EXEGETICAL NOTES.—
Lamentations 5:10. The bread, which was obtained at the risk of their lives, was not enough in quantity to nourish them. Our skin is hot like an oven; the feverishness is because of the burning heat of hunger. “Hunger dries up the pores of the skin, so that it becomes like as if it had been exposed to the burning heat of the simoom.”
We must not fancy that the several distressing things alluded to befell every one of all classes. We should rather believe that some troubles were felt by one portion, while another portion had to bear different troubles. So the author proceeds to record what sufferings were endured by particular divisions of the population.
Lamentations 5:12. The most gentle were outraged, and princes were hanged up by their hand—not the hand of the foe is referred to, though by him the cruel deed was perpetrated; still less is the reference to compulsory suicide, as Calvin surmises; but the hand of the princes was the leverage by which their bodies were lifted up. Whether they were first killed and then suspended, or were tortured by such suspension when every nerve and muscle was vibrating with life’s waves, is a question to which no sure reply can be given; but probably the latter is hinted at. The bodies of Saul and his sons were fastened to the wall of Beth-shan (1 Samuel 31:10-12); and more recent commentators refer to “Records of the Past,” 1:38, in which an inscription of Sennacherib is quoted as saying of the people of Ekron, “The chief priests and noblemen I put to death; on stakes all round the city I hung their bodies;” and the practice seems to have been not uncommon among Assyrians and Babylonians. Still, impalement after death does not correspond distinctly to the atrocity mentioned here. The faces—persons—of elders were not honoured. Not only men high in rank, but also those who held responsible positions among the people—aged persons are spoken of after this—were treated with indignity in the insolence of conquest.
Lamentations 5:13. The choice portion of the nation were forced to be nothing but mere burden-bearers. Young men bare the mill. They had to carry about, and no doubt to turn, the hand-mills to grind corn for their military masters, thus doing the work of women or of slaves; while the fuel, for cooking and other purposes, was laid on shoulders ill able to bear a load. Boys stumbled [under] a burden of wood.
HOMILETICS
THE GALLING TYRANNY OF CONQUEST
I. There is the physical suffering occasioned by starvation. “Our skin is black like an oven because of the terrible famine” (Lamentations 5:10). The human body can bear a great deal, but it cannot resist, nor can it survive, the ravages of famine. The bloom of health fades from the cheek, the eyes shine with an unnatural lustre, and then lose all expression; the flesh is dried and parched, the skin becomes “fiery red like an oven, because of the fever-blast” of famine, and the whole frame becomes skeletonised. During one of the famines in Ireland there was a form of face which came upon the sufferers when their state of misery was far advanced, and which was a sure signal that their last stage of misery was nearly run. The mouth would fall and seem to hang, the lips at the two ends of the mouth would be dragged down, and the lower parts of the cheeks would fall, as though they had been dragged and pulled. There were no signs of acute agony, none of the horrid symptoms of gnawing hunger. The look was one of apathy, desolation, and death. The agony of want was past. Nothing could save.
II. Social purity is outraged. “They humbled the women in Zion, and the maids in the city of Judah” (Lamentations 5:11). History records revolting examples of the excesses committed by a brutal soldiery in the mad delirium of conquest. War brings in its train worse consequences than wounds and death. There is a fouler lust than the lust of military glory. The pure and unoffending are dishonoured. The sanctity of social life is invaded, and its sacred laws violated.
III. Rank and age are treated with indignity. “Princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of elders were not honoured” (Lamentations 5:12). See exegetical notes on this verse. It was a barbarity of ancient warfare that the conqueror paid so little regard to the feelings of the conquered. To the humiliation of defeat was added whatever could pain and degrade the vanquished. The princes of the royal blood and magistrates who had grown old in their lengthened term of office were treated with scant courtesy. The conqueror seemed to glory in parading the most illustrious of his captives under the most ignominious conditions. There were noble exceptions to this rule, but they were so rare that history has not failed to chronicle them.
