Lamentations 2:1-12 ▼

1 How the Lord has covered with His nose the daughter of Zion! He has cast from the heavens to the earth the beauty of Israel, and He did not remember the stool for His feet on the day of His anger!

2 The Lord has swallowed up and He has not pitied all the dwelling places of Jacob; He has thrown down in His wrath the fortifications of the daughter of Judah; He has made them touch to the ground; He has profaned the kingdom and its princes.

3 He has cut off in the burning of His anger every horn of Israel; He has turned back His right hand from before the enemy, and He has blazed against Jacob like a fire of flame, devouring all around!

4 He has bent His bow like an enemy, standing with His right hand like an adversary, and He has slain all those desirable to His eye; on the tent of the daughter of Zion, He has poured out His fury like fire.

5 The Lord has been like an enemy! He has swallowed up Israel, has swallowed up all her palaces; He has destroyed her strongholds, and He has multiplied in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation.

6 He has treated violently His booth as a garden; He has destroyed His appointed place; YHWH has caused to be forgotten in Zion the appointed feast and Sabbath, and He has spurned in the rage of His anger king and priest!

7 The Lord has rejected His altar; He has disowned His sanctuary; He has shut up in the hand of the enemy the walls of her palaces; a voice they have given forth in the house of YHWH as on the day of the appointed feast.

8 YHWH has purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion; He has stretched out a line; He has not turned back His hand from destroying; the rampart and wall He has caused to lament, and together they have languished.

9 Her gates have sunk into the ground; He has destroyed and broken her bars; her king and her princes are among the nations; the law is no more, and her prophets cannot find vision from YHWH.

10 They sit on the ground and are silent—the elders of the daughter of Zion; they have thrown up dust on their heads, they have girded themselves with sackcloth; they have bowed their heads to the ground, the virgins of Jerusalem.

11 My eyes end in tears, my bowels are troubled; my liver is poured to the ground over the destruction of the daughter of my people, at the fainting of the infants and sucklings in the streets of the city!

12 To their mothers they say, “Where is the grain and wine?” In their becoming feeble like a wounded one in the streets of the city, in the pouring out their soul into the bosom of their mothers.