The man’s journey from the darkness of despair to the light of hope is of pastoral significance for every believer. As sinful people living in a fallen world under the power of the devil, we may suffer for our own sin, like this representative Judahite man did, or we may suffer because of divine providence, like Job did. Whatever our experience of suffering, and whatever reason behind our suffering, we can identify with the experience of this man of affliction, at least to some extent. Suffering of whatever kind—spiritual, physical, psychological, emotional—can leave our soul feeling embittered and bowed down. We can feel bereft of peace and happiness; our strength and life energy can wither inside us, and we can feel like the hope that God once blessed us with is now dead. When we suffer, God can feel far away and nameless.
The way out of such despair is given in the last word of verse 18, when the man reaches his lowest point in the dark. In the darkness of his despair he names Yahweh, his covenant Lord, the one who brought him into the despair. In the moving words of a Rwandan believer after he lost family and home in the genocide that swept his country, “I never knew Jesus was all I needed until Jesus was all I had.” When we name God in the midst of the darkness of despair, the darkness begins to dissipate in the light of his presence. When we name God, we call upon his character of steadfast love and never-ending mercies, and we are not consumed—great is his faithfulness. All hail the power of Yahweh’s name!
As Christians we can call on God only through the name of his Son, Jesus Christ. Chapter 3 provides a beautiful preview of Jesus through the type of the man of affliction. So far, the Christological trajectories have been via the city, temple, and nation. However, through the man of affliction this third poem in Lamentations presents us with the most obvious Christological connection thus far. The words “I am the man who has seen affliction” could be uttered by many biblical figures; Joseph, Job, Naomi, Hannah, the suffering servant, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea all experienced affliction of one sort or another by the hand of God. But all were people with small afflictions in comparison to the man of great affliction, Jesus Christ.
In Lamentations 3:1 the man introduces himself as a geber, a strong man, a champion-warrior who embodies Jerusalem-Judah and who also serves as a prophet distinct from the nation, providing instruction and mediation. He qualifies as the personification of Jerusalem-Judah’s suffering because he himself suffers as one of the people—and yet, he is also distinct from the people. He suffers, it seems, at their expense, not his. In all this we have a type of Jesus, the man of affliction who, though he knew no sin, experienced many of the things this man of affliction experienced.
As both a representative for the people and a prophet distinct from the people, Jesus saw affliction under the rod of God’s wrath on the cross (cf. v. 1). He was driven and brought into the darkness of Gethsemane and Golgotha (v. 2). God turned his hand against him by abandoning him to cruel men (v. 3). God enveloped him with tribulation in his passion and death (v. 5). God made him “dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago” as he lay in death’s dark shadow for three days (v. 6). God walled him about so that there was no escape from his enemies (v. 7). God shut out his cry of dereliction on the cross, providing him with no answer (v. 8). Jesus was the target of God’s attacks that came to him via the medium of enemy agents, in the form of the Jews, the Romans, Pilate, and King Herod (vv. 10–12). God’s arrows were fatal for him (v. 13). He became the object of scorn, a laughingstock and mocking song by all peoples, including his own (v. 14). His soul was bereft of peace, and he forgot happiness (v. 17). His splendor and glory perished on the cross as he voluntarily gave up his life (vv. 17–18). He experienced affliction and homelessness throughout his life, all the way up to his death—the wormwood and the gall were his bitter food (v. 19). His soul was bowed down within him (v. 20).
