Morning Bible Study: Lamentations 2:1-9

2:1 How the Lord has covered Daughter Zion    

    with the cloud of his anger [or How the Lord in his anger / has treated Daughter Zion with contempt]!

He has hurled down the splendor of Israel

    from heaven to earth;

he has not remembered his footstool

    in the day of his anger.

2 Without pity the Lord has swallowed up

    all the dwellings of Jacob;

in his wrath he has torn down

    the strongholds of Daughter Judah.

He has brought her kingdom and its princes

    down to the ground in dishonor.

3 In fierce anger he has cut off

    every horn [or off / all the strength; or every king; 

horn here symbolizes strength.] of Israel.

He has withdrawn his right hand

    at the approach of the enemy.

He has burned in Jacob like a flaming fire

    that consumes everything around it.

4 Like an enemy he has strung his bow;

    his right hand is ready.

Like a foe he has slain

    all who were pleasing to the eye;

he has poured out his wrath like fire

    on the tent of Daughter Zion.

5 The Lord is like an enemy;

    he has swallowed up Israel.

He has swallowed up all her palaces

    and destroyed her strongholds.

He has multiplied mourning and lamentation

    for Daughter Judah.

6 He has laid waste his dwelling like a garden;

    he has destroyed his place of meeting.

The Lord has made Zion forget

    her appointed festivals and her Sabbaths;

in his fierce anger he has spurned

    both king and priest.

7 The Lord has rejected his altar

    and abandoned his sanctuary.

He has given the walls of her palaces

    into the hands of the enemy;

they have raised a shout in the house of the Lord

    as on the day of an appointed festival.

8 The Lord determined to tear down

    the wall around Daughter Zion.

He stretched out a measuring line

    and did not withhold his hand from destroying.

He made ramparts and walls lament;

    together they wasted away.

9 Her gates have sunk into the ground;

    their bars he has broken and destroyed.

Her king and her princes are exiled among the nations,

    the law is no more,

and her prophets no longer find

    visions from the Lord.

Commentary

(the following is from Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary -- www.christianity.com)

"A sad representation is here made of the state of God's church, of Jacob and Israel; but the notice seems mostly to refer to the hand of the Lord in their calamities. Yet God is not an enemy to his people, when he is angry with them and corrects them. And gates and bars stand in no stead when God withdraws his protection. It is just with God to cast down those by judgments, who debase themselves by sin; and to deprive those of the benefit and comfort of sabbaths and ordinances, who have not duly valued nor observed them. What should they do with Bibles, who make no improvement of them? Those who misuse God's prophets, justly lose them. It becomes necessary, though painful, to turn the thoughts of the afflicted to the hand of God lifted up against them, and to their sins as the source of their miseries."