EXEGETICAL NOTES.—
Lamentations 1:1-2 present the city as she is in sharp contrast with what she was, and as an object of deep distress, on account of her sins and their penalties. The verses have a pictorial illustration in the medal struck by the Roman Emperor Titus in commemoration of the capture of Jerusalem (A.D. 71).
(א) Lamentations 1:1. How, not in interrogation, but in surprise and pain. This particle is unnecessarily inserted twice in the Authorised Version. It is not again employed in the Hebrew of the book, except in chaps. Lamentations 2:1 and Lamentations 4:1-2, sitteth alone, in a posture of overpowering sorrow rather than of utter isolation, like Nehemiah, who, when he heard of the doleful state of Jerusalem, sat down and wept and mourned (Lamentations 1:4), the city = Jerusalem, as following verses prove. The fact that the Chaldean captain left of the poor of the people, which had nothing, in the land of Judah (Jeremiah 39:10) suggests that a few waifs and strays might be still banging round the ruined city, while the reference (chap. Lamentations 2:10) to the elders of the daughter of Zion may intimate that some of better means were also with them; that was full of people. No known criterion exists by which to estimate the population of ancient Jerusalem. An approximate guess even cannot be made from the perfunctory census taken in David’s reign. She is become as a widow, forsaken and under the reproach of widowhood, seeing that she is not in communion with the Lord, her Maker; but still she is not quite a widow; there is to be a restoration, because for a small moment have I forsaken thee … saith the Lord thy Redeemer (Isaiah 54:6); that was great among the nations, respected and powerful; a princess over the provinces. The dominion centered in Jerusalem is illustrated by the letter of Artaxerxes to his subordinates, There have been mighty kings over Jerusalem, which have ruled over all the country beyond the river; and tribute, custom, and toll was paid unto them (Ezra 4:20). This jurisdiction over dependent peoples was at its height in the reigns of David and Solomon, though after them there were also kings whose rule embraced others beside the Jews. In sad contrast she is become a vassal, generally shown by taskwork, not so often by money-payment, and expressing entire subservience.
(ב) Lamentations 1:2. Intense grief overwhelms her, She weeps bitterly in the night; no temporary oblivion comes to her; the silent hours pass with her tears on her cheeks. For her there is no comforter among all her lovers; all her friends, or neighbours, have dealt treacherously with her. The Babylonians and all the Chaldeans, Pekod and Shoa and Koa, and all the Assyrians with them (Ezekiel 23:23), were alienated from her, while Egypt, Amnion, Edom, Moab, disowned their alliance with her: they are become her enemies, and gloat over her downfall (2 Kings 24:2).
HOMILETICS
Grief for a Ruined City
There is a fine piece of statuary representing the figure of a Hebrew female in a sitting posture, the head and shoulders slightly bent forward, the hair escaping in disordered tresses from the neatly plaited fillets, the arms, carelessly crossed over each other, resting helplessly in her lap, the eyes, moistened with tears, gazing wistfully on the ground, and the face expressing in every feature the tenderest pathos of sorrow. The whole figure seems to quiver with irrepressible emotion. Every part is moulded with voluptuous grace, and is susceptible of the deepest passion, but it is the passion of an inconsolable grief! The genius of the artist has thus sought to idealise unhappy Judah weeping amid the scattered fragments of national ruin. It is a reproduction, by the art of the nineteenth century, of the same sad image that appeared on the well-known medal of Titus, struck to celebrate his triumph over Jerusalem—a woman sitting weeping beneath a palm-tree, and below is inscribed the legend Judea capta. It is startling to observe how exactly the heathen conqueror copied the poetic description by Jeremiah of the forlorn condition to which his beloved country was reduced. These words describe a pathetic picture of grief for a ruined city.
I. Because of its utter desolation. “How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people” (Lamentations 1:1) There is a tradition that Jeremiah wrote these elegies in a grotto that is still shown, situated in the face of a rocky hill on the western side of Jerusalem; and there is a freshness and versatility in the images employed, as if every time he glanced at the ruins of the ill-fated city, full in his view, he was unable to repress a new outburst of grief. He had seen Jerusalem in prosperity, its Temple thronged with worshippers, its commerce flourishing, its people content and joyous; but now all is changed; the market-place is empty, the streets silent, the princes and people in exile, and the Temple, which the Jew fondly dreamed invulnerable, was a heap of ruins. Such desolation was unparalleled in the history of the nation and in the experience of the prophet, and his heart was riven with anguish. We may read about the decay of great cities without emotion; but to witness the demolition of our own city is a different matter.
II. Because of the loss of its beloved chief. “How is she become as a widow!” (Lamentations 1:1). A city is often described as the mother of its inhabitants, the king as husband, the princes as children. When the king is gone, and not even a representative is left, the city is widowed and orphaned indeed. The condition of an Eastern widow is pitiable. Her hair is cut short, she strips off all her ornaments, eats the coarsest food, fasts often, and is all but an outcast in the family of her late husband. The image employed by the prophet would therefore be painfully suggestive to the Jewish mind.