And yet, in the darkness of despair on the hill of Golgotha, Jesus called to mind—consciously, deliberately, actively—the promises of God in the Word of God. Each of his statements from the cross revealed that his mind was fixed on God. He learned through bitter experience that God was all he needed because God was all he had. God was his portion—the Lord was enough for him—and therefore he found hope (v. 24). And now, since Jesus made the journey from the darkness of despair to the light of hope through faith in his Father, we can also make that same journey through faith in him. All we need to do is call upon his name in the darkness. How sweet the name of Jesus sounds!Lamentations 3:1–24
Lamentations 3:25–39
Hebrew good
Syriac, Targum; Hebrew Because of the steadfast love of the Lord, we are not cut off
3:1–3 Verse 1 begins with an emphatic statement: “I am the man.” The afflicted man has replaced the abandoned woman in the personification of Jerusalem-Judah. The word “affliction” (ʿoni) appears three times in chapter 1 (vv. 3, 7, 9) and three times in this chapter as well (3:1, 19, 33). The difference in chapter 3 is its direct association with God: affliction comes because of God’s angry attacks on his people. In this case God is portrayed as a harsh shepherd mistreating his sheep. Several keywords help to form the image. The “rod” was a weapon of attack used by shepherds to protect their sheep from wild animals (cf. Ps. 23:4). Ironically, God the Great Shepherd has used it to clobber a member of his flock. But the irony is deeper still when the Hebrew word employed for “the man” is taken into consideration. The word geber is used in the OT for mighty men of valor, warrior champions—men like Nimrod (Gen. 10:8) and Goliath (1 Sam. 17:51). This man is presented as a strong warrior-man, yet he is reduced to a pitiful sheep, beaten and bruised by the club of his own shepherd. His mistreatment continues in Lamentations 3:2, where the shepherd “drives” the man and “brings” him (Hb. “causes him to walk”) in darkness and not light, as if wishing him to encounter some danger or harm. The shepherd’s opposition to the man is underscored in verse 3 with the doubly emphatic opening statement “surely against me he [has turned] his hand”—something that he does repeatedly and continuously. There is irony here too. The hand of God was used for saving his people (cf. Ex. 15:6, 12) and protecting them (cf. Isa. 42:6), but now it is used to attack his representative man.
3:4–6 The image of the shepherd is more subtle in these verses, but connections are still present. God brings physical injury to the man, making his flesh and skin waste away, breaking his bones (v. 4). The language of besieging (Hb. “building”) and encompassing the man with “bitterness and tribulation,” both rare terms used for the first time, communicates how claustrophobic God has made the man to feel. The word “bitterness” is used of poisonous plants in the OT (“gall” in v. 19; cf. Deut. 29:18; Ps. 69:21; Hos. 10:4). Perhaps the picture is that of God’s building a paddock of poisonous plants around the sheep. The language of making the man to dwell in darkness recalls leading the sheep into darkness in Lamentations 3:2. The progression is subtle but frightening: first God injures him, then he imprisons and poisons him before making him dwell in darkness, the home of the dead. We might say that this shepherd has led his sheep to the slaughter.
3:7–9 The metaphor for God now switches from shepherd to jailor, conveying the picture of imprisonment. The key word denoting God’s action is “walled about/up,” which, poetically, also “walls in” this stanza: the verb begins both outer verses (vv. 7, 9). God the jailor imprisons the man with walls, physically and vocally. Physically, he imprisons him inside a set of walls and then chains him with heavy chains (v. 7); vocally, he shuts off the transmission of sound, making the prison an echo chamber so that the man’s prayers bounce off the walls and ceiling (v. 8). Verse 9 returns to the walling-up image begun in verse 7, only this time it is applied to the man’s “ways.” God blocks (or “walls up”) a way of escape with “blocks of stone” that have been cut for this purpose. This is no hasty construction job but one that the jailor has carefully designed himself. The last colon of verse 9 communicates the same idea but changes the image: the man’s paths are made crooked so that, even if he does escape, he will become lost and confused. The whole picture captures in a nutshell the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, when Nebuchadnezzar and his army surrounded the city and cut off every escape route, pursuing and killing those who did escape (2 Kings 25:1–7).
3:10–12 These verses introduce us to the third and fourth metaphor for God: a wild animal and a deadly hunter. In Lamentations 3:10–11 God is likened to a bear and a lion, both of which lie in wait for their prey. Elsewhere the bear and lion are used as symbols of Israel’s enemies (cf. Isa. 59:9–11; Hos. 13:8; Amos 5:19), from which God protected his people. But now, ironically, God has become the bear and the lion that attack and devour his people. In some respects the image of the harsh shepherd from Lamentations 3:1–6 forms the backdrop for this image. The shepherd has left the sheep unprotected and alone; as a result, when the bear and lion approach, the sheep is easily torn to pieces (v. 11).
Within the same stanza the metaphor changes to a second image, that of a deadly hunter (v. 12), an image that continues into the next stanza (v. 13). The image recalls 2:4, in which God the enemy archer had bent his bow to shoot at his people. Here the arrows are also fatal, wounding the man in his internal organs, the kidneys (3:13). Thus we have the picture of the afflicted man hunted by beast and man and mortally injured in each encounter.
