Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Lamentations · About this commentary
Is Any Sorrow Like My Sorrow
Lamentations 1:12-22
12 “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look, and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which is brought on me, with which Yahweh has afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger. · WEB
The city speaks for herself for the first time, and what she asks passers-by for is not help but attention.
From verse 12 the voice changes and Jerusalem speaks. Her first words are addressed to people walking past: is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look, and see.
That is the request the whole chapter has been building toward, and it is not a request for rescue. She asks to be looked at. A grief nobody acknowledges is a second injury, and the poem treats the indifference of passers-by as part of the suffering rather than a separate failing.
The images that follow are all of a hand deliberately applied: fire sent into the bones, a net spread for the feet, a yoke bound by his hand and knit together, the young men crushed, the daughter of Judah trodden as in a winepress Lamentations 1:13–15. The agent throughout is God, named without hedging.
And in the middle of it, verse 18: Yahweh is righteous, for I have rebelled against his commandment. The poem holds the two together without resolving them — the affliction described as God's own work, and God declared right in doing it, by the one being afflicted.
Verse 16 returns to the wound of the chapter: the comforter who should refresh my soul is far from me.
The chapter ends where lament often ends, in a request that the same measure fall on those who watched and were glad Lamentations 1:21–22. It is not a polished sentiment, and the book does not tidy it.
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