Charles Ellicott Commentary Lamentations 5

Remember, O Lord. —The fact that the number of verses is, as in Lamentations 1:2, Lamentations 1:4, the same as that of the Hebrew alphabet suggests the inference that this chapter also, though not actually alphabetic, was intended to have been alphabetic, and that we have the last of the five elegies in a half-finished state. It would seem as if Jeremiah first wrote freely what was in his mind, and then set to work as an artist to bring it under the alphabetic scheme.

This chapter, it may be stated, has more the character of a prayer than any other, and the prayer begins with recapitulating the woes of Judah as a ground for the compassion of Jehovah.

Turned. —Used here in the sense of transferred.

Houses. —In Jeremiah 3:13, the Chaldeans are said to have burnt the houses of Jerusalem, and those of the great men elsewhere; here, therefore, the “houses” spoken of are those of the farmers and peasants in the country.

Our mothers are as widows — i.e., their husbands, though living, were carried into exile, and they were as destitute as though they had been deprived of them by death. The Chaldee paraphrase gives the same meaning to the last clause also, “We are like orphans.”

Our water ... our wood. —The point of the complaint lies in the possessive pronoun. The Chaldean conquerors were in possession of the country, and the very necessities of life, which had been regarded as the common property of all, could only be obtained with money. In the Hebrew of the first clause, the fact appears even more emphatically: Our water comes to us for money. These words have been attributed by some commentators to the sufferings of the exiles in Egypt, but the context is more consistent with the idea of the hardships of those who were left in Judah.

Our necks are under persecution. — Better, were under pursuit: that is, the enemies were pressing close on them, always, as in our English phrase, at their very heels.