Lamentations 4:4-6

New English Translation

Footnotes

1. Lamentations 4:4 tn Heb “bread.” The term “bread” might function as a synecdoche of specific (= bread) for general (= food); however, the following parallel line does indeed focus on the act of breaking bread in two.
2. Lamentations 4:4 tn Heb “there is not a divider to them.” The term “divider” refers to the action of breaking bread in two before giving it to a person to eat (Isa 58:7; Jer 16:7; Lam 4:4).
3. Lamentations 4:5 tn Heb “eaters of delicacies.” An alternate English gloss would be “connoisseurs of fine foods.”
4. Lamentations 4:5 tn Heb “are desolate.”
5. Lamentations 4:5 tn Heb “were reared.”
6. Lamentations 4:5 tn Heb “in purple.” The term תוֹלָע (tolaʿ, “purple”) is a figurative description of expensive clothing, a metonymy of association where the color of the dyed clothes (= purple) stands for the clothes themselves.
7. Lamentations 4:5 tn Heb “embrace garbage.” One may also translate “rummage through” (cf. NCV “pick through trash piles”; TEV “pawing through refuse”; NLT “search the garbage pits”).
8. Lamentations 4:5 tn The Hebrew word אַשְׁפַּתּוֹת (ʾashpatot) can also mean “ash heaps.” Though not used as a combination elsewhere, to “embrace ash heaps” might also envision a state of mourning or even dead bodies lying on the ash heaps.
9. Lamentations 4:6 tn The noun עֲוֹן (ʿavon) has a basic, twofold range of meaning: (1) basic meaning: “iniquity, sin,” and (2) metonymical cause-for-effect meaning: “punishment for iniquity.”
10. Lamentations 4:6 tn Heb “the daughter of my people.”
11. Lamentations 4:6 tn Heb “the sin of.” The noun חַטָּאת (khattaʾt) often means “sin, rebellion,” but here it probably functions in a metonymical (cause for effect) sense: “punishment for sin” (e.g., Zech 14:19). The context focuses on the severity of the punishment of Jerusalem rather than the depths of its degradation and depravity that led to the judgment.
12. Lamentations 4:6 tn Heb “without a hand turned.” The preposition ב (bet) after the verb חוּל (khul) in Hos 11:6 is adversative: “the sword will turn against [Assyria’s] cities.” Other contexts with חוּל (khul) plus ב (bet) are not comparable (ב [bet] often being locative). However, it is not certain that hands must be adversarial, as the sword clearly is in Hos 11:6. The present translation pictures the suddenness of Sodom’s overthrow as an easier fate than the protracted military campaign and subsequent exile and poverty of Judah’s survivors.