Isaiah 13:16

13:16 Their children will be smashed to pieces before their very eyes;

their houses will be looted

and their wives raped.

Lamentations 1:10

י (Yod)

1:10 An enemy grabbed ¹ 

all her valuables. ² 

Indeed she watched in horror ³  as Gentiles ⁴ 

invaded her holy temple ⁵  –

those whom you ⁶  had commanded:

“They must not enter ⁷  your assembly place.” ⁸ 

Lamentations 5:11-12

5:11 They raped ⁹  women in Zion,

virgins in the towns of Judah.

5:12 Princes were hung by their hands;

elders were mistreated. ¹⁰ 

Amos 7:17

7:17 “Therefore this is what the Lord says:

‘Your wife will become a prostitute in the streets ¹¹ 

and your sons and daughters will die violently. ¹² 

Your land will be given to others ¹³ 

and you will die in a foreign ¹⁴  land.

Israel will certainly be carried into exile ¹⁵  away from its land.’”

Matthew 24:19-21

24:19 Woe ¹⁶  to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing their babies in those days! 24:20 Pray ¹⁷  that your flight may not be in winter or on a Sabbath. 24:21 For then there will be great suffering ¹⁸  unlike anything that has happened ¹⁹  from the beginning of the world until now, or ever will happen.

[1:10]  ¹ tn Heb “stretched out his hand.” The war imagery is of seizure of property; the anthropomorphic element pictures rape. This is an idiom that describes greedy actions (BDB 831 s.v. פָרַשׂ), meaning “to seize” (HALOT 976 s.v. 2).

[1:10]  ² tc The Kethib is written מַחֲמוֹדֵּיהֶם (makhamodehem, “her desired things”); the Qere and many medieval Hebrew mss read מַחֲמַדֵּיהֶם (makhamaddehem, “her desirable things”). The Qere reading should be adopted.

[1:10]  ³ tn Heb “she watched” or “she saw.” The verb רָאָה (ra’ah, “to see”) has a broad range of meanings, including “to see” a spectacle causing grief (Gen 21:16; 44:34; Num 11:15; 2 Kgs 22:20; 2 Chr 34:28; Esth 8:6) or abhorrence (Isa 66:24). The words “in horror” are added to “she watched” to bring out this nuance.

[1:10]  ⁴ sn The syntax of the sentence is interrupted by the insertion of the following sentence, “they invaded…,” then continued with “whom…” The disruption of the syntax is a structural device intended to help convey the shock of the situation.

[1:10]  ⁵ tn Heb “her sanctuary.” The term מִקְדָּשָׁהּ (miqdashah, “her sanctuary”) refers to the temple. Anthropomorphically, translating as “her sacred place” would also allow for the rape imagery.

[1:10]  ⁶ sn Lam 1-2 has two speaking voices: a third person voice reporting the horrific reality of Jerusalem’s suffering and Jerusalem’s voice. See W. F. Lanahan, “The Speaking Voice in the Book of Lamentations” JBL 93 (1974): 41-49. The reporting voice has been addressing the listener, referring to the Lord in the third person. Here he switches to a second person address to God, also changing the wording of the following command to second person. The revulsion of the Reporter is so great that he is moved to address God directly.

[1:10]  ⁷ tn Heb “enter.” The Hebrew term בּוֹא (bo’) is also a sexual metaphor.

[1:10]  ⁸ tn The noun קָהָל (qahal, “assembly”) does not refer here to the collective group of people assembled to worship the Lord, but to the place of their assembly: the temple. This is an example of a synecdoche of the people contained (= assembly) for the container (= temple). The intent is to make the violation feel more personal than someone walking into a building.

[5:11]  ⁹ tn Heb “ravished.”

[5:12]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “elders were shown no respect.” The phrase “shown no respect” is an example of tapeinosis, a figurative expression of understatement: to show no respect to elders = to terribly mistreat elders.

[7:17]  ¹¹ tn Heb “in the city,” that is, “in public.”

[7:17]  ¹² tn Heb “will fall by the sword.”

[7:17]  ¹³ tn Heb “will be divided up with a [surveyor’s] measuring line.”

[7:17]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “[an] unclean”; or “[an] impure.” This fate would be especially humiliating for a priest, who was to distinguish between the ritually clean and unclean (see Lev 10:10).

[7:17]  ¹⁵ tn See the note on the word “exile” in 5:5.

[24:19]  ¹⁶ tn Here δέ (de) has not been translated.

[24:20]  ¹⁷ tn Here δέ (de) has not been translated.

[24:21]  ¹⁸ tn Traditionally, “great tribulation.”

[24:21]  ¹⁹ sn Suffering unlike anything that has happened. Some refer this event to the destruction of Jerusalem in a.d. 70. While the events of a.d. 70 may reflect somewhat the comments Jesus makes here, the reference to the scope and severity of this judgment strongly suggest that much more is in view. Most likely Jesus is referring to the great end-time judgment on Jerusalem in the great tribulation.