Lamentations 5 - ESV - Bible Reading / Study Notes

Lamentations 5

Restore Us to Yourself, O Lord

5:1   Remember, O LORD, what has befallen us;
    look, and see our disgrace!
2   Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers,
    our homes to foreigners.
3   We have become orphans, fatherless;
    our mothers are like widows.
4   We must pay for the water we drink;
    the wood we get must be bought.
5   Our pursuers are at our necks;
    we are weary; we are given no rest.
6   We have given the hand to Egypt, and to Assyria,
    to get bread enough.
7   Our fathers sinned, and are no more;
    and we bear their iniquities.
8   Slaves rule over us;
    there is none to deliver us from their hand.
9   We get our bread at the peril of our lives,
    because of the sword in the wilderness.
10   Our skin is hot as an oven
    with the burning heat of famine.
11   Women are raped in Zion,
    young women in the towns of Judah.
12   Princes are hung up by their hands;
    no respect is shown to the elders.
13   Young men are compelled to grind at the mill,
    and boys stagger under loads of wood.
14   The old men have left the city gate,
    the young men their music.
15   The joy of our hearts has ceased;
    our dancing has been turned to mourning.
16   The crown has fallen from our head;
    woe to us, for we have sinned!
17   For this our heart has become sick,
    for these things our eyes have grown dim,
18   for Mount Zion which lies desolate;
    jackals prowl over it.
19   But you, O LORD, reign forever;
    your throne endures to all generations.
20   Why do you forget us forever,
    why do you forsake us for so many days?
21   Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may be restored!
    Renew our days as of old—
22   unless you have utterly rejected us,
    and you remain exceedingly angry with us.

Commentary

This chapter is not acrostic, unlike the previous chapters; even the structure provided in the previous chapters is gone; it is almost a seres of notes, like scraps of paper with different observations and comments; only at the very end, in v19-22, is there a simple, pathetic, prayer - 'Restore us to yourself O Lord.' Hope is only in God. 'unless you have utterly rejected us' - the hope is still fragile; but there is no-one else to help!

v1: Trusting in God, contrast Jer 44.15-19; many of the people had deliberately chosen idolatry.

v2-3: The land, so precious to the people, for God had given it, was handed over to foreigners.

v4-10: The bare necessities of life wee hard to find, they had a constant struggle for survival.

v11-15: The people all suffered. No one could find a group of people exempt from the pain.

v16: The key to the book, "Woe to us, for we have sinned!" The long, sorry, saga, of decline and defeat is summed up so aptly.

v17-18: The people still believed that their future was tied up with the condition of Mount Zion, and therefore they sorrowed over it. No longer the place of joy and dancing (v15), but desolate, the home of wild animals.

v19-20: The eternity of God; without Him there is no hope. God is in control, in every generation. But why, comes the question, was this generation forgotten?

v21-22: Ultimately, God would show His faithfulness again. Jeremiah knew that the suffering would end, for God had promises still to be fulfilled; and His throne is forever.

Unlike in Habakkuk, where God speaks in the time of crisis, here God is silent. That is part of the lament; we still cry when He is, or seems, to be silent.