EXEGETICAL NOTES.—
Lamentations 5:2 begins to describe the substance of the reproaches. Our inheritance, the land which was promised to Abraham, and of which his descendants had held possession for generations, is turned over unto strangers. Indeed, all their property had passed into other hands; our houses unto aliens. Even if any small houses were left standing, after the Chaldeans had destroyed every important building in Jerusalem, besides breaking down the city walls, they were at the disposal of those foreigners.
Lamentations 5:3. No recondite application of the terms of this verse—as that, “We are abandoned by Thee, our Father”—need be considered. The note of a Targum sufficiently defines them, “We are like the most desolate of beings.” We have become orphans, without a father. A devastating war, a merciless capture of Jerusalem, a banishment to a far country of thousands of the population, must have caused reports of many among the “bread-winners” being dead or missing; hence it could be said virtually, if not really, Our mothers [are] like widows, the words being true of other families as well as of those whose head had perished.
Lamentations 5:4. Not only are they orphaned and desolate, but they are cruelly mulcted. Our water for money we have drunken. The bitterness of the act was that water, perhaps from their own wells and cisterns, had to be paid for, and similarly to that, Our wood has come for a price. Held in such durance that they could not get the requisites for personal and domestic comfort, to which they had free access formerly, unless by bribing their custodians.
Lamentations 5:5. It is best to suppose that the phrase, On our necks we are pursued, means, our pursuers keep so close as to be, as it were, holding our necks; yet, tired out by such persecution, no rest is for us.
HOMILETICS
THE MISERIES OF THE DISINHERITED
I. To see their possessions enjoyed by foreigners. “Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens” (Lamentations 5:2). The land of Canaan was God’s gift to the Jews. It was promised to them long before they entered into possession. There was a time when it seemed they would not be permitted even to look upon their Beulah-land. But God kept His word, and, after long wandering and many disappointments, the tribes received their allotted inheritance. In beauty and fruitfulness they found the land all that it had been represented. For many happy years they sat under their own vine and fig-tree, none daring to make them afraid. It was a bitter disappointment to find themselves violently ejected, and their loved inheritance occupied by their enemies. The possessions of earth are liable to strange and sudden changes; but the heavenly inheritance is indefeasible, and can never be wrested from the faithful.
II. To be reduced to the condition of widows and orphans. “We are orphans and fatherless; our mothers are as widows” (Lamentations 5:3). Their misery was comparable to the sad and lonely desolation of fatherless orphans and wives just bereaved of their husbands. The guardian, guide, and support of family life is taken away, and they are left to battle with the cold, unpitying world, surrounded with heartless and cruel enemies. It is a painful experience for any family to be reduced by a single stroke from affluence to penury and friendlessness. If God did not help the widows and the fatherless, their condition would be unbearable. The competition of life is keen enough to the most favoured; but it is a terrible struggle to the lonely and friendless. The luxury of former years unfits many for the fierceness of life’s conflict, and thousands go down into untimely oblivion.
III. To be compelled to pay for the food and fuel produced on their own property. “We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us” (Lamentations 5:4). The bitterness of the complaint is intensified in not merely that they must pay for the necessaries of life, but that it is their own property which they have to purchase. The water in their own house cisterns is taxed; the wood in their own forests must be paid for—and they paid dearly for every fagot. “The captives were doubtless closely watched, and not allowed to stray from the place where they were detained in preparation for their removal to Babylon, and thus could obtain wood and water only by paying for them” (Speaker’s Commentary). How would they long now for the sticks their little children used to gather for the fires in which they idolatrously baked cakes for the queen of heaven! (Jeremiah 7:18). It is in the hardships of life that we lament the wanton waste of more prosperous times.