III. Because of its humiliating subjection. “She that was great among the nations and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary?” (Lamentations 1:1). The older meaning of the word tributary refers not to a money-payment, but to personal labour (Joshua 16:10). The city that ruled from the Nile to the Euphrates is now reduced to slavery, and the few inhabitants who are left must render bond-service to a heathen potentate. It is galling to a once proud and prosperous people to be thus humiliated. They who will not serve God faithfully must be compelled to serve their enemies.
IV. Because of its being cruelly betrayed. “Among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her. All her friends have dealt treacherously with her; they have become her enemies” (Lamentations 1:2). Her allies, who made great protestations of attachment when all was prosperous, not only forsake her when adversity comes, but unite with her enemies in completing her destruction. It is a bitter irony of human professions when love turns to enmity and friendship to treachery. “A loose tooth and a fickle friend are two evils.” The sooner we are clear of them the better; but who likes the wrench? If we lose the comfort of God, we are not likely to find help in man. We can trust in no one if we cannot trust in God.
V. Is expressed with irresistible pathos. “She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks” (Lamentations 1:2). It was a fine touch of poetic genius when the prophet selected a sorrowful woman as an emblem of a disconsolate city. Woman is never so fascinating, so tender, so bewitchingly irresistible in commanding sympathy as when she is in tears! The hardest heart is melted, the sternest enemy subdued. The sorrow of Judah was overwhelming because the ruin was so unexpected and unparalleled. No city has been wept over like Jerusalem. The melancholy wail has been prolonged through the centuries, and is reproduced to-day. The Lamentations are still read yearly by the Jews to commemorate the burning of the Temple. Every Friday, Israelites young and old, of both sexes, gather at the wailing place in Jerusalem, where a few of the old stones of the Temple still remain in the wall, and, amid tears, recite these sad verses and suitable psalms, as they fervently kiss the stones. On the 9th of the month Ab, nearly our July, this dirge, composed about 600 years before Christ, is read aloud in every synagogue over the world. Weeping is not repentance; but the tears of the contrite do not flow in vain. They are noted in heaven, and God will help.
LESSONS.—
1. The ruin of a once prosperous city is a sad and suggestive spectacle.
2. The miseries of others should rouse our compassion.
3. The greatest grief finds relief in tears.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
Lamentations 1:1. “How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people.” A populous city.
1. A busy scene of activity, gaiety, sin, sorrow, and complicated experiences.
2. Produces a strange sensation upon the belated visitor when it is hushed in the silence of sleep.
3. Its ruin a subject of profound sorrow and suggestive reflections to one who has known it in the flood-tide of its prosperity.
—“How has she become as a widow, she that was great among the nations.” Widowhood.
1. Suggestive of loss—loss of happiness, solace, guardianship, affection.
2. Implies loneliness, dejection, sorrow.
3. A painful experience when contrasted with a former state of affluence and grandeur.
—“Princes among the provinces, how is she become tributary.” The strange reverses of fortune.
1. The ruler becomes the ruled.
2. The free are the conquered:
3. Wealth exchanged for poverty.
4. Life dependent on abject submission to those who were once our inferiors.
Lamentations 1:2. “She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks.” The pathos of tears.
1. A sublime spectacle in the ideal woman.
2. An evidence of profound sorrow.
3. Gathers its significance from the character of the calamity it bewails
4. A merciful relief to an intensely sensitive nature.
—“All her friends have dealt treacherously with her; they are become her enemies.” The fickleness of human friendships. I. Genuine friends are rare. They may usually be counted on a thumb and finger; the one is the wife or husband, the other is the mother, who is father, mother, and a great deal more. There is no folly so fanatical as that which flings away a real friend. II. Friends are plentiful when we do not need their help. They depend on us more than ever we had occasion to depend on them. While we can help them, their friendship is effusive and their vows of fealty emphatic. When our power declines, so does their attachment: when our circumstances alter, so do they. They are swallow friends, fluttering merrily about us in the summertime of prosperity, but suddenly become invisible when the winter of adversity sets in. III. It is a sad proof of the perversity of human nature when a friend is transformed into an enemy. The enmity is often the more rancorous because of the intimacy of a former friendship. The secrets confided in a moment of familiarity are used against us with a studied ingenuity of irritating spitefulness. It is a painful shock to an unsophisticated youth, and leaves a wound that time cannot heal, when he discovers for the first time the base treachery of a pretended friend.
ILLUSTRATIONS.—Mutual sympathy in sorrow. When Henry VII. heard of the sudden death of his son Prince Arthur at Ludlow Castle in 1502, he said, “Send some one for the Queen; let me bear this grief with her.” She came and did her best to comfort him. She then retired to her own room, was overwhelmed with sorrow, and swooned away. It was now his turn to cheer and comfort. On both sides it was, “Let me bear this grief with her,” and, “Let me bear this grief with him.” And thus in their retreat at Greenwich the King and Queen of England mourned in silence for the loss of their first-born son.