3:13–15 Following the fourth metaphor of the deadly hunter, the next five verses (vv. 14–18) take up the resultant suffering experienced by the man. The verses track his suffering without and within. Externally, he is mocked. The prophet uses two new terms (“laughingstock” and “taunts”) to describe the impact of God’s relentless antagonism against him. What the nation experienced in 1:7; 2:15–16 the man now experiences for himself. The first term is rare in the OT and can be used in positive (for laughter; Ps. 126:2) or negative ways (for derision; Jer. 20:7; 48:26, 39). The latter is obviously intended here. The same is true of “taunts”; it can also be used positively (for music; Lam. 5:14) or negatively (for mocking song; Ps. 69:12). Again, here the latter is intended. The carefully chosen words are another indicator of one of the many divine reversals the people experience: laughter and music have been replaced by derision and mocking songs (cf. Ps. 137:1–3). The question is this: Do “all peoples” include God’s own people? The Hebrew text would suggest so, since it reads “my people.” Thus a new element is introduced into the mockery compared to Lamentations 1–2: the man receives taunts from everyone, including his own people. This distinguishes him from his people and supports the view that, while he is a personified representative of the people, he is also a prophet distinct from them.
In 3:15–16 God returns as the subject of the main verbs, and with his return a fifth and final image of him is painted, that of a cruel torturer. The suffering also shifts from external to internal. God first fills the man with bitterness and then makes him drunk with wormwood. Both verbs can be used positively for satisfaction with food or material things (“fill, satisfy”; e.g., Pss. 81:16; 91:16; 103:5; 105:40) or saturation with drink or water (“water”; e.g., Isa. 55:10). Yet once again they are used negatively here: God force-feeds the man with bitterness (cf. Job 9:18) and then makes him drunk with wormwood. The word “wormwood” is rare in the OT. It is most often coupled with “gall/bitterness” (cf. Deut. 29:18; Jer. 9:15; 23:15; Lam. 3:19; Amos 6:12) and likely denotes a species of poisonous plant. Here it stands metaphorically in parallel with “bitterness.” This is the “food and drink” with which God has “satisfied” and “sated” this man. But this is not all God does, as the next stanza shows.
3:16–18 The metaphor of God the cruel torturer carries over into this stanza, but now with external means of torture (Lam. 3:16), breaking the man’s teeth with gravel, meaning that he either made him eat gravel or pushed his teeth into the gravel. The latter is probably intended, given the parallel line about being “made to cower” in the ashes. God has stamped on this man’s head and face to the point that he grinds his teeth in the dirt, causing him to cower in the ashes. It is a pitiful picture of what the man has become, especially given the fact that he was introduced in verse 1 as geber—a strong man, a mighty warrior-hunter.
Verses 17–18 return to the internal suffering of the man, only now with respect to his soul, not his stomach. He experiences a kind of anxious amnesia as he is robbed of peace, happiness, and endurance. Verse 18 records his speech within his speech. He may be restless and forgetful, but he can still speak some final words. Two things have died inside him: his “endurance” (Hb. “splendor, glory”) and his “hope.” The glory of the man, what gave him vitality in his inner man, has perished—and so too has his hope “from the Lord.” The prepositional phrase is significant for two reasons. For a start, this is the first time that God is identified in the chapter. Up until now he has simply been an unnamed “he.” The lack of identification heightens the estrangement, but now the identification heightens the irony. The man has received all these things from the covenant Lord, the one who swore by himself to be committed to his people (e.g., Gen. 22:16; Ex. 32:13). Yet here is Yahweh afflicting his own man. Second, the preposition “from” hints of the potential source of hope. Since God is so antagonistic toward the man, his hope has understandably withered to death. However, since hope comes from God, those without hope can find hope again if they can find God again—which is exactly what happens in Lamentations 3:19–24.
