EXEGETICAL NOTES.—
(ג). Lamentations 4:3. Beasts of prey show affection for their brood. Even the jackals draw out—present—the breast; a familiar fact testifying that they were true to their instincts, they suckle their whelps; but in miserable contrariety to this, the daughter of my people has become otherwise; unwilling to give nourishment to their babes, they show themselves cruel, like ostriches in the desert. This arraignment of the wild birds is according to ideas current at the time, and reported in the Book of Job. She leaveth her eggs on the earth … she is hardened against her young ones, as if they were not hers (Job 39:14; Job 39:16). Later observations require some modification of this account of the habits of the ostrich; but the writers of the Sacred Scriptures had not a knowledge of Nature beyond their times.
This fearful, unnatural result of the extreme trials of the Israelites had its correlated feature.
(ד). Lamentations 4:4. The tongue of the sucking child cleaveth to the roof of his mouth, because of getting no milk. The young children ask bread, and no one divides to them the cakes in which form it was made.
(ה) Lamentations 4:5. Adults also are distressed. They that did feed delicately, in the fastidiousness of luxury, are desolate in the streets, with no one to serve them, with no means to satisfy hunger, perishing. They that were brought up in scarlet, those of the wealthy classes, accustomed to use the most expensive cloth, lay themselves, in sheer despair, on the dirt-heaps which have accumulated in the ruined city. Like Dives, clothed in purple and fine linen, faring sumptuously every day, they too are in darkness—only they in the visible, he in the invisible world.
(ו) Lamentations 4:6. Those awful distresses were due to the way in which the people had lived. The crying wickedness of Sodom is again and again denounced by prophets as a warning to the Israelites. Here that wickedness is minified, and, from the long drawn out sufferings of the latter, it is implied that the iniquity—not the punishment of the iniquity, a translation which has not been established from the usage of the two corresponding Hebrew words elsewhere—of the daughter of my people is greater than the sin of Sodom. The Cities of the Plain had not the advantage which the Jews had, who were intrusted with the oracles of God, and their guilt was less. The supreme authority of Jesus Christ stands behind the declaration that it would be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for those who refused the light of life. Moreover, Sodom was destroyed by a sudden stroke—no protracted sufferings, no starved, wailing children, no mothers eating their own infants, overthrown as in a moment, and by forces in which no human agency had any part; hands did not encircle her. No enemies brandished their swords against her inhabitants, investing her on every side. God can paralyse all industries and destroy a community without man’s aid. The ground of this preference of Sodom is that a trouble direct from God is more bearable than one inflicted by man, and was expressed by King David, Let me fall into the hand of Jehovah … let me not fall into the hand of man (1 Chronicles 21:13).
(ז) Lamentations 4:7. Men under religious vows could not have been so numerous as to form a conspicuous element in the population. Nor is there any reason to suppose that they were noted for a fine physique. Besides, the Hebrew word is not confined to those who are professed Nazarites, but applies to such as were distinguished from others. So Joseph, in Jacob’s dying forecasts, is described as him that was nazin, separate from [marg. that it prince among] his brethren (Genesis 49:26). Her nobles were purer than snow, &c. Still another feature characterised them, they were more ruddy in body than rubies. “The white and red are to be understood as mixed, and shading into one another, as our popular poetry speaks of cheeks which ‘like milk and purple shine’ ” (Delitzsch); My beloved is white and ruddy (Song of Solomon 5:10); “My love is like the red, red rose” (Scottish song). Sapphire was their polishing [lit. figure]. The comparison, however, can only be with the brilliancy of the gem, not with its shape. The appearance of the nobles, as here described, indicates that their faces were not bronzed and seamed by exposure to all kinds of weather; no engrained dust from toiling day after day darkened their complexion. They looked as those who live delicately in king’s courts. But now—
(ח) Lamentations 4:8. Darker than blackness is their visage; they are not recognised in the streets as members of the aristocracy; nothing marks them off from the labouring classes. Their skin cleaveth to their bones, they are emaciated and shrivelled through hunger and anguish, and the skin is become dry as wood.
(ט) Lamentations 4:9. One melancholy contrast suggests another, i.e., between those who are dead and those who are tortured by want. Better are the slain by the sword than the slain by hunger. The next clause is more descriptive of the condition of the former than of the latter. The advantage of less prolonged and gnawing pains is with those who pine away [lit. flow away, as sinking from loss of blood gushing from ghastly wounds], pierced through at a time when there was no lack of food from the fruits of the field.
(י) Lamentations 4:10. A more dreadful fact is related in regard to the little ones than that in Lamentations 4:3-4. The hands of tender-hearted women—not servants or hirelings, but themselves—have boiled their own children; they became meat for them in that climax of sufferings, the destruction of the daughter of my people. Moral duty is sacrificed, and unnatural crimes committed at the shrine of physical cravings.
HOMILETICS
THE EXTREMITY OF SUFFERING
I. Deadens natural affection (Lamentations 4:3-4). Maternal instincts are demoralised in the straitness of the siege. Little children are left to perish, without any effort to relieve their wants or soothe their sufferings. In vain they ask for bread; no attempt is made to allay their hunger and thirst. Absorbed in their own intolerable miseries, the wretched mothers sink below the instincts of the wild beasts, for even the jackals suckle their young. They are become like the cruel crocodile, which, after laying its eggs in the sand, abandons them without further care. The infants pine to death, unheeded and unmourned. Excessive suffering denaturalises man and woman.
