Old Testament
Lamentations 5
Overview
The final poem is a communal prayer, no longer describing the ruin from the outside but crying directly to God: "Remember, O LORD, what has befallen us; look, and see our disgrace." The survivors catalogue their humiliation — orphans, slaves, exhausted laborers, women violated, elders dishonored, the joy gone out of their hearts — and they confess that they bear the punishment of their fathers' sins along with their own. The poem rises to a great affirmation of God's eternal reign — "You, O LORD, reign forever; your throne endures to all generations" — and ends not with resolution but with a raw, open-ended plea: "Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may be restored," shadowed by the fear that God may have utterly rejected them.
1Remember, Yahweh, what has come on us. Look, and see our reproach.
2Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our houses to aliens.
3We are orphans and fatherless. Our mothers are as widows.
4We must pay for water to drink. Our wood is sold to us.
5Our pursuers are on our necks. We are weary, and have no rest.
6We have given our hands to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread.
7Our fathers sinned, and are no more. We have borne their iniquities.
8Servants rule over us. There is no one to deliver us out of their hand.
9We get our bread at the peril of our lives, because of the sword in the wilderness.
10Our skin is black like an oven, because of the burning heat of famine.
11They ravished the women in Zion, the virgins in the cities of Judah.
12Princes were hanged up by their hands. The faces of elders were not honored.
13The young men carry millstones. The children stumbled under loads of wood.
14The elders have ceased from the gate, and the young men from their music.
15The joy of our heart has ceased. Our dance is turned into mourning.
16The crown has fallen from our head. Woe to us, for we have sinned!
17For this our heart is faint. For these things our eyes are dim:
18for the mountain of Zion, which is desolate. The foxes walk on it.
19You, Yahweh, remain forever. Your throne is from generation to generation.
20Why do you forget us forever, and forsake us for so long a time?
21Turn us to yourself, Yahweh, and we will be turned. Renew our days as of old.
22But you have utterly rejected us. You are very angry against us.