Lamentations 4:15

Verse 11 gives the whole catastrophe one cause in its first words: “The LORD hath accomplished his fury.” The army of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon took and destroyed the city and its temple in 586 BC, and the poet calls that army’s work the LORD’s own act. The name used is Yᵉhôvâh, the personal covenant name of God. So the judgment comes from the God who had bound himself to Israel, falling on a people who had broken that covenant, and it fulfils the curses he had set before them for disobedience in Deuteronomy 28.

The verse gathers one word for anger after another. “Fury” is chêmâh, heat or rage, a word that elsewhere can also mean poison. “Hath accomplished” is kâlâh, to end, finish or complete, so his fury has run on to its end. “He hath poured out” is shâphak, to pour out, spill or shed, and it pictures his anger poured over the city like a liquid. “His fierce anger” joins two words. Chârôwn is a burning of anger, anger kindled like a fire, and ʼaph is properly the nose or nostril, which came to mean anger from the hard breathing of someone who is angry.

God’s anger here is his just answer to long rebellion. For generations Judah had worshipped idols, oppressed the weak and broken faith with the covenant, while prophets like Jeremiah warned them again and again. Many had come to count Zion safe whatever they did, because God had promised David a lasting house and the temple stood on its hill. That confidence burned with the city. God’s holiness is unchanged under the new covenant, and the letter to the Hebrews says to the church, “For our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29).

Jerusalem stood on its hills behind strong walls, and it had been rescued before, most famously when the Assyrian king Sennacherib besieged it and the city was delivered (2 Kings 19). As the city where God’s temple stood, it was widely held to be under his protection and beyond the reach of any army. So verse 12 says that “the kings of the earth, and all the inhabitants of the world, would not have believed” that an enemy could come in at its gates. “All the inhabitants of the world” is a deliberate overstatement, and it shows how far and wide the shock was felt.

The verb behind “believed” is ʼâman. Its root sense is to support or foster, and Hebrew uses it for trusting something as firm and sure. The nations had been sure of the opposite. “The adversary” is tsar, from a root meaning to cramp or make narrow. It most often means an adversary, one who presses in on others, and it can also mean distress. Set beside “the enemy”, it stresses how hostile the invaders were, and here both words mean the Babylonian forces.

The gates of a city were its defence and the centre of its trade and public life. When an enemy came in at the gates, the city’s strength was broken and it had lost the right to rule itself. Jerusalem, Yᵉrûwshâlaim, was the city of David and the place of the temple, and its name is commonly explained as “founded peaceful”. The Hebrew form is a dual, which is explained as an allusion to the city’s two main hills.

Jeremiah had foretold that Babylon would come and the land would be laid waste (Jeremiah 25:8–11). Centuries later Jesus wept over the same city as he foresaw its ruin (Luke 19:41–44).

Verse 13 opens with “For”, and gives the reason for everything before it. The KJV ends the verse with a comma, because the sentence runs on into verse 14.

The two words for wrongdoing are set side by side. “Sins” is chaṭṭâʼâh, an offence, and the same word is used for the sin offering that dealt with it. “Iniquities” is ʻâvôn, perversity or moral evil, and it can also mean the guilt and punishment that follow. Pairing “the sins of her prophets” with “the iniquities of her priests” lays the guilt on both groups of spiritual leaders together. The prophets had promised peace when God had spoken of sword and famine (Jeremiah 14:13–14), and the priests had broken God’s law and profaned his holy things (Ezekiel 22:26). Jeremiah says that both prophet and priest were profane (Jeremiah 23:11) and pronounces woe on the shepherds who scattered God’s flock (Jeremiah 23:1–2).

The worst charge comes last: they “have shed the blood of the just in the midst of her”. “Shed” is the same verb, shâphak, that verse 11 uses for the LORD pouring out his anger. The leaders poured out righteous blood, and the LORD poured out his anger on the city. Blood, dâm, is blood as that which causes death when it is shed, and in the plural it means bloodshed and bloodguilt. The victims are tsaddîyq, the just or righteous. The law forbade the shedding of innocent blood (Deuteronomy 19:10), among the things the LORD hates are “hands that shed innocent blood” (Proverbs 6:17), and Ezekiel charged Jerusalem with the bloodshed and injustice done inside it (Ezekiel 22:6–9). “In the midst of her” means this was done openly, in the heart of the city where God’s house stood.

Verse 14 goes on with the same leaders. “They have wandered as blind men in the streets.” The verb nûwaʻ means to waver or wander, moving without a steady course, and it comes back in verse 15 when the leaders flee. The streets, chûwts, are the outside places beyond the houses, so their stumbling was seen by everyone. The men who should have guided the nation could see neither their own sin nor the judgment coming. Isaiah calls Israel’s watchmen blind (Isaiah 56:10) and pictures the people groping for the wall like the blind (Isaiah 59:10), and Jesus calls the religious leaders of his day “blind guides” (Matthew 23:24).

