Lamentations · chapter 5 of 5
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Lamentations 5 is a communal prayer in which the people ask the Lord to remember what has happened to them and to look at their disgrace. It describes the loss of inheritance, hunger, forced labor, the sin of their fathers and their own, and the silence of the festivals. It acknowledges that the Lord reigns forever and ends with the plea to be restored and renewed, though it closes with an open question: whether God has utterly rejected them.
The fifth and last poem of Lamentations has twenty-two verses, like chapters 1, 2 and 4, but it is no longer an acrostic: it is a continuous prayer, without the order of the alphabet. It speaks in the first person plural, like a chorus of the people before God. The book ends this way, not with a settled comfort but with a plea.
The prayer begins with a petition: remember, O Lord, what has befallen us; look, and see our disgrace. Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to foreigners. We have become fatherless orphans, and our mothers are like widows. We must pay for the water we drink, and our wood is sold to us. With a yoke on our necks we are hard driven; we are weary and find no rest. We have given the hand to Egypt and to Assyria to get bread.
The people acknowledge that their fathers sinned and are no more, and that they bear their punishment. Slaves rule over us, and there is none to deliver us from their hand. We get our bread at the peril of our lives, because of the sword in the wilderness. Our skin is hot as an oven with the burning heat of famine. Women were violated in Zion, and virgins in the towns of Judah. Princes were hung up by their hands, and no respect was shown to the elders. Young men were set to grind, and boys stagger under loads of wood.
The elders have left the city gate, the young men their music. The joy of our hearts has ceased, and our dancing has turned to mourning. The crown has fallen from our head: woe to us, for we have sinned. For this our heart is sick, and our eyes have grown dim, for Mount Zion which lies desolate, where foxes prowl over it.
Then the tone changes with an affirmation of faith: you, O Lord, reign forever; your throne endures from generation to generation. The people ask why he forgets them forever and forsakes them for so many days. They plead: restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored; renew our days as of old. The book ends with a question: or have you utterly rejected us, and are you exceedingly angry with us?
References follow ESV book names and verse numbers. Read each verse in your Bible before the explanation.
Remember, O Lord, what has befallen us; look, and see our disgrace. The prayer begins by asking God to look, as at the end of the earlier chapters, and makes clear that the people have no one else to turn to.
Our fathers sinned and are no more, and we bear their punishment. The people recognize a responsibility shared across generations, though in verse 16 they will also confess their own sin.
You, O Lord, reign forever; your throne endures from generation to generation. In the midst of the ruins the people affirm that God's throne has not been overthrown, and that conviction sustains everything they ask next.
Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored; renew our days as of old. The plea recognizes that conversion is a gift of God and that restoration depends on his acting first.
6 questions with answers and references, ready for Sunday school, small group or a Bible quiz night.
Answer: To remember what has befallen them and look at their disgrace. — Lamentations 5:1
Answer: They have been turned over to strangers and foreigners. — Lamentations 5:2
Answer: That they sinned and are no more, and that the people bear their punishment. — Lamentations 5:7
Answer: The joy of their hearts has ceased and their dancing has turned to mourning. — Lamentations 5:15
Answer: That he reigns forever and his throne endures from generation to generation. — Lamentations 5:19
Answer: That the Lord restore them to himself so that they may be restored, and renew their days as of old. — Lamentations 5:21
Lamentations 5 is a model of communal prayer in times of crisis. In a church or small group you can pray in the plural, as this chapter does, for a community that has suffered losses, and confess both our own sins and those of earlier generations without hiding them.
The ending offers no quick solution. The book ends with an open question, and that teaches that faith can live with questions while still affirming that God reigns. For the Christian, the plea for restoration is answered fully in Christ, but while we wait for his return we keep crying out that the Lord would turn us back to him.
Lamentations 5 closes the book with the prayer of a people who ask God to look, who confess that he reigns and who plead for restoration, though they do not yet know the answer. In the public reading of the book, Jewish tradition repeats verse 21 at the end so as not to finish on the question, a gesture that recalls that the grief of Lamentations is not God's last word.
The text does not explain it. It has twenty-two verses, the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, but does not follow the order of the letters. Many scholars think that at the end of the book the prayer flows without fixed form because grief can no longer be ordered, or that the poet moves from composed poem to direct plea.
It is an expression for seeking alliances or help from foreign powers in order to have bread. The people recall that instead of trusting the Lord they depended on Egypt and Assyria, two great powers of the region, something the prophets had already criticized.
No. Although the last verse is a question, the book already declared in chapter 3 that the Lord's mercies are new every morning, and in 5:19 the people affirm that the Lord reigns forever. The plea to be restored assumes the hope that God can do it.