Lamentations 5:4

5:1-16 Is any afflicted? Let him pray; and let him in prayer pour out his complaint to God. The people of God do so here; they complain not of evils feared, but of evils felt. If penitent and patient under what we suffer for the sins of our fathers, we may expect that He who punishes, will return in mercy to us. They acknowledge, Woe unto us that we have sinned! All our woes are owing to our own sin and folly. Though our sins and God's just displeasure cause our sufferings, we may hope in his pardoning mercy, his sanctifying grace, and his kind providence. But the sins of a man's whole life will be punished with vengeance at last, unless he obtains an interest in Him who bare our sins in his own body on the tree.

We have drunken our water for money,.... They who in their own land, which was a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths, had wells of water of their own, and water freely and in abundance, now were obliged to pay for it, for drink, and other uses: our wood is sold unto us; or, "comes to us by a price" (r); and a dear one; in their own land they could have wood out of the forest, for cutting down and bringing home; but now they were forced to give a large price for it. (r) "in pretio venerunt", Pagninus, Montanus; "caro nobis pretio veniunt", Michaelis.

This seemeth to refer to the state of the Jews in Babylon, where it is probable their adversaries made them buy both water and wood, which in the land of Canaan they had plentifully, and without any further charge to them than fetching the one, and cutting down and bringing home the other.

(4) Our water . . . our wood. —The point of the complaint lies in the possessive pronoun. The Chaldæan conquerors were in possession of the country, and the very necessaries of life, which had been looked on as the common property of all, were only to be had for money. In the Hebrew of the first clause the fact appears yet more emphatically: Our water comes to us for money. The words have been referred by some commentators to the sufferings of the exiles in Egypt, but the context fits in better with the idea of the hardships of those who were left in Judah.

4. water for money—The Jews were compelled to pay the enemy for the water of their own cisterns after the overthrow of Jerusalem; or rather, it refers to their sojourn in Babylon; they had to pay tax for access to the rivers and fountains. Thus, "our" means the water which we need, the commonest necessary of life. our wood—In Judea each one could get wood without pay; in Babylon, "our wood," the wood we need, must be paid for.

And not merely are the inhabitants of Judah without land and property, and deprived of all protection, like orphans and widows; they are also living in penury and want, and ( Lamentations 5:5 ) under severe oppression and persecution. Water and wood are mentioned in Lamentations 5:4 as the greatest necessities of life, without which it is impossible to exist. Both of these they must buy for themselves, because the country, with its waters and forests, is in the possession of the enemy. The emphasis lies on "our water...our wood." What they formerly had, as their own property, for nothing, they must now purchase. We must reject the historical interpretations of the words, and their application to the distress of the besieged (Michaelis); or to the exiles who complained of the dearness of water and wood in Egypt (Ewald); or to those who fled before the Chaldeans, and lived in waste places (Thenius); or to the multitudes of those taken prisoner after the capture of Jerusalem, who were so closely watched that they could not go where they liked to get water and wood, but were obliged to go to their keepers for permission, and pay dearly for their services (Ngelsbach). The purchase of water and wood can scarcely be taken literally, but must be understood as signifying that the people had to pay heavy duties for the use of the water and the wood which the country afforded.

10 . If our transgressions ] Better, direct: our transgressions … are upon us. The people had come to regard their calamities as due to their sins and evidence of them. They had come round to the prophet’s view of their history, for they saw his predictions fulfilled. But the new view came with a crushing weight upon them. The calamities of their country were unparalleled ( Lamentations 1:12 ; Lamentations 2:13 ; Lamentations 2:20 ; Lamentations 3:1 ; Lamentations 4:6 ; Lamentations 4:9 ), and equally unparalleled must have been their guilt ( Lamentations 1:9 ; Lamentations 1:14 ; Lamentations 2:14 ; Lamentations 4:13 ; Lamentations 5:7 ). And their calamities seemed final, their sin was expiable only by their complete destruction. we pine away ] Or, waste away. The word expresses not mental but physical wasting away, ending in complete dissolution. See the very similar figures, Isaiah 10:18 ; Isaiah 17:4 ; cf. Ezekiel 4:17 ; Ezekiel 24:23 ; Leviticus 26:39 . 10–20 . Despondency of the people, making the prophet’s appeals to them of none effect. Removal of the despair by two gracious words from the Lord.

Verse 3. - And on the ninth day of the fourth month. The text of Kings is here incomplete, and has to be restored from Jeremiah 52:6 . Our translators have supplied the missing words. The famine prevailed in the city (see the comment on ver. 2). As I have elsewhere observed, "The intensity of the suffering endured may be gathered from Lamentations, Ezekiel, and Josephus. The complexions of the men grew black with famine ( Lamentations 4:8 ; Lamentations 5:10 ); their skin was shrunk and parched ( Lamentations 4:8 ); the rich and noble women searched the dunghills for setups of offal ( Lamentations 4:5 ); the children perished for want, or were even devoured by their parents ( Lamentations 2:20 ; Lamentations 4:3, 4, 10 ; Ezekiel 5:10 ); water was scarce, as well as food, and was sold at a price ( Lamentations 5:4 ); third part of the inhabitants died of the famine, and the plague which grew out of it ( Ezekiel 5:12 )" (see the 'Speaker's Commentary,' vol. it. p. 147). And there was no bread for the people of the land. Bread commonly fails comparatively early in a siege. It was some time before the fall of the city that Ebed-Meleeh expressed his fear that Jeremiah would starve, since there was no more bread in the place (see Jeremiah 38:9 ). 2 Kings 25:3