Jeremiah 5:17 - Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible

They shall eat up thine harvest, and thy bread; they shall make clean riddance, leave thee, no supports of life, but bring an utter famine upon thee; it is thus threatened Deuteronomy 28:30,48,51. Which thy sons and thy daughters should eat; or, they shall eat up thy sons and thy daughters; but this is only a metonymy of the effect: but properly, this aggravates the dreadfulness of the judgment; parents, out of the tenderness of their affection, choosing rather to die themselves, than to live to see their children starved before their eyes, and they no ways able to relieve them, Lamentations 2:10,11. They shall eat up thy flocks, & c.; a particular enumeration of the desolation that would be made, all tending to the greatness of the former. They shall impoverish thy fenced cities, wherein thou trustedst, with the sword, i.e. beside the waste that the famine would make among persons, their cities also should be depopulated by the sword of the enemy; or rather, possibly the siege should be so strait and strict, as may be implied in the word impoverish, that they should be forced to eat one another, till they were quite wasted, they should be reduced to such poverty and exigencies; or the sword may relate to the mentioned mischiefs, as the cause of them all, the sword shall do all this: in all which he doth not so much tell them that the Chaldeans shall conquer them, for that is taken as it were for granted, as what cruelties they shall use when they have conquered.