Lamentations 5:10

Lam 5:10 Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine.

Ver. 10. Our skin was black like an oven.] Or, As a chimney, {Isa 31:9} being still beaten upon with the fire that is within it,

Because of the terrible famine.] Propter procellas famis, because of the tempests of famine, which, like a violent storm, beareth down all before it.

John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

EXEGETICAL NOTES.—

Lam_5:10. The bread, which was obtained at the risk of their lives, was not enough in quantity to nourish them. Our skin is hot like an oven; the feverishness is because of the burning heat of hunger. “Hunger dries up the pores of the skin, so that it becomes like as if it had been exposed to the burning heat of the simoom.”

We must not fancy that the several distressing things alluded to befell every one of all classes. We should rather believe that some troubles were felt by one portion, while another portion had to bear different troubles. So the author proceeds to record what sufferings were endured by particular divisions of the population.

Lam_5:12. The most gentle were outraged, and princes were hanged up by their hand—not the hand of the foe is referred to, though by him the cruel deed was perpetrated; still less is the reference to compulsory suicide, as Calvin surmises; but the hand of the princes was the leverage by which their bodies were lifted up. Whether they were first killed and then suspended, or were tortured by such suspension when every nerve and muscle was vibrating with life’s waves, is a question to which no sure reply can be given; but probably the latter is hinted at. The bodies of Saul and his sons were fastened to the wall of Beth-shan (1Sa_31:10-12); and more recent commentators refer to “Records of the Past,” 1:38, in which an inscription of Sennacherib is quoted as saying of the people of Ekron, “The chief priests and noblemen I put to death; on stakes all round the city I hung their bodies;” and the practice seems to have been not uncommon among Assyrians and Babylonians. Still, impalement after death does not correspond distinctly to the atrocity mentioned here. The faces—persons—of elders were not honoured. Not only men high in rank, but also those who held responsible positions among the people—aged persons are spoken of after this—were treated with indignity in the insolence of conquest.

Lam_5:13. The choice portion of the nation were forced to be nothing but mere burden-bearers. Young men bare the mill. They had to carry about, and no doubt to turn, the hand-mills to grind corn for their military masters, thus doing the work of women or of slaves; while the fuel, for cooking and other purposes, was laid on shoulders ill able to bear a load. Boys stumbled [under] a burden of wood.

HOMILETICS

THE GALLING TYRANNY OF CONQUEST

(Lam_5:10-13)

I. There is the physical suffering occasioned by starvation. “Our skin is black like an oven because of the terrible famine” (Lam_5:10). The human body can bear a great deal, but it cannot resist, nor can it survive, the ravages of famine. The bloom of health fades from the cheek, the eyes shine with an unnatural lustre, and then lose all expression; the flesh is dried and parched, the skin becomes “fiery red like an oven, because of the fever-blast” of famine, and the whole frame becomes skeletonised. During one of the famines in Ireland there was a form of face which came upon the sufferers when their state of misery was far advanced, and which was a sure signal that their last stage of misery was nearly run. The mouth would fall and seem to hang, the lips at the two ends of the mouth would be dragged down, and the lower parts of the cheeks would fall, as though they had been dragged and pulled. There were no signs of acute agony, none of the horrid symptoms of gnawing hunger. The look was one of apathy, desolation, and death. The agony of want was past. Nothing could save.

II. Social purity is outraged. “They humbled the women in Zion, and the maids in the city of Judah” (Lam_5:11). History records revolting examples of the excesses committed by a brutal soldiery in the mad delirium of conquest. War brings in its train worse consequences than wounds and death. There is a fouler lust than the lust of military glory. The pure and unoffending are dishonoured. The sanctity of social life is invaded, and its sacred laws violated.

III. Rank and age are treated with indignity. “Princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of elders were not honoured” (Lam_5:12). See exegetical notes on this verse. It was a barbarity of ancient warfare that the conqueror paid so little regard to the feelings of the conquered. To the humiliation of defeat was added whatever could pain and degrade the vanquished. The princes of the royal blood and magistrates who had grown old in their lengthened term of office were treated with scant courtesy. The conqueror seemed to glory in parading the most illustrious of his captives under the most ignominious conditions. There were noble exceptions to this rule, but they were so rare that history has not failed to chronicle them.