3:19–21 Verse 19 introduces the turning point in the opening section, as the man makes his journey from the darkness of despair to the light of hope. In verse 17 he had forgotten happiness, but he does remember some things: his affliction and his wanderings, the wormwood and the gall. The ESV interprets the infinitive construct as an imperative (“remember”), suggesting that the man cries out to God to remember. The infinitive construct could also be read in a nominal sense, “to remember my affliction and wanderings is wormwood and gall”—that is, it is bitterness to the man. This reading fits well with verse 20, where he states that such remembrance makes his soul to be bowed down. Affliction, as already noted, is a keyword in the book, used to describe the people’s plight. Its complement here is “wanderings,” which denotes homelessness (cf. 1:7). Wormwood and gall are a couplet that metaphorically conveys the bitterness of his affliction and wanderings.
Lamentations 3:20 repeats the word “remember,” only this time intensifying it with an infinitive absolute (“continually,” or “surely”). These are things he cannot erase from his memory, and as a result his soul is “bowed down” in despair. This, however, is not the only remembering he does. The afflicted man recalls something else in verses 21–24, which resurrects his dying hope. The word “this” (Hb. zoʾt) in verse 21 appears first in the bicolon to help maintain the acrostic pattern. However, the strong contrast between verses 19–20 and 21–24 suggests that the word is also fronted for emphasis. The logical connectors are clear and tight: “Surely to remember my affliction is bitter, but this I also recall to mind, and therefore I have hope.” Hope rises from the ashes in which he has been made to cower. However, this requires effort on his part: the verb “recall” implies a conscious, deliberate—even determined—act of the will. But what was the catalyst for this recall? Verses 22–24 reveal that his hope was given a chance of new life when he mentioned God’s name for the first time in verse 18.
3:22–24 These verses unpack the “this” of verse 21, showing that hope springs eternal when it recalls the eternal God and his character. The grammar and syntax of the first colon in verse 22 are tricky. Although its meaning remains unchanged, the word “steadfast love” is spelled with a rare plural construct form (cf. Ps. 89:2; Isa. 55:3). This has led translators from the earliest times to read the construct phrase “the steadfast love of the Lord” as the third-person-plural subject of the verb “never ceases,” even though the Hebrew text has a first-person-plural verb. It is preferable to follow the Hebrew text: “Because of the steadfast love of the Lord, we are not cut off” (ESV mg.). The shift from first-person-singular (“I”) in verse 21 to plural (“we”) in verse 22 is not out of place, given the identification of the prophet with the people elsewhere in the chapter (vv. 40–47). Moreover, the language of not being consumed answers directly the problem of “perishing” in verse 18. Furthermore, this reading displays a simple chiasm at the conceptual level: cause + proposition + cause. In other words, the afflicted people are not consumed because they are surrounded by God’s steadfast love and never-ending mercies, poetically and realistically.
God’s steadfast love and never-failing mercies, as well as his faithfulness mentioned in the next verse, form a trilogy of covenant terms connected to God’s name (cf. Ex. 34:6–7). This is what the man recalls: the essential goodness of God’s character, exactly what Moses saw on Mount Sinai. Lamentations 3:23 provides a further qualification on God’s mercies: they are new-morning mercies—a comforting, daily truth. The final line in the bicolon (“great is your faithfulness”) provides not a synonymous thought to God’s new-morning mercies but rather an emphatic climax to the whole description of God’s character. His faithfulness is great because his love is steadfast and his mercies never-ending. Meanwhile, the second-person pronominal suffix “your” turns this into a direct address to God. Theology always leads to doxology, and this man, having had his hope revived by recalling God’s character, cannot help but turn his explanation into exultation midsentence.
Verse 24 rounds off the opening section with another speech within the man’s speech. In verse 18 he did the same when he contemplated his own end as his splendor/glory withered away and his hope from Yahweh perished. But the mention of God’s name was enough to provide a paradigm shift that revived his hope. His soul, which was once “bowed down” (v. 20), now speaks up. The word “portion” is generally used of material possessions or landed property that are shared. However, it is also employed metaphorically for a person’s relationship with God (cf. Pss. 73:26; 119:57). As such, it conveys that God is this man’s inheritance—God is enough for him. In the pit of his despair the man realizes that, because the Lord was all he had, the Lord was all he needed. Therefore, he had hope. Thus the journey into the darkness of despair has ended in the light of hope for the afflicted man, with the turning point coming when he spoke God’s name at his lowest point in the darkness.