Lamentations 5
1 Remember, O LORD, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach.
2 Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens.
3 We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows.
4 We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us.
5 Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest.
6 We have given the hand to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread.
7 Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities.
8 Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand.
9 We gat our bread with the peril of our lives because of the sword of the wilderness.
10 Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine.
11 They ravished the women in Zion, and the maids in the cities of Judah.
12 Princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of elders were not honoured.
13 They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood.
14 The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick.
15 The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning.
16 The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned!
17 For this our heart is faint; for these things our eyes are dim.
18 Because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes walk upon it.
19 Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation.
20 Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time?
21 Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.
22 But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.
World Behind This Chapter
Explore the people, places, language, history, and material world connected to Lamentations 5.
Why does Lamentations 5 have twenty-two lines but no alphabetic acrostic?
The final poem preserves the alphabet’s numerical frame while abandoning the letter-by-letter pattern. Scholars disagree on whether the break is deliberate literary design or simply another form of lament.
What social conditions are remembered in Lamentations 5?
Loss of land and houses, payment for basic resources, forced labor, disrupted leadership, hunger, and ruined Zion form a compressed portrait of postwar dislocation.
How early is the Hebrew text of Lamentations attested?
Fragments of Lamentations survive among the Dead Sea Scrolls, including 4Q111 from Qumran Cave 4 and 3Q3 from Cave 3. These manuscripts are centuries later than Jerusalem’s destruction but much earlier than medieval Hebrew codices.
Research PathsCurated links for exploring this chapter 3
History & Daily Life1
- Voices in Lamentations: The Communal Prayer of Chapter 5TheTorah.com
Explains how chapter 5 differs from the preceding poems by presenting a predominantly communal plea rather than an alphabetic acrostic. It examines the survivors’ shared catalogue of dispossession, hunger, forced labor, violence, lost leadership, ruined social life, and the unresolved appeal for restoration.
Language & Literature1
- Lamentations 5 Hebrew Text and Communal PrayerSTEP Bible, Tyndale House
Interactive Hebrew text for examining the chapter’s twenty-two-verse structure, which echoes the length of an alphabetic acrostic without following alphabetical order. It highlights the shift to communal speech and vocabulary for inheritance, foreign rule, forced labor, hunger, social collapse, shame, remembrance, restoration, rejection, and renewal.
Artifacts & Manuscripts1
- Medieval Hebrew Bible Containing LamentationsLibrary of Congress
Digitized Hebrew Bible produced in Spain around 1300 with vocalization, accentuation, and Masoretic annotation. The manuscript allows readers to view Lamentations within the Jewish canonical collection and illustrates the careful transmission of the book’s Hebrew text long after the Babylonian period.
Public Discussion
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