Mine eye affecteth mine heart,.... Seeing the desolation of his country; the ruins of the city and temple of Jerusalem; and the multitudes of those that were slain, and carried captive; and the distresses the rest were in; this affected his heart, and filled it with grief; as his heart also affected his eyes, and caused them to run down in rivers of water, as before expressed; or, as the Targum,
"the weeping of mine eyes is the occasion of hurt to my soul or life;''
his excessive weeping endangered his life:
because of all the daughters of my city; not Anathoth, his native place, but Jerusalem; so the Targum,
"of Jerusalem my city.''
The meaning is, that his heart was affected at seeing the ruin of the inhabitants of Jerusalem; or of the towns and cities round about it, which that was the metropolis of. Some, as Jarchi, render it, "more than all the daughters of my city" p; his heart was more affected with those calamities than those of the most tender sex, even than any or all of them.
p מכל בנות עירי "supra cunctas filias civitatis meae"; so some in Vatablus; and Jarchi.