IV. Young men and children are forced into the performance of the most menial and exhausting tasks. “They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood” (Lamentations 5:13). To grind the corn in the hand-mill was the work of female slaves. It was a great blow to the self-respect and ambition of the young men who were of legal age for military service to be condemned to this menial work. The little Jewish children, whose tender years should have been a sufficient protection against such cruelty, staggered under the loads of firewood they were compelled to carry for the Chaldean soldiers, who indulged in inhuman sport at the brave little fellows as they fell exhausted under their crushing burdens. Many of the children would be crippled for life. It is one of the praiseworthy features of nineteenth-century civilisation that so much care is shown in the protection and healthy development of child-life.
LESSONS.—
1. Woe to the people who fall into the hands of a heartless conqueror!
2. There are worse sufferings than the sense of being vanquished.
3. The tyrant conqueror has no respect for sex, or rank, or age.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
Lamentations 5:10. The sufferings of famine.
1. Apparent in their ghastly physical results.
2. Reduce all ranks to a common level.
3. Are intensified by conscious defeat and humiliation.
Lamentations 5:11-13. The atrocities of war.
1. The pure and defenceless are defiled (Lamentations 5:11).
2. Princes and aged counsellors are treated with contempt and cruelty (Lamentations 5:12).
3. The spirit of the young is crushed with overpowering burdens (Lamentations 5:13).
ILLUSTRATIONS.—The cause of famine. For unknown years the Persians have been cutting off their trees, and diminishing their rainfall thereby. Nay, not only has the removal of the forests decreased the supply, but it has wasted whatever rain fell. For the roots of the trees and of all the innumerable shrubs, bushes, vines and ferns that thrive in their shadow, kept the ground open, and held the water in countless natural wells for the use of the soil in droughts. But all the undergrowth dying when its protecting forests were felled, the scanty showers percolated into the streams at once, causing rare floods and frequent droughts. The droughts yielded no harvests, and no harvests were followed by famine, pestilence, and death.
The fascination of lust. You will go on in your lust and your sins, despite warnings, despite advice, until you perish in your guilt. How worse than children are grown-up men! The child who goes for a merry slide upon a pond, if he be told that the ice will not bear him, starts back affrighted, or, if he daringly creeps upon it, how soon he leaves it if he hears but a crack upon the slender covering of the water! But you men have conscience, which tells you that your sins are vile, and that they will be your ruin. You hear the crack of sin as its thin sheet of pleasure gives way beneath your feet; ay! and some of you have seen your comrades sink in the flood and lost, and yet you go sliding on. Worse than childish, worse than mad, are you, thus presumptuously to play with your everlasting state.—Spurgeon.
Age dishonoured.
“I have lived long enough. My way of life
Is fallen into the sere and yellow leaf:
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have.”—Shakespeare.
Helplessness appeals to our pity. Thus was the heart of the rough sailor touched when, tossing with other castaways in an open boat on the open sea, he parted with a morsel of food, which, hidden with more care than misers hide their gold, he had reserved for his own last extremity. Around him lay men and women, some dead, with glassy eyes, some dying, and these reduced to ghastly skeletons; but none of these moved him to peril his own life for theirs. The object of his noble and not unrewarded generosity—foras if Heaven had sent it on purpose to reward the act, a sail speedily hove in sight—was a gentle boy, that, with his face turned on hers, lay dying in a mother’s arms, and between whose teeth the famished man put his own last precious morsel.—Guthrie.
The atrocities of war. I look on war with a horror which no words can express. I have long wanted patience to read of battles. The thought of man, God’s immortal child, butchered by his brother, the thought of sea and land stained with human blood by human hands, of women and children buried under the ruins of besieged cities, of the resources of empires and the mighty powers of nature all turned by man’s malignity into engines of torture and destruction—this thought gives to earth the semblance of hell. I shudder as among demons.—Charming.