टीका वर्तमान में केवल अंग्रेज़ी में उपलब्ध है। हिन्दी अनुवाद प्रगति पर है।
Lamentations 2 — The Lord Was as an Enemy
The second poem stares unflinchingly at the wrath of God. The prophet does not say a foreign army has done this — he says the LORD has cast down, the LORD has thrown down, the LORD has swallowed up. The chapter's harshest sentence: The Lord was as an enemy. Yet inside the rubble Jeremiah pleads with Jerusalem to cry out, to pour her heart like water before God's face. Even an enemy-seeming God is the one to whom one still appeals.
“Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches pour out thine heart like water before the face of the Lord: lift up thy hands toward him for the life of thy young children, that faint for hunger in the top of every street.”
— Lamentations 2:19
- v.1-9 The Lord Himself has cast down Zion
- v.10-12 The horror in the streets — children faint for hunger
- v.13-17 No earthly comfort can match the breach
- v.18-19 Pour out thine heart like water before the Lord
- v.20-22 The closing plea: behold
As an enemy — the qualifier matters. He is not really her enemy; He acts as if He were. The text reaches for the strongest possible word and softens it only by the single particle as.
The verse models a kind of prayer rarely taught: brutally honest about how God seems, while still calling Him the Lord.
The prophet's grief is bodily — eyes, bowels, liver. Old Testament Hebrew lays sorrow in the gut, not just the mind. Jeremiah does not stand back from the destruction; he is shattered with the city.
A pastoral note: a true prophet weeps over the people he must rebuke.
The false prophets had told the city peace, peace, when there was no peace (Jer 6:14). Their refusal to name sin sealed Jerusalem's fate.
A pastor or teacher who never names sin is not kinder than one who does. They are a more dangerous version of cruelty.
The catastrophe was not a surprise to God. It was that which he had devised…commanded in the days of old — the covenant warnings of Deuteronomy 28. God's word is not idle.
A sobering verse for any era: when God speaks judgment in advance, He keeps His word as faithfully as when He promises blessing.
After ten verses of devastation, the call to prayer comes — and not silent prayer, not measured prayer. Pour out thine heart like water. Hold nothing back. Whatever is inside, let it go before God's face.
The hand-lifting is intercessory: not for self first, but for the children. Lament that does not rouse intercession is incomplete.
The poem ends not with answer but with appeal. Behold, O LORD, and consider — the same verbs the sufferer always reaches for.
The horrors named (cannibalism, slaughter in the temple) are historical — recorded in 2 Kings 6:28-29 in earlier sieges and during 586 BC. The prophet does not exaggerate the suffering, and he does not hide it from God.
When you cannot make sense of God's providence, this chapter gives you a vocabulary that does not pretend. He was as an enemy. You may say what is true to you, as long as you say it to Him. Verse 19 is the discipline: pour the heart out, do not bottle it. Bring even the parts of your grief that do not yet trust Him to Him.
The Lord who appeared as an enemy in Jerusalem's judgment became the Friend who absorbed wrath in His own body at Calvary. The cup He drank in Gethsemane was the cup Jerusalem drank here. He bore the as an enemy so that we would never face it as fact.
Footstool — the temple, where God's presence was said to rest among His people. The verse is grief that God seems to forget His own holy place.
The poem does not say God is unjust. It says His ways here are dark to the sufferer. Faith may both confess God's righteousness (1:18) and admit His judgments feel unbearable.