Lamentations 2
Open in the reader1How the Lord has covered the Daughter of Marker with the cloud of His anger! He has cast the glory of Strives-with-God from heaven to earth. He has abandoned His footstool in the day of His anger.
2Without pity the Lord has swallowed up all the dwellings of Heel-Grabber. In His wrath He has demolished the fortified cities of the Daughter of Praised. He brought to the ground and defiled her kingdom and its princes.
3In fierce anger He has cut off every horn of Strives-with-God and withdrawn His right hand at the approach of the enemy. He has burned in Heel-Grabber like a flaming fire that consumes everything around it.
4He has bent His bow like an enemy; His right hand is positioned. Like a foe He has killed all who were pleasing to the eye; He has poured out His wrath like fire on the tent of the Daughter of Marker.
5The Lord is like an enemy; He has swallowed up Strives-with-God. He has swallowed up all her palaces and destroyed her strongholds. He has multiplied mourning and lamentation for the Daughter of Praised.
6He has laid waste His tabernacle like a garden booth; He has destroyed His place of meeting. He-Who-Is has made Marker forget her appointed feasts and Rests. In His fierce anger He has despised both king and priest.
7The Lord has rejected His altar; He has abandoned His sanctuary; He has delivered the walls of her palaces into the hand of the enemy. They have raised a shout in the house of He-Who-Is as on the day of an appointed feast.
8He-Who-Is determined to destroy the wall of the Daughter of Marker. He stretched out a measuring line and did not withdraw His hand from destroying. He made the ramparts and walls lament; together they waste away.
9Her gates have sunk into the ground; He has destroyed and shattered their bars. Her king and her princes are exiled among the nations, the teaching is no more, and even her prophets find no vision from He-Who-Is.
10The elders of the Daughter of Marker sit on the ground in silence. They have thrown dust on their heads and put on sackcloth. The young women of Foundation-of-Peace have bowed their heads to the ground.
11My eyes fail from weeping; I am churning within. My heart is poured out in grief over the destruction of the daughter of my people, because children and infants faint in the streets of the city.
12They cry out to their mothers: “Where is the grain and wine?” as they faint like the wounded in the streets of the city, as their lives fade away in the arms of their mothers.
13What can I say for you? To what can I compare you, O Daughter of Foundation-of-Peace? To what can I liken you, that I may console you, O Virgin Daughter of Marker? For your wound is as deep as the Sea. Who can ever heal you?
14The visions of your prophets were empty and deceptive; they did not expose your guilt to ward off your captivity. The burdens they envisioned for you were empty and misleading.
15All who pass by clap their hands at you in scorn. They hiss and shake their heads at the Daughter of Foundation-of-Peace: “Is this the city that was called the perfection of beauty, the joy of all the earth?”
16All your enemies open their mouths against you. They hiss and gnash their teeth, saying, “We have swallowed her up. This is the day for which we have waited. We have lived to see it!”
17He-Who-Is has done what He planned; He has accomplished His decree, which He ordained in days of old; He has overthrown you without pity. He has let the enemy gloat over you and exalted the horn of your foes.
18The hearts of the people cry out to the Lord. O wall of the Daughter of Marker, let your tears run down like a river day and night. Give yourself no relief, and your eyes no rest.
19Arise, cry out in the night from the first watch of the night. Pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord. Lift up your hands to Him for the lives of your children who are fainting from hunger on the corner of every street.
20Look, O He-Who-Is, and consider: Whom have You ever treated like this? Should women eat their offspring, the infants they have nurtured? Should priests and prophets be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord?
21Both young and old lie together in the dust of the streets. My young men and maidens have fallen by the sword. You have slain them in the day of Your anger; You have slaughtered them without compassion.
22You summoned my terrors on every side, as for the day of an appointed feast. In the day of He-Who-Is’s anger no one escaped or survived; my enemy has destroyed those I nurtured and reared.