—It is the weeping cloud that blesses the earth.
Grief useless that does not lead to active help. We are sorry (for the English are a kind-hearted people) for the victims of our luxury and neglect; sorry for the thousands whom we let die every year by preventible diseases, because we are either too busy or too comfortable to save their lives; sorry for the savages whom we exterminate by no deliberate intent, but by the mere weight of our heavy footstep; sorry for the thousands who are used up yearly in certain trades in ministering to our comfort, even to our very luxuries and frivolities; sorry for the Sheffield grinders, who go to work as to certain death; sorry for the people whose lower jaws decay away in lucifermatch factories; sorry for the diseases of artificial flower-makers; sorry for the boys working in glass-houses whole days and nights on end without rest, “labouring in the very fire, and wearying themselves with weary vanity.” We are sorry for them all, as the giant is for the worm on which he treads. Alas! poor worm. But the giant must walk on. He is necessary to the universe, and the worm is not. So we are sorry, for half an hour, and glad too (for we are a kind-hearted people) to hear that charitable persons or the Government are going to do something towards alleviating these miseries. And then we return, too many of us, each to his own ambition, comforting ourselves with the thought that we did not make the world, and we are not responsible for it.—C. Kingsley.
The All-seeing God and the lonely. God sees you always. There is no moment when He does not see you, night or day, waking or sleeping, alone or in company. It is told of Linnæus, the famous naturalist, that he was greatly impressed with this thought, and that it told upon his conversation, his writings, and his conduct. He felt the importance of this so much, that he wrote over the door of his study the Latin words, Innocui vivite; Numen ad est. “Live innocently; God is here!”
Christianity relieves the miseries of great cities. Look at those noble buildings which the generosity of our fellow-countrymen have erected in all our great cities. You may truly find in them sermons in stones; sermons for rich and poor alike. They preach to the rich, these hospitals, that the sick-bed levels all alike; that they are the equals and brothers of the poor in the terrible liability to suffer. They preach to the poor that they are, through Christianity, the equals of the rich in their means and opportunities of cure. Whether the founders so intended or not, these hospitals bear direct witness for Christ. They do this, and would do it even if—which God forbid!—the name of Christ was never mentioned within their walls. That may seem a paradox, but it is none; for it is a historic fact that hospitals are the creation of Christian times and of Christian men. The heathen knew them not. In the great city of ancient Rome, as far as I have been able to discover, there was not a single hospital, not even a single charitable institution. Fearful thought! A city of a million and a half inhabitants, the centre of human civilisation, and not an hospital there! The Roman Dives paid his physician; the Roman Lazarus literally lay at his gates full of sores, till he died the death of the street dogs which licked those sores, and was carried forth to be thrust under ground awhile, till the same dogs came to quarrel over his bones. The misery and helplessness of the lower classes in the great city of the Roman Empire, till the Church of Christ arose literally with healing in its wings, cannot, I believe, be exaggerated.—C. Kingsley.
—When you hear a man praising “the good old times,” ask him how the peasantry were then sheltered and fed.
The power of tears. A young lady once visited a lunatic asylum, and was led into a room where there was but one patient, a young girl of the same age as herself. She was standing in the corner of the room, her face almost touching the wall. In stony hopelessness she stood. She neither looked nor spoke. She might have been dead but that she still stood on. It was a pathetic sight. “Will you speak to her?” asked the doctor; “we can do nothing with her. She has been thus for days; but one like yourself might move her.” The young lady stepped forward, and, with an upward cry for Divine help, laid her hand gently on the shoulder of the listless form, and with tears in her eyes spoke one sentence of yearning sympathy and compassion. The spell was broken. The poor patient turned, gazed for a moment on the face of the weeping visitor, and then burst into tears! The doctor exclaimed, “Thank God, she may now be saved!” The visitor could never recall the words she had used; but, with the voice softened with tears, they had done their work. The still and cold indifference of the patient gave way before the warmth of a pitying heart and the magic touch of a hand stretched out to help. The eloquence of tears is irresistible.
The friends of youth: Where are they?
“I sought you, friends of youth, in sun and shade,
By home and hearth; but no! ye were not there.
Where are ye gone, beloved ones, where? I said.
I listened, and an echo answered, Where?
Then silence fell around: upon a tomb
I sat me down, dismayed at death, and wept;
Over my senses fell a cloud of gloom;
They sank before the mystery, and I slept.
I slept, and then before my eyes there pressed
Faces that showed a bliss unknown before;
The loved whom I in life had once possessed
Came one by one, till all were there once more.
A light of nobler worlds was round their head;
A glow of better actions made them fair.
‘The dead are there,’ triumphantly I said;
Triumphantly the echo answered, ‘There’!”
—Clive.