John Calvin Commentary Lamentations 3:47

"Fear and the pit are come upon us, devastation and destruction." — Lamentations 3:47 (ASV)

The Prophet dwells extensively on the severity of the calamity that had occurred. He compares here the anxieties into which the people had been brought to a pitfall and dread. There is a striking alliteration in the Hebrew words פחד and פחת, pechet and peched. But the meaning is that the people had been reduced to such dire straits that there was no escape for them. This is like our own experience: when we are filled with dread, look around and see nothing but pitfalls on every side, then we are at our wits' end. Such then was the state of the people, as Jeremiah shows: filled with dread, they sought refuge but saw pitfalls on every side.

He later mentions desolation or destruction, and sorrow. It is probably a mistake in Jerome’s version, where the first word is rendered “prophesying.” Some think that he was led astray by the Hebrew letter ש, shin, which he seems to have read with a dot on the left side; and he took the word as coming from the Hebrew word נשא, nusha. But another conjecture seems more correct: that the transcribers made a mistake. For what I have said is most appropriate to the passage—namely, that the people were overwhelmed with all kinds of evils, because there was nothing to be seen but desolation and sorrow, or bruising, or breach, from the Hebrew word שבר, shaber.