Remember, Yahweh, What Has Come on Us
1 Remember, Yahweh, what has come on us. Look, and see our reproach. 2 Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our houses to aliens. 3 We are orphans and fatherless. Our mothers are as widows. 4 We must pay for water to drink. Our wood is sold to us. 5 Our pursuers are on our necks. We are weary, and have no rest. 6 We have given our hands to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread. 7 Our fathers sinned, and are no more. We have borne their iniquities. 8 Servants rule over us. There is no one to deliver us out of their hand. 9 We get our bread at the peril of our lives, because of the sword in the wilderness. 10 Our skin is black like an oven, because of the burning heat of famine.
The last poem abandons the alphabet it has kept for four chapters and becomes a plain prayer, and its details are the smallest in the book.
The final poem is formally different from everything before it, and the difference was checked rather than assumed. Chapters 1, 2 and 4 run the alphabet a verse at a time; chapter 3 runs it three verses at a time. Chapter 5 has the same twenty-two verses and follows no alphabetic pattern at all.
The count survives and the pattern does not. After four poems of the most disciplined form Hebrew possessed, the last one keeps the shape of a lament and lets the scaffolding go — and it opens not with the funeral cry but with a request: remember, Yahweh.
What follows is the most ordinary suffering in the book. Not fire and sword but economics. Inheritance handed to strangers, houses to aliens Lamentations 5:2. We must pay for water to drink; our wood is sold to us — a people buying what their own land produces. Bread fetched at the risk of their lives Lamentations 5:9.
Verse 6 names the alliances that failed: hands given to Egypt and Assyria to be satisfied with bread. The bargain was for food, and it did not work.
Verse 7 is the line the book is questioned over: our fathers sinned, and are no more; we have borne their iniquities. It is a report of how the ruin felt to the generation standing in it, and the same book has this speaker confess his own rebellion repeatedly Lamentations 1:18 Lamentations 3:42 — and verse 16 will do it again. A prophet of the same period quotes the proverb about fathers and sour grapes in order to refuse it Ezekiel 18:2.
settled What this mark means