IV. Young men and children are forced into the performance of the most menial and exhausting tasks. “They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood” (Lam_5:13). To grind the corn in the hand-mill was the work of female slaves. It was a great blow to the self-respect and ambition of the young men who were of legal age for military service to be condemned to this menial work. The little Jewish children, whose tender years should have been a sufficient protection against such cruelty, staggered under the loads of firewood they were compelled to carry for the Chaldean soldiers, who indulged in inhuman sport at the brave little fellows as they fell exhausted under their crushing burdens. Many of the children would be crippled for life. It is one of the praiseworthy features of nineteenth-century civilisation that so much care is shown in the protection and healthy development of child-life.

LESSONS.—

1. Woe to the people who fall into the hands of a heartless conqueror!

2. There are worse sufferings than the sense of being vanquished.

3. The tyrant conqueror has no respect for sex, or rank, or age.

GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES

Lam_5:10. The sufferings of famine.

1. Apparent in their ghastly physical results.

2. Reduce all ranks to a common level.

3. Are intensified by conscious defeat and humiliation.

Lam_5:11-13. The atrocities of war.

1. The pure and defenceless are defiled (Lam_5:11).

2. Princes and aged counsellors are treated with contempt and cruelty (Lam_5:12).

3. The spirit of the young is crushed with overpowering burdens (Lam_5:13).

ILLUSTRATIONS.—The cause of famine. For unknown years the Persians have been cutting off their trees, and diminishing their rainfall thereby. Nay, not only has the removal of the forests decreased the supply, but it has wasted whatever rain fell. For the roots of the trees and of all the innumerable shrubs, bushes, vines and ferns that thrive in their shadow, kept the ground open, and held the water in countless natural wells for the use of the soil in droughts. But all the undergrowth dying when its protecting forests were felled, the scanty showers percolated into the streams at once, causing rare floods and frequent droughts. The droughts yielded no harvests, and no harvests were followed by famine, pestilence, and death.

The fascination of lust. You will go on in your lust and your sins, despite warnings, despite advice, until you perish in your guilt. How worse than children are grown-up men! The child who goes for a merry slide upon a pond, if he be told that the ice will not bear him, starts back affrighted, or, if he daringly creeps upon it, how soon he leaves it if he hears but a crack upon the slender covering of the water! But you men have conscience, which tells you that your sins are vile, and that they will be your ruin. You hear the crack of sin as its thin sheet of pleasure gives way beneath your feet; ay! and some of you have seen your comrades sink in the flood and lost, and yet you go sliding on. Worse than childish, worse than mad, are you, thus presumptuously to play with your everlasting state.—Spurgeon.

Age dishonoured.

“I have lived long enough. My way of life

Is fallen into the sere and yellow leaf:

And that which should accompany old age,

As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,

I must not look to have.”—Shakespeare.

Helplessness appeals to our pity. Thus was the heart of the rough sailor touched when, tossing with other castaways in an open boat on the open sea, he parted with a morsel of food, which, hidden with more care than misers hide their gold, he had reserved for his own last extremity. Around him lay men and women, some dead, with glassy eyes, some dying, and these reduced to ghastly skeletons; but none of these moved him to peril his own life for theirs. The object of his noble and not unrewarded generosity—foras if Heaven had sent it on purpose to reward the act, a sail speedily hove in sight—was a gentle boy, that, with his face turned on hers, lay dying in a mother’s arms, and between whose teeth the famished man put his own last precious morsel.—Guthrie.

The atrocities of war. I look on war with a horror which no words can express. I have long wanted patience to read of battles. The thought of man, God’s immortal child, butchered by his brother, the thought of sea and land stained with human blood by human hands, of women and children buried under the ruins of besieged cities, of the resources of empires and the mighty powers of nature all turned by man’s malignity into engines of torture and destruction—this thought gives to earth the semblance of hell. I shudder as among demons.—Charming.

The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.

5:10 There was a famine in the city during the siege (2 Kgs 25:3; Jer 37:21; 38:9; 52:6).

Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

As an oven is scorched with too much fire, so our skin with the hot blast of famine (Margin, rightly, "storms," like the hot simoom). Hunger dries up the pores so that the skin becomes like as if it were scorched by the sun (Job 30:30; Psa 119:83).

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

Verse 10. Our skin was black - because of the terrible famine.] Because of the searching winds that burnt up every green thing, destroying vegetation, and in consequence producing a famine.

Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

Some read, “for tremors;” literally, “from the face of tremors.” Jerome renders it, “tempests,” but the word “burnings” is the most suitable; for he says that their skins were darkened, and he compares them to an oven. This metaphor often occurs in Scripture,

“Though ye have been as among pots in the smoke, and deformed by blackness, yet your wings shall shine.” (Psalm 68:14.)