IV. To be harassed by incessant toil. “Our necks are under persecution: we labour and have no rest” (Lamentations 5:5). We were pursued so actively that our enemies seemed ever so close upon us as to be leaning over our necks ready at once to seize us. We were tired out with being thus chased incessantly, and no opportunity was allowed us of refreshing our weary frames (Speaker’s Commentary). Labour is necessary for health, for sustenance, for happiness. There is nothing servile in honest and necessary work, whether by hand or brain. Abraham fed his own flocks. Moses kept sheep in the desert. Paul stitched canvas tents while labouring as a pioneer among the Gentiles. The fathers of the Roman Republic ploughed their own fields, sowed the seed, and reaped their harvests with their own hands. But there is neither nobility nor pleasure in forced labour, especially in labour unrelieved by necessary rest. Life becomes one long, weary, monotonous, and depressing grind. And this is often the fate of the disinherited.
LESSONS.—
1. It is a great hardship to see our rightful inheritance violently transferred to strangers.
2. The loss of worldly property is not always the greatest calamity.
3. The truly good have an inheritance that is incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
Lamentations 5:2-5. The sudden reverses of fortune.
1. From wealth to poverty (Lamentations 5:2).
2. From social happiness to loneliness (Lamentations 5:3).
3. From freedom to galling exactions (Lamentations 5:4).
4. From ease to excessive toil (Lamentations 5:5).
Lamentations 5:2. Property.
1. Knows nothing of absolute ownership.
2. Is constantly changing hands.
3. Its loss by robbery and pillage a great hardship.
4. Its fickle tenure contrasts with the imperishable character of spiritual possessions.
Lamentations 5:3. Bereavement.
1. One of the great curses of war.
2. The inevitable lot of humanity.
3. Brings pungent sorrow to somebody.
Lamentations 5:4-5. The loss of liberty. I. Is painfully realised by the imposition of unjust exactions. “We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us” (Lamentations 5:4). II. Is followed by oppression. “Our necks are under persecution” (Lamentations 5:5). III. Subjects to the slavery of incessant labour. “We labour and have no rest” (Lamentations 5:5).
ILLUSTRATIONS.—The sadness of national decline. “Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands—the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the first of these great powers only the memory remains; of the second, the ruin; the third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led, through prouder eminence, to less pitied destruction. The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded for us in perhaps the most touching words ever uttered by the prophets of Israel against the cities of the stranger. Her successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less in endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline, a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak, so quiet, so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the city and which the shadow.”—Ruskin.
Bereavement has its consolations. A little boy once went out in the early morn, and was greatly delighted with the little globes formed by the dew on the brambles. He hastened back, and led his father out to see these miniature worlds; but when the father and son arrived, the sun was up, and had drawn up in vapour the globes that had hung on the brambles, and so displeased the child. The child cried, and said, “The angry sun has taken them all up.” The father looked up and saw the beautiful rainbow on the bosom of the cloud, and said, “There, my child, the sun has taken up the bramble globes, and they help to form that beautiful bow on the cloud.” Ah! my friends, God has taken up some of our friends, and have we not murmured? But where are they? Ah! do they not form the beautiful bow round the throne of God?
Industry secures independence. He that hath a trade hath an estate, and he that hath a calling hath an office of profit and honour; but then the trade must be worked at and the calling followed. If we are industrious, we shall never starve, for at the working man’s house hunger looks in but dares not enter. Nor will the bailiff or the constable enter, for industry pays debts while despair increaseth them.—Franklin.
Compassion for the needy. King Oswald of Northumbria accompanied the monk Aidan in his long missionary journeys as interpreter. One day, as he feasted with the monk by his side, the thegn, a noble of his war-band, whom he had set to give alms to the poor at his gate, told him of a multitude that still waited fasting without. The king at once bade the untasted meat before him be carried to the poor, and his silver dish he divided piecemeal among them. Aidan seized the royal hand and blessed it. “May this hand,” he cried, “never grow old.”
Persecution defeats itself. The cruelty of Mary’s reign and the lurid fires of Smithfield had only worked in Londoners a fiercer conviction of the error and falsity of the Roman Catholic religion, and when Elizabeth came to the throne, the people thronged the streets and greeted her with acclamation, as though her coming were as the rising of the sun.
—Speaking of the persecutions and martyrdoms in the time of Queen Mary, Mr. Froude says, “Every martyr’s trial was a battle; every constant death was a defeat of the common enemy; and the instinctive consciousness that truth was asserting itself in suffering converted the natural emotion of horror into admiring pride.”