Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Lamentations · About this commentary
The Lord Has Become as an Enemy
Lamentations 2:1-10
1 How has the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger! He has cast the beauty of Israel down from heaven to the earth, and hasn’t remembered his footstool in the day of his anger. · WEB
The second poem attributes the destruction to God in a relentless series of first-hand verbs, and its hardest sentence is not softened anywhere in the book.
The cry opens again — how — and what follows is the most sustained attribution of destruction to God in Scripture. Nearly every verse has him as the subject of an active verb: covered, cast down, swallowed up, thrown down, brought to the ground, profaned, cut off, drawn back his hand, burned, bent his bow.
Verse 4 is the turn nobody expects: he has bent his bow like an enemy, he has stood with his right hand as an adversary. And verse 5 says it without the comparison: the Lord has become as an enemy.
The poem does not retract that and the book never explains it away. It stands, and the chapter that follows will set beside it the statement that he does not afflict from the heart Lamentations 3:33 — two things said by one writer about one God, and the lament is allowed to say its half first.
What is destroyed is specifically religious. Verse 6 lists it: his own tabernacle taken away, his place of assembly destroyed, solemn assembly and Sabbath caused to be forgotten. Verse 7 has the enemy shouting in Yahweh's house as on a festival day — the noise of celebration made by the wrong people in the right place.
Verse 8 supplies the detail that makes it worse than rage. He stretched out the line — a measuring cord, the builder's tool — and used it to destroy. The demolition was surveyed.
Verse 10 leaves the elders sitting on the ground in silence, dust on their heads. There is nothing to say yet.
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