Biblion Bible Commentary
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How the Gold Has Become Dim
Lamentations 4:1-11
1 How the gold has become dim! The most pure gold has changed! The stones of the sanctuary are poured out at the head of every street. · WEB
The fourth poem returns to the funeral cry and works entirely by devaluation, and its comparison of the city to Sodom is the harshest in Scripture.
The cry opens for the third and last time — how — and this poem's method is metallurgy. Gold gone dim, the finest gold changed, the sanctuary's stones poured out in the streets like rubble Lamentations 4:1. Then the same figure applied to people: the sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold, valued now like clay pots Lamentations 4:2.
Verses 7 and 8 run the transformation on individual bodies. Nobles once purer than snow, whiter than milk, ruddier than coral — now blacker than soot, skin clinging to bone, unrecognized in the streets. The poem does not editorialize; it simply sets before and after next to each other, which is what the first chapter did with the city.
Verse 3 makes an accusation through the animal world. Jackals nurse their young, and the daughter of my people has become cruel. Verse 10 states what that means without metaphor, and it is the second time the book has recorded it Lamentations 2:20: mothers boiling their own children for food. The law had named this as what a siege produces Deuteronomy 28:53.
Verse 9 is the coldest sentence in the poem: those killed by the sword are better than those killed by hunger. A quick death rated above a slow one, as a considered judgment.
And verse 6 makes the comparison the book will be remembered for. The punishment of this people is greater than the sin of Jerusalem 's ancient counterpart, overthrown in a moment, with no hands laid on her. The point is duration. Sodom's end was instantaneous; this has taken months, and the siege is what the poem calls worse.
settled What this mark means