John Calvin Commentary Lamentations 5:10

"Our skin is black like an oven, Because of the burning heat of famine." — Lamentations 5:10 (ASV)

Some read, “for tremors”—literally, “from the face of tremors.” Jerome translates it as “tempests,” but the word “burnings” is the most suitable, because he says that their skins were darkened, and he compares them to an oven. This metaphor often occurs in Scripture:

Though you have been as among pots in the smoke, and deformed by blackness, yet your wings shall shine (Psalms 68:14).

God says that his people had contracted blackness, as though they had touched smoky pots, because they had been burned, as it were, by many afflictions. For when we pine away in our evils, filthiness itself deforms us.

But here he compares their skin to an oven (which amounts to the same thing). He then says that the skin of everyone was so wrinkled and darkened by blackness that it was like an oven, which is black from constant fire and smoke.

The Prophet, or whoever was the author of Psalm 119, uses another comparison: that he was like a bottle or a bladder, contracted by the smoke, and had wrinkles together with blackness.

The meaning is that there was a degrading deformity in the people, because they were so famished that no moisture remained in them. When moisture fails, paleness and decay follow; and then from paleness comes a greater deformity and blackness, of which the Prophet now speaks.

Therefore, I have said that the word “burnings” is the most suitable. For if we say tempests or storms, a tempest certainly does not darken the skin; and if we translate it as tremors or tremblings, this would be far from the mark. But if we adopt the word “burnings,” the whole passage will appear consistent.

And we know that, just as food, as it were, irrigates human life, so famine burns it up, as Scripture also says elsewhere.