II. Drags down all classes to one level (Lamentations 4:5). The wealthy are now even as the poor. They who fared sumptuously, and whose tastes were pampered with the most delicate viands, are now sullenly starving to death with the crowd. They who were clothed in scarlet, and accustomed to every refinement from their infancy, are now content to stretch themselves on the dirt-heaps of the city, and eager to devour any offal they may pick up amid the general scramble for food. All men find a universal communism in suffering. Human extremity knows no distinction in ranks and titles. Hunger drags every one to the same level.
III. Prefers a swift to a lingering punishment (Lamentations 4:6). The destruction of Sodom, which filled a large space in the Jewish mind as an example of the terrible judgment of Heaven on extreme iniquity, was regarded as light compared with the sufferings of Jerusalem. The punishment of Sodom was sudden, and came direct from God; but the punishment of Judah was by the hands of the Chaldeans, and was slow and lingering. David preferred to be dealt with directly from God, and chose pestilence rather than injuries inflicted by human hands (2 Samuel 24:14). But the iniquity of Judah was greater than the sin of Sodom, and the punishment was therefore more severe. There is a point in suffering when we yearn for a speedy release; when death is welcome.
IV. Reduces the healthiest from beauty to hideousness (Lamentations 4:7-8). The Nazarites, because of their temperance, were remarkable for health and personal beauty, and were held in veneration because of their religious devotion (comp. Numbers 6). Their complexion was ruddy as coral, and the beauty of their physical form was as exact and faultless as is the cutting of a sapphire. But the most distinguished of the population, whether Nazarites or of the aristocracy, are involved in the general calamity, and suffer with the rest. Their rosebud complexion is turned to blackness, their frame is shrunk and distorted, and their skin is shrivelled and dry. Famine plays havoc with beauty, and brings the strongest down to helplessness.
V. Recoils not from the most horrible means of appeasing the irresistible pangs of hunger (Lamentations 4:9-10). Such were the sufferings of the famished, that they who were slain with the sword were deemed happier than those who were pierced with the dart of unappeased hunger. So extreme was the famine, that cannibalism became common, and women who were known as tender-hearted mothers actually boiled and ate their own children (comp. 2 Kings 6:28-29; Leviticus 26:29; Deuteronomy 28:56-57; Josephus’s “Wars,” cap. 10:9). It is a fearful experience when the animal in human nature gains the mastery over every other instinct.
LESSONS.—
1. Extremity makes strange revelations of human nature.
2. The restraints of civilisation are very superficial.
3. Sin acquaints the soul with the lowest depths of degradation.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
Lamentations 4:3-10. The rigour of war. I. Demoralises maternal affection (Lamentations 4:1). II. Involves innocent children in suffering (Lamentations 4:2). III. Reduces all classes to poverty and distress (Lamentations 4:5; Lamentations 4:7-8). IV. Prolongs the misery of its victims (Lamentations 4:6). V. Is attended with the worst results of famine (Lamentations 4:9-10).
Lamentations 4:6. Graduated punishment.
I. Is proportioned to the character and degree of the sin committed. II. Its severity implies the enormity of the offence. III. Cannot be charged with injustice.
Lamentations 4:7-10. The horrors of famine. I. Changes strength into feebleness and beauty into deformity (Lamentations 4:7-8). II. Is more cruel than the sword (Lamentations 4:9). III. Debases the most refined into cannibals (Lamentations 4:10).
ILLUSTRATIONS.—Degradation. Is it not wonderful that base desires should so extinguish in men the sense of their own excellency, as to make them willing that their souls should be like to the souls of beasts, mortal and corruptible with their bodies?—Hooker.
There have been those—
“Who, in the dark dissolving human heart,
And hallowed secrets of this microcosm,
Dabbling, with shameless jest, a shameful band,
Encarnalised their spirits.”
Importance of food. Temperature has less influence in inciting the migration of birds than failure of food; for a few even of the regular migrants will linger throughout the winter at sheltered localities, where food remains accessible, safely daring the severest cold. Hunger means loss of heat and life, and it is this the birds primarily flee. No attraction to Christians like spiritual food. “Tie them up by the teeth,” as Mr. Spurgeon says.
Necessity a teacher. “Life and the necessities of life are the best philosophers, if we will only listen honestly to what they say to us; and dislike the lesson as we may, it is cowardice which refuses to hear it.”—Froude.
—The wife of a certain chieftain who had fallen upon idle habits, one day lifted the dish-cover at dinner, and revealed a pair of spurs; a sign that he must ride and hunt for his next meal.
Help in extremity. In the Magdalen Islands, off the Newfoundland coast, the means of livelihood is almost entirely found in the fisheries, and if these fail, life becomes a burden. In 1883 a famine occurred which came near to decimating the population. The fisheries failed; the ship which was expected to bring the winter’s supply before the ice formed foundered in a storm. By the time spring came, starvation stared the people in the face. Many must have died had not a large ship filled with produce been wrecked off Coffin Island. The news spread like wildfire. The population turned out, and from the cargo of a shipwrecked vessel drew a new lease of life.
Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity. It is a current saying, “That the darkest cloud precedes the dawn,” and that “Every dark cloud has a silver lining.” Early risers tell us that the lowest temperature immediately precedes the sun-rising. These things serve to illustrate God’s kingdom of grace. “Before honour is humility.” “Thou has lifted me up and cast me down.” “How long, O Lord, how long?”