“They have polluted themselves with blood.” The verb gâʼal means to soil, stain, defile or desecrate. The blood is the dâm of verse 13, the blood of the people they had wronged, and it marks them with the guilt of violence and injustice. Isaiah told Jerusalem, “your hands are full of blood” (Isaiah 1:15), Jeremiah charged Judah with the blood of the innocent poor (Jeremiah 2:34), and the law says that blood defiles the land (Numbers 35:33).

“So that men could not touch their garments.” Under the law of Moses, touching something unclean made a person unclean too (Leviticus 11:24–25, Leviticus 15:5). These men had become so defiled that people kept clear of even their clothes. The priests who were meant to keep the people clean were now the uncleanness everyone avoided, cut off from the community and from God.

Verse 15 gives the cry raised against them: “Depart ye; it is unclean; depart, depart, touch not.” The word “depart” stands three times in this verse, and the repetition makes the command urgent and final. The verb is çûwr, also spelled çûyr, meaning to turn aside, remove or withdraw. “Touch” is the same verb as in verse 14, so the cry puts into words what the people were already doing.

“Unclean” is ṭâmêʼ, foul in a religious sense, defiled. Under the law a person could become unclean through contact with a dead body, certain skin diseases or bodily discharges, and had to stay apart from the community and the sanctuary until purified. A leper had to cry “Unclean, unclean” as he went (Leviticus 13:45–46). Here others shout the leper’s cry at the city’s priests and prophets. The word that belonged to ritual impurity now names a moral defilement that made them abhorrent to God and to their own people.

Verse 16 brings the passage back to the LORD. Under “the anger of the LORD” stands pânîym, the word for face, so the Hebrew speaks of the LORD’s face as turned against them. “Hath divided” is châlaq, to divide, share out or allot, and it also has a second sense, to be smooth. Here it describes a people broken apart, split up and scattered among the nations, and a society that had come apart from within. God’s anger is righteous and deliberate, for “The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked” (Nahum 1:3).

“He will no more regard them.” The verb nâbaṭ means to look or gaze, and from that to have regard for someone with favour and care. Joined with yâçaph, “no more”, it says that the LORD has stopped looking on them with that kindly care.

“They respected not the persons of the priests, they favoured not the elders.” To respect persons is literally to lift up the face, and the same word for face stands under “persons” as under “anger” earlier in the verse. “Favoured” is chânan, to bend or stoop in kindness to someone lower, to show favour. The priests led the nation’s worship and taught the law, and the elders were its community leaders, judges and counsellors. When neither was given honour, contempt had spread through spiritual and civil life alike, and the order God had given for the people’s good had broken down.

The anger poured out on Jerusalem points to the cross, where God’s wrath against sin fell on his own Son. Jesus is the “Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and Isaiah says that the LORD laid on his servant the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:4–6). Since we are justified by his blood, we “shall be saved from wrath through him” (Romans 5:9). John the Baptist promised that the one coming after him would baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire (Matthew 3:11). The foundations of Zion burned, and God has laid another foundation that no fire can devour, for “other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11).

Jerusalem’s gates were broken through, and Jesus says, “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved” (John 10:9). Nothing can separate those who enter by him from the love of God (Romans 8:38–39). The world could hardly believe that Jerusalem would fall, and many later stumbled at the message of Christ crucified, which is the power and wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:23–25). The gates of the New Jerusalem are never shut (Revelation 21:25).

The religious leaders of Jesus’ own day shed the blood of the Just One in Jerusalem (Acts 3:14). His blood, “as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Peter 1:19), was poured out for sin and shed “for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:28), and “without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22). He is the Prophet who has made the Father known (John 1:18), the great High Priest who offered himself (Hebrews 4:14–16), the chief Shepherd (1 Peter 5:4) and the head over all things to the church (Ephesians 1:22–23).

Jesus warned of blind leaders of the blind (Matthew 15:14), and he came to give sight to the blind (John 9:39–41). Those who were stained with guilt are cleansed by his blood from all sin (1 John 1:7), because God “made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The leaders of Zion were driven out as unclean, and Jesus “suffered without the gate” so that he might sanctify the people with his own blood (Hebrews 13:12). The exiles found nowhere to stay, and the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head (Matthew 8:20), yet he makes those who trust him children of God and heirs with him (Romans 8:17). His promise to his people is, “lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20).

These verses show who God is when his people persist in sin. He is holy, his warnings are true, and he holds his people, and their leaders most of all, to account. Neither a famous city, nor a temple, nor past blessing protected Jerusalem when its prophets and priests shed righteous blood. The passage also shows how far the ruin of a people can begin with the corruption of those who teach it.

Yet the book that holds this chapter also holds the confession, “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 3:22–23). The God who judged Zion is the same God who promised to bring his people home, and who in Christ bore his own fierce anger so that all who trust in his Son are spared it. That is why we can read even this hard passage with hope.