’s notes that bath is used as widely as any word of family, so that it can even name the towns and villages that belong to a city, and “the daughters” of a city can stand for all its people. The word “all” in the verse takes in every one of them.

Jerusalem’s ruin came from its sin, and still God himself is moved by his people’s misery. When Israel put away their idols in the days of the judges, “his soul was grieved for the misery of Israel” (Judges 10:16). A psalmist weeps over sin itself: “Rivers of waters run down mine eyes, because they keep not thy law” (Psalm 119:136). The prophet’s grief for the daughters of his city shares in that compassion of God, which stays with his people even under judgment. Paul asks the same of every believer: “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15).

From here to the end of the passage the man tells of his own sufferings. “Mine enemies chased me sore, like a bird, without cause.” The word for enemies, ʼôyêb, is a form of the verb to be hostile, and it is the usual word for a foe. The verb tsûwd, “chased”, means to lie in wait, and so to hunt or catch an animal. The Hebrew repeats the verb for force, and the KJV carries that force with “sore”: they hunted him hard.

The bird is tsippôwr, a small bird, which Strong’s traces to a root meaning to skip about, a hopping bird. A small bird has little strength and few ways of escape when it is hunted, so the picture is of a man helpless before men far stronger than he is.

Chinnâm, “without cause”, is formed from the word for favour and means gratis, for nothing, without a cause, or in vain. His enemies had no reason for what they did. David prays with the same complaint: “For without cause have they hid for me their net in a pit, which without cause they have digged for my soul” (Psalm 35:7). In Psalm 7:4–5 David asks the LORD to let the enemy overtake him if he has done evil to one who was at peace with him. Jesus says of the hatred against himself, “They hated me without a cause” (John 15:25).

The enemies may be the Babylonians, whom God used as the instruments of his judgment, or the neighbouring nations who gloated over Judah’s fall, or men within Judah who persecuted the prophet for the word he spoke.

“They have cut off my life in the dungeon, and cast a stone upon me.” The verb tsâmath means to destroy utterly, to consume, to cut off or to bring to an end, and chay is life, the living self. The “dungeon” is bôwr, a pit, the word for a cistern or a well and also for a prison. A dry cistern made a ready prison. It was deep and dark, often muddy at the bottom, and a man could hardly climb out of it unless someone drew him up. A stone, ʼeben, cast over the mouth of the pit sealed it like a tomb, and the man inside was left with every way of escape closed.

The man who says this is still alive to say it. “They have cut off my life” tells us how it was for him: they put him where he was as good as dead, cut off from the living.

Jeremiah knew such a pit. His enemies “cast him into the dungeon of Malchiah... and in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire” (Jeremiah 38:6). The pit of this verse may be a real place of that kind, and it also pictures a man shut in and left alone, as if buried alive. The psalms and the prophets speak of the same depths. “Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps” (Psalm 88:4–7). Job complains that God “hath fenced up my way that I cannot pass” (Job 19:8). Jonah says, “I went down to the bottoms of the mountains”, and then, “yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O LORD my God” (Jonah 2:6). David praises the God who “brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock” (Psalm 40:2).

Verse 54 brings water into the pit. “Waters flowed over mine head.” Mayim is the plain word for water, and Scripture often uses deep water as a picture of overwhelming trouble. Tsûwph means to flow, to overflow or to float, and the waters rise over his head until he is under them. The psalmist cries in the same way: “Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul... I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me” (Psalm 69:1–2).

“Then I said, I am cut off.” The words “then I said” mark the moment his despair became words. The verb here is gâzar, to cut down or cut off, and so to destroy, divide, exclude or decide. The two verses share the English “cut off”, and behind them stand two different Hebrew verbs, tsâmath in verse 53 and gâzar in verse 54. In verse 53 his enemies cut him off. In verse 54 he says it of himself, and he has given himself up as severed from life, from hope and from help. This is the bottom of a long account of his trouble (Lamentations 3:43–53), in which he has been pursued and mocked, and has felt that God was silent toward him or even set against him.

These verses lead us to Jesus. He wept over Jerusalem as the prophet did: “when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it”, foreseeing its destruction (Luke 19:41–44). He wept at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:35). He is the “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief”, who “hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:3–5). In Gethsemane “his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44).

He too was hunted by enemies and hated without a cause. He “did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth” (1 Peter 2:22), and he is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). He was “cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken” (Isaiah 53:8). On the cross, bearing the sin of the world, he cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34). His body was laid in a tomb, and a great stone was rolled to the door of the sepulchre (Matthew 27:59–60), as the lamenter’s enemies cast a stone upon him. That stone was rolled away, and Christ was “raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father” (Romans 6:4).

Verse 50 asks the LORD to look down from heaven. In Christ he came down, took on our flesh and entered our sorrow, so that “we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). He was cut off for us, and so those who are in him are kept, for nothing “shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39). The tears of verse 49, which flow without any intermission, will one day end: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4).

These seven verses give grief its place in God’s word. A man of God weeps for his people, tells the LORD of enemies who hunted him for nothing, and says at the bottom of the pit that he is lost, and Scripture keeps every word of it. The LORD hears his people when they speak to him like this, and he is grieved by their misery. The prophet’s tears last until the LORD looks down, and the LORD has looked down. He came in his Son, who wept over the same city, was shut in a tomb behind a stone, and rose again. When we weep with them that weep, as Paul says, we share both the prophet’s tears and the compassion of God that lies behind them.