God says that his people had contracted blackness, as though they had touched smoky pots, because they had been burnt as it were by many afflictions; for when we pine away in our evils, filthiness itself deforms us. But here he compares to an oven (which is the same thing) their skins or skin. He then says that the skin of every one was so wrinkled and darkened by blackness, that it was like an oven which is black through constant fire and smoke. The Prophet or whoever was the author of the 119th Psalm, uses another comparison, that he was like a bottle or a bladder, contracted by the smoke, and had wrinkles together with blackness.

The meaning is, that there was a degrading deformity in the people, for they were so famished that no moisture remained in them; and when moisture fails, then paleness and decay follow; and then from paleness a greater deformity and blackness, of which the Prophet now speaks. Hence I have said, that the word “burnings” is the most proper. For, if we say tempests or storms, a tempest does not certainly darken the skin; and if we render it tremors or tremblings, this would be far remote; but if we adopt the word burnings, the whole passage will appear consistent; and we know, that as food as it were irrigates the life of man, so famine burns it up, as Scripture speaks also elsewhere. It follows, —

John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.

(10) Our skin was black . . .-Better, fiery red, and for “terrible famine,” the fever-blast of famine. The words paint the hot fever of hunger rather than the livid paleness of exhaustion.

A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

10. The feverishness and wasting brought on by hunger is meant.

black] or as mg. hot.

The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Our skin was black like an oven, because of the terrible famine. Or "terrors and horrors of famine"; which are very dreadful and distressing: or, "the storms of famine"; see Psa 11:6; or, "burning winds" (u); such as are frequent in Africa and Asia; to which the famine is compared that was in Jerusalem, at the siege of it, both by the Chaldeans and Romans; and as an oven, furnace, or chimney becomes black by the smoke of the fire burnt in it, or under it; so the skins of the Jews became black through these burning winds and storms, or burnings of famine; see Lam 4:8. So Jarchi says the word has the signification of "burning"; for famine as it were burns up the bodies of men when most vehement.

(u) "horrorum famis", Montanus; "terrores, vel tremores", Vatablus; "procellas famis", Junius & Tremellius, Piscator; "exustiones", Pagninus, Calvin; "adustiones famis", Stockius, p. 281.

John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

Our skin ... - Or, is fiery red like an oven because of the fever-blast “of famine.”

Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

The want of bread caused leanness, and paleness, and ill colours in their faces.

Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

10. Our skin was black — The word rendered “black” occurs in three other passages, namely, in Gen_43:30, and 1Ki_3:26, in both which places it is translated “yearned;” and in Hos_11:8, where it is rendered “kindled.” The use of the word oven, or furnace, seems decisive for this last sense in this place; though Furst says, “The explanation of Kimchi, ‘to grow warm,’ is only conjectural.” The allusion is to the fever produced by famine, and the clause should read, Our skin glows like an oven, because of the fever of famine.

Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Was black like an oven. The translation is misleading; there is no real parallel to Lam_4:8. Render, gloweth. It is the feverish glow produced by gnawing hunger which is meant. The terrible famine; rather, the burning heat of hunger. Hariri, the humoristic author of the cycle of stories in rhymed Arabic prose and verse, called "Makamat," puts into the mouth of his ne"er do well Abu Seid very similar words to describe a famished man"Dess Eingeweide brennend nach Erquickung sehrein, Der nichts gegessen seit zwei Tagen oder drein. (Ruckert"s adaptation, third Makama.)

The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

is parched Heb. נִכְמַרוּ, became heated, and so (Gen. 43:30): “for his mercies were stirred up (נִכְמְרוּ)”; and in the language of the Gemara there are many instances [of the use of this word]: (Yev. 97a): “a heating vessel (כּוֹמֶר) of olives”; (Pes. 58a): “for the heating (מִכְמָר) of the flesh.

the heat of hunger Heb. זַלְעֲפוֹת,” heat, like (Ps. 11:6): “and a burning wind (רוּחַ זִלְעָפוֹת)”; an expression of burning.

Rashi on the Tanakh — English translations: “The Judaica Press complete Tanach with Rashi, translated by A. J. Rosenberg” (CC BY 4.0); “Pentateuch with Rashi's commentary by M. Rosenbaum and A.M. Silbermann, 1929-1934” (public domain); “The Metsudah Tanach series, Lakewood, N.J” (CC BY 4.0); and “The Book of Joshua, Metsudah Publications, 1997” (CC BY 4.0). Text via Sefaria.