Matthew Henry on Lamentations 4:1-12
The elegy in this chapter begins with a lamentation of the very sad and doleful change which the judgments of God had made in Jerusalem. The city that was formerly as gold, as the most fine gold, so rich and splendid, the perfection of beauty and the joy of the whole earth, has become dim, and is changed, has lost its lustre, lost its value, is not what it was; it has become dross. Alas! what an alteration is here!
I. The temple was laid waste, which was the glory of Jerusalem and its protection. it is given up into the hands of the enemy. And some understand the gold spoken of (Lam 4:1) to be the gold of the temple, the fine gold with which it was overlaid (Kg1 6:22); when the temple was bu…
Read the whole note in the consoleJamieson-Fausset-Brown on Lamentations 4:3
sea monsters . . . breast--Whales and other cetaceous monsters are mammalian. Even they suckle their young; but the Jewish women in the siege, so desperate was their misery, ate theirs (Lam 4:10; Lam 2:20). Others translate, "jackals."
ostriches--see on Job 39:14; Job 39:16, on their forsaking their young.
Adam Clarke on Lamentations 4:3
Even the sea monsters draw out the breast - The whales give suck to their young ones. The word תנין tannin, signifies all large and cruel creatures, whether aquatic or terrestrial; and need not here be restrained to the former sort. My Old MS. Bible translates curiously: Not and the cruel bestis that ben clepid Lamya, and thei nakeden ther tetis, geve ther whelpis souken.
Like the ostriches in the wilderness - For her carelessness about her eggs, and her inattention to her young, the ostrich is proverbial.
John Gill on Lamentations 4:3
Even the sea monsters draw out the breast,.... Which some interpret of dragons; others of seals, or sea calves; but it is best to understand it of whales, as the word is rendered in Genesis 1:21; and elsewhere: and Bochart (d) has proved, out of various writers, that these have breasts and milk; but that their breasts, or however their paps, are not manifest, but are hid as in cases, and must be drawn out: and so Jarchi observes that they draw their breasts out of a case, for their breasts have a covering, which they uncover: so Ben Melech. Aristotle (e) says, that whales, as the dolphin, sea calf, and balaena, have breasts or paps, and milk, which he makes to be certain species of the whale…
