Lamentations 3:17

3:1-20 The prophet relates the more gloomy and discouraging part of his experience, and how he found support and relief. In the time of his trial the Lord had become terrible to him. It was an affliction that was misery itself; for sin makes the cup of affliction a bitter cup. The struggle between unbelief and faith is often very severe. But the weakest believer is wrong, if he thinks that his strength and hope are perished from the Lord.

And thou hast removed my soul far off from peace,.... From the time the city was besieged by the Chaldeans, and now the people was carried captive; who could have no true peace, being in a foreign land, in an enemy's country, and out of their own, and far from the place of divine worship; nor could the prophet have any peace of soul, in the consideration of these things, the city, temple, and nation, being desolate, though he himself was not in captivity. I forgat prosperity; or "good" (q); he had been so long from the enjoyment of it, that he had lost the idea of it, and was thoughtless about it, never expecting to see it any more. (q) "bonorum", V. L. "boni", Pagninus, Montanus, Cocceius, Junius & Tremellius, Piscator, Michaelis.

17 . thou hast removed (mg. cast off ) my soul ] The change to the second person is abrupt. LXX have “he has thrust away,” the Syr. (and so Targ.) “my soul is thrust away,” but, as Pe. remarks, this is improbable in view of Lamentations 3:31 . The writer there, however, need not be the same as here; see intr. note. By adopting the 3rd person we should avoid the introduction of a direct address to God, which seems not to come earlier than Lamentations 3:19 .

Verse 17. - Thou hast removed my soul ; rather, thou hast rejected my soul. The words look like a quotation from Psalm 88:14 (Hebrew, 15), where they are undoubtedly an address to Jehovah. But there is another rendering, which grammatically is equally tenable, and which avoids the strangely abrupt address to God, viz. My soul is rejected ( from peace ). Lamentations 3:17

Peace here signifieth prosperity , rather than a freedom from war . Though during the siege they were far from peace in a strict sense, yet in their captivity they had that peace; but both their minds were far off from quiet, and their persons from prosperity: the prophet owneth God as the cause of this. They had in Canaan lived prosperously, but now they thought of it no more, nor understood what such a thing meant.

(17) Thou hast removed my soul far off from peace. —The verb is found in this sense in Psalm 88:14 . By some critics it is taken as passive, and in the 3rd person feminine. My soul loathes peace, i.e., has lost even the desire of better things; or, My soul is despised of peace, i.e., is shut out from it. But the Authorised version is preferable.

In Lamentations 3:17 and Lamentations 3:18 the speaker, in his lamentation, gives expression to that disposition of his heart which has been produced by the misery that has befallen him to so fearful an extent. He has quite given up hopes of attaining safety and prosperity, and his hope in the Lord is gone. In Lamentations 3:17 it is a question whether תּזנח is second or third pers. of the imperf. Following the lxx, who give the rendering ἀπώσατο ἐξ εἰρήνης ψυχήν μου, Rosenmller, Gesenius, De Wette, and Ngelsbach consider זנח transitive, as in Deuteronomy 2:7 , and take תּזנח as of the second pers.: "Thou didst reject my soul (me) from peace." But to this view of the words there is the decided objection, that neither before nor after is there any direct address to Jahveh, and that the verbs which immediately follow stand in the first person, and succeed the first clause appropriately enough, provided we take נפשׁי as the subject to תּזנח (third pers.). זנח has both a transitive and an intransitive meaning in Kal; cf. Hosea 8:3 (trans.) and Hosea 8:5 (intrans.). Ngelsbach has no ground for casting doubt on the intrans. meaning in Hosea 8:5 .

Moreover, the objection that the passage now before us is a quotation from Psalm 88:15 (Ngelsbach) does not prove that תּזנח נפשׁי is to be taken in the same sense here as in that passage: "O Jahveh, Thou despisest my soul." By adding משּׁלום, Jeremiah has made an independent reproduction of that passage in the Psalms, if he had it before his mind. This addition does not permit of our attaching a transitive sense to תּזנח, for the verb means to despise, not to reject; hence we cannot render the words, "Thou didst reject my soul from peace." The meaning of the clause is not "my soul loathes prosperity," as it is rendered by Thenius, who further gives the sense as follows: "I had such a thorough disgust for life, that I had no longer the least desire for prosperity." As Gerlach has already remarked, this explanation neither harmonizes with the meaning of שׁלום, not with the expression of doubt in the following verse, which implies a very lively "sense of the prosperous;" moreover, it has no good lexical basis. The fundamental meaning of זנח is to stink, be rancid, from which comes the metaphorical one of instilling disgust, - not, feeling disgust ( Hosea 8:5 ), - and further, that of despising. The meaning "to instil disgust" does not suit this passage, but only that of being despised. "My soul is despised of prosperity," i.e., so that it shares not in prosperity; with this accords the intransitive use of the Hiphil הזניח with מן, 2 Chronicles 11:14 .