Paul Kretzmann Commentary - Lamentations 2:1 - 2:10

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Paul Kretzmann Commentary - Lamentations 2:1 - 2:10


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A Description of Jehovah's Judgment

v. 1. How hath the Lord covered the daughter of Zion, His own city, formerly the seat of His Church, with a cloud in His anger, with the chilly darkness of ignominy and shame, and cast down from heaven unto the earth the beauty of Israel, the glory of the capital itself, chosen by God, as it had been, for the seat of His glory and power in the midst of His people had been established there, and remembered not His footstool in the day of His anger! so that the very Ark of the Covenant, 1Ch_28:2, where Jehovah was enthroned between the wings of the cherubim, was removed and destroyed.

v. 2. The Lord hath swallowed up all the habitations of Jacob,
the entire country being included in the ruin, and hath not pitied, carrying out His judgment with merciless severity; He hath thrown down in His wrath the strongholds of the daughter of Judah, the fortified places sharing the fate of the hamlets in the open country; He hath brought them down to the ground, in a total destruction; He hath polluted the kingdom and the princes thereof, by delivering the country together with its rulers into the hands of the heathen conquerors.

v. 3. He hath cut off in His fierce anger all the horn of Israel,
symbol of strength and majesty, breaking it in the heat of His indignation; He hath drawn back His right hand from before the enemy, withdrawing His assistance from His people and thus delivering them into the power of the invaders, and He burned against Jacob like a flaming fire which devoureth round about, the Lord thus being directly active in its destruction.

v. 4. He hath bent His bow like an enemy,
attacking them with a deadly weapon; He stood with His right hand as an adversary, wielding a ruthless sword, and slew all that were pleasant to the eye, all that charmed and delighted the eye, both in children and in goods, in the tabernacle of the daughter of Zion, in the entire city of Jerusalem; He poured out His fury like fire, in the capture and destruction of the city.

v. 5. The Lord was as an enemy; He hath swallowed up Israel,
or, "The Lord became—as a hero He hath destroyed"; He hath swallowed up all her palaces, the fine dwellings of the rich and mighty; He hath destroyed His strongholds, all the fortified places throughout the country, and hath increased in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation, or "sorrow and sadness, mourning and misery," as we might translate in following the play of similar sounds in the original.

v. 6. And He hath violently taken away His Tabernacle as if it were of a garden,
the Temple being subjected to ruin like a garden which the owner converts into some other kind of plot if it no longer suits his purposes; He hath destroyed His places of the assembly, where He met with His people in the communion of the covenant, in the Sanctuary protected by His holy Law. The Lord hath caused the solemn feasts and Sabbaths to be forgotten in Zion, this being the natural result of the city's destruction, and hath despised, in the indignation of His anger, the king and the priest; for He no longer desired these mediators of His covenant, and the service of the priests was no longer required when the Temple-worship ceased.

v. 7. The Lord hath cast off His altar,
rejecting it with disdain, chiefly on account of the hypocritical worship connected with it; He hath abhorred His Sanctuary, the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, the center of the Jewish cultus; He hath given up into the hand of the enemy the walls of her palaces, the proud buildings of the Temple, which reared their columns high above the surrounding city and country. They have made a noise in the house of the Lord, the enemies breaking forth into loud shouts of rejoicing over their victory, as in the day of a solemn feast, in a noisy celebration.

v. 8. The Lord hath purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion,
the destruction of Jerusalem setting into execution the judgment of God, 2Ki_25:10; He hath stretched out a line, in taking measures to level the city in unsparing rigidity of punishment; He hath not withdrawn His hand from destroying, from bringing total ruin upon the city; therefore He made the rampart and the wall to lament, they languished together, overcome by the shame which was done to them.

v. 9. Her gates are sunk into the ground,
buried under a mass of rubbish and earth, which the destruction of the city has scattered over them; He hath destroyed and broken her bars, with which the gates were bolted against the attack of the enemies. Her king and her princes are among the Gentiles, in shameful captivity; the Law is no more, its ordinances and provisions no longer being in force; her prophets also find no vision from the Lord, the Lord withholding His ordinary revelations and communications, as at the time of the Judges, 1Sa_3:1.

v. 10. The elders of the daughter of Zion,
the leaders of the Jewish Church, sit upon the ground and keep silence, they have no counsel to give, chiefly because they are dumb with grief; they have cast up dust upon their heads, they have girded themselves with sackcloth, in token of the greatness of their mourning; the virgins of Jerusalem, ordinarily care-free and happy, hang down their heads to the ground, in an excess of grief. Such is the effect when the Lord carries out His sentence of judgment upon nations and upon individuals who oppose His will.