Lamentations 2

God's Anger over Israel

1How the Lord has covered the daughter of Zion

With a cloud in His anger!

He has cast from heaven to earth

The glory of Israel,

And has not remembered His footstool

In the day of His anger.

2The Lord has swallowed up; He has not spared

All the habitations of Jacob.

In His wrath He has thrown down

The strongholds of the daughter of Judah;

He has brought them down to the ground;

He has profaned the kingdom and its princes.

3In fierce anger He has cut off

All the strength of Israel;

He has drawn back His right hand

From before the enemy.

And He has burned in Jacob like a flaming fire

Consuming round about.

4He has bent His bow like an enemy;

He has set His right hand like an adversary

And slain all that were pleasant to the eye;

In the tent of the daughter of Zion

He has poured out His wrath like fire.

5The Lord has become like an enemy.

He has swallowed up Israel;

He has swallowed up all its palaces,

He has destroyed its strongholds

And multiplied in the daughter of Judah

Mourning and moaning.

6And He has violently treated His tabernacle like a garden booth;

He has destroyed His appointed meeting place.

The Lord has caused to be forgotten

The appointed feast and sabbath in Zion,

And He has despised king and priest

In the indignation of His anger.

7The Lord has rejected His altar,

He has abandoned His sanctuary;

He has delivered into the hand of the enemy

The walls of her palaces.

They have made a noise in the house of the Lord

As in the day of an appointed feast.

8The Lord determined to destroy

The wall of the daughter of Zion.

He has stretched out a line,

He has not restrained His hand from destroying,

And He has caused rampart and wall to lament;

They have languished together.

9Her gates have sunk into the ground,

He has destroyed and broken her bars.

Her king and her princes are among the nations;

The law is no more.

Also, her prophets find

No vision from the Lord.

10The elders of the daughter of Zion

Sit on the ground, they are silent.

They have thrown dust on their heads;

They have girded themselves with sackcloth.

The virgins of Jerusalem

Have bowed their heads to the ground.

11My eyes fail because of tears,

My spirit is greatly troubled;

My heart is poured out on the earth

Because of the destruction of the daughter of my people,

When little ones and infants faint

In the streets of the city.

12They say to their mothers,

“Where is grain and wine?”

As they faint like a wounded man

In the streets of the city,

As their life is poured out

On their mothers' bosom.

13How shall I admonish you?

To what shall I compare you,

O daughter of Jerusalem?

To what shall I liken you as I comfort you,

O virgin daughter of Zion?

For your ruin is as vast as the sea;

Who can heal you?

14Your prophets have seen for you

False and foolish visions;

And they have not exposed your iniquity

So as to restore you from captivity,

But they have seen for you false and misleading oracles.

15All who pass along the way

Clap their hands in derision at you;

They hiss and shake their heads

At the daughter of Jerusalem,

“Is this the city of which they said,

‘The perfection of beauty,

A joy to all the earth'?”

16All your enemies

Have opened their mouths wide against you;

They hiss and gnash their teeth.

They say, “We have swallowed her up!

Surely this is the day for which we waited;

We have reached it, we have seen it.”

17The Lord has done what He purposed;

He has accomplished His word

Which He commanded from days of old.

He has thrown down without sparing,

And He has caused the enemy to rejoice over you;

He has exalted the might of your adversaries.

18Their heart cried out to the Lord,

“O wall of the daughter of Zion,

Let your tears run down like a river day and night;

Give yourself no relief,

Let your eyes have no rest.

19“Arise, cry aloud in the night

At the beginning of the night watches;

Pour out your heart like water

Before the presence of the Lord;

Lift up your hands to Him

For the life of your little ones

Who are faint because of hunger

At the head of every street.”

20See, O Lord, and look!

With whom have You dealt thus?

Should women eat their offspring,

The little ones who were born healthy?

Should priest and prophet be slain

In the sanctuary of the Lord?

21On the ground in the streets

Lie young and old;

My virgins and my young men

Have fallen by the sword.

You have slain them in the day of Your anger,

You have slaughtered, not sparing.

22You called as in the day of an appointed feast

My terrors on every side;

And there was no one who escaped or survived

In the day of the Lord's anger.

Those whom I bore and reared,

My enemy annihilated them.