Lamentations 5

¹ Remember, LORD, 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.

¹¹ They ravished the women in Zion, the virgins in the cities of Judah.

¹² Princes were hanged up by their hands. The faces of elders were not honored.

¹³ The young men carry millstones. The children stumbled under loads of wood.

¹⁴ The elders have ceased from the gate, and the young men from their music.

¹⁵ The joy of our heart has ceased. Our dance is turned into mourning.

¹⁶ The crown has fallen from our head. Woe to us, for we have sinned!

¹⁷ For this our heart is faint. For these things our eyes are dim:

¹⁸ for the mountain of Zion, which is desolate. The foxes walk on it.

¹⁹ You, LORD, remain forever. Your throne is from generation to generation.

²⁰ Why do you forget us forever, and forsake us for so long a time?

²¹ Turn us to yourself, LORD, and we will be turned. Renew our days as of old.

²² But you have utterly rejected us. You are very angry against us.

Around Lamentations 5

Context

Context for this book is being written. A note appears here only once it names its sources.

AI explanation

About Lamentations as a whole · Written by an AI model · Not reviewed by a theological reader

This explanation was written by an AI model to help you get started. It names no sources and can contain mistakes. Scripture comes first, and context with sources is shown separately on this page.

What this book is about

A city sits alone. “How the city sits solitary, that was full of people!” the first poem cries, and it says she has become like a widow who was once great among the nations. Lamentations is five poems of grief over the destruction of Jerusalem, and the city is pictured as a widow weeping alone. The poems describe hunger, loss and shame without softening them, and they name the people’s own sin as part of the cause.

Then, at the center of the book, in chapter 3, something turns. In the middle of the darkness the poet says that God’s mercies have not come to an end: “his mercies don’t fail”, and “They are new every morning.”

Background

The poems respond to the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon in 586 or 587 before Christ. Tradition credits them to Jeremiah, though the Hebrew text names no author. Four of the five follow the Hebrew alphabet, each verse or group of verses beginning with the next letter. It is as if grief were being given order, from the first letter to the last, so that it could be carried.

How Christians read it

The book gives God’s people words for grief, and shows that lament belongs within faith. Jews read it each year on the day that remembers the destruction of the temple. Many Christians read it in Holy Week. It ends with a question to God and not with a resolution, which readers have found truthful.

About this explanation

Written by Claude Sonnet 5.5, an AI model, on 20 October 2026. It draws on the WEB text and general knowledge and was not checked against sources by a person. Every quotation from Scripture is checked automatically against the WEB text.

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