John Calvin Commentary Lamentations 2:16

"All thine enemies have opened their mouth wide against thee; They hiss and gnash the teeth; they say, We have swallowed her up; Certainly this is the day that we looked for; we have found, we have seen it." — Lamentations 2:16 (ASV)

Here, also, the Prophet introduces enemies as insolently exulting over the miseries of the people. He first says that they had opened the mouth, even so that they might loudly upbraid them. For one is not said to open the mouth who only speaks, but one who insolently and freely utters his slanders.

Indeed, God is sometimes said emphatically to open His mouth when He announces something that deserves special notice; and so Matthew says that Christ opened His mouth when He spoke of true happiness (Matthew 5:2).

But in this place and in others, the enemy is said to open his mouth, who, with a full mouth, so to speak, taunts the one whom he sees worn out with evils. Therefore, he refers to petulance or insolence when he says that enemies had opened their mouth.

He then adds that they had hissed. By hissing, he no doubt means scoffing or taunting; for it immediately follows that they had gnashed with their teeth, as though he had said that enemies not only blamed and condemned them but had also given tokens of extreme hatred. For one who gnashes with his teeth thus shows the bitterness of his mind, and even fury; for to gnash the teeth is what belongs to a wild beast.

The Prophet then says that enemies had not only harassed the people with taunts and scoffs but had also cruelly and even furiously treated them. Now we know that to people of ingenuous minds, such treatment is harder than death itself: for many deem it a hard thing to fall in battle—and we see how soldiers expose themselves to the greatest danger—but a disgraceful death is far more bitter.

The Prophet, then, no doubt, amplifies the miseries of the people by this circumstance: that they had been harassed on every side by taunts. And he mentions this on purpose, because the reproofs by the prophets had not been received by them; for we know how perversely the Jews had rebelled against the prophets when they reproved them in God’s name.

Since, then, they would not have borne the paternal reproofs of God, they were thus constrained to bear the reproaches of enemies and to receive the just reward of their pride and presumption. Nor is there a doubt, as I have said, that the Prophet related reproaches of this kind and the scoffs of enemies, so that the people might at length know that they had been exposed to such evils because they had proudly rejected the reproofs given them by the prophets.

He says that enemies spoke thus: We have devoured; surely this is the day which we have expected. This was as though they triumphed when they saw that they had gained the victory and that they could do with the people as they pleased.

And as I have said, this in itself was a very bitter thing to the people. But when the Prophet related, as in the person of the enemies, what was already sufficiently known to them, the people ought to have called to mind the reason why they had been so severely afflicted.

And this is what the Prophet clearly sets forth in the next verse, for he adds: