Lamentations 4:18-20 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

They hunt our steps that we cannot go in our streets The Chaldeans, employed in the siege, are so close upon us, that we cannot stir a foot, nor look out at our doors, nor walk safely in the streets. Our end is near The end of our church and state; we are just at the brink of the ruin of both. Nay, our days are fulfilled, our end is come We are utterly undone; a fatal, final period is put to all our comforts; the days of our prosperity are fulfilled, they are numbered and finished. Our persecutors are swifter than the eagles God has brought upon us that judgment which he threatened by Moses, of bringing a nation against us as swift as the eagle flieth, Deuteronomy 28:49. Such were the horsemen of the Chaldean army. We could nowhere escape them, neither by fleeing to the mountains, nor by hiding ourselves in the valleys. The wilderness is in other places put for the lower, or pasture grounds. The breath of our nostrils, the anointed of the Lord, &c. Our king, who was the very life of us; was taken in their pits In those toils his enemies had laid for him. Some have supposed that the prophet speaks this of Josiah, but it seems more probable that Zedekiah is meant, and his being taken prisoner and led into captivity is here alluded to. Of whom we said, Under his shadow we shall live among the heathen As long as he was safe, we had some hopes of being protected, and of preserving some face of government, although we were carried away into a foreign country. The protection a king affords his subjects is often, in Scripture, compared to the shelter of a great tree, which is a covert against storms and tempests: see Ezekiel 17:23; Ezekiel 31:6; Daniel 4:12.