Charles Ellicott Commentary Lamentations 1:3

"Judah is gone into captivity because of affliction, and because of great servitude; She dwelleth among the nations, she findeth no rest: All her persecutors overtook her within the straits." — Lamentations 1:3 (ASV)

Because of affliction. — The Authorised Version suggests the thought that the words refer to the voluntary emigration of those who went to Egypt and other countries (Jeremiah 42:14), to avoid the oppression to which they were subject in their own land. The Hebrew, however, permits the rendering from affliction, and so the words speak of the forcible deportation of the people from misery at home to a yet worse misery in Babylon as the land of their exile. Even there they found no rest (Deuteronomy 28:65). Their persecutors hunted them down to the straits from which no escape was possible.