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Chapter 3

The Voice of a Suffering Individual[a]

I am one who has known affliction
    under the rod of God’s anger,(A)
One whom he has driven and forced to walk
    in darkness, not in light;
Against me alone he turns his hand—
    again and again all day long.

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Footnotes

  1. 3:1–66 This chapter is focused less on the destruction of Jerusalem than are chaps. 1 and 2 and more on the suffering of an individual. The identity of the individual is never given, and one probably should not search for a specific identification of the speaker. The figure of the representative sufferer makes concrete the pain of the people in a way similar to the personification of Zion as a woman in chaps. 1 and 2. Indeed, in vv. 40–48 the individual voice gives way to a communal voice, returning in vv. 49–66 to the individual sufferer.