Lamentations 2:9

ט (Tet)

2:9 Her city gates have fallen ¹  to the ground;

he smashed to bits ²  the bars that lock her gates. ³ 

Her king and princes were taken into exile; ⁴ 

there is no more guidance available. ⁵ 

As for her prophets,

they no longer receive ⁶  a vision from the Lord.

Leviticus 26:36-39

26:36 “‘As for ⁷  the ones who remain among you, I will bring despair into their hearts in the lands of their enemies. The sound of a blowing leaf will pursue them, and they will flee as one who flees the sword and fall down even though there is no pursuer. 26:37 They will stumble over each other as those who flee before a sword, though ⁸  there is no pursuer, and there will be no one to take a stand ⁹  for you before your enemies. 26:38 You will perish among the nations; the land of your enemies will consume you.

Restoration through Confession and Repentance

26:39 “‘As for the ones who remain among you, they will rot away because of ¹⁰  their iniquity in the lands of your enemies, and they will also rot away because of their ancestors’ ¹¹  iniquities which are with them.

Deuteronomy 28:64-67

28:64 The Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods of wood and stone. 28:65 Among those nations you will have no rest nor will there be a place of peaceful rest for the soles of your feet, for there the Lord will give you an anxious heart, failing eyesight, and a spirit of despair. 28:66 Your life will hang in doubt before you; you will be terrified by night and day and will have no certainty of surviving from one day to the next. ¹²  28:67 In the morning you will say, ‘If only it were evening!’ And in the evening you will say, ‘I wish it were morning!’ because of the things you will fear and the things you will see.

Jeremiah 24:9

24:9 I will bring such disaster on them that all the kingdoms of the earth will be horrified. I will make them an object of reproach, a proverbial example of disaster. I will make them an object of ridicule, an example to be used in curses. ¹³  That is how they will be remembered wherever I banish them. ¹⁴ 

Ezekiel 5:12

5:12 A third of your people will die of plague or be overcome by the famine within you. ¹⁵  A third of your people will fall by the sword surrounding you, ¹⁶  and a third I will scatter to the winds. I will unleash a sword behind them.

[2:9]  ¹ tn Heb “have sunk down.” This expression, “her gates have sunk down into the ground,” is a personification, picturing the city gates descending into the earth, as if going down into the grave or the netherworld. Most English versions render it literally (KJV, RSV, NRSV, NASB, NIV, NJPS); however, a few paraphrases have captured the equivalent sense quite well: “Zion’s gates have fallen facedown on the ground” (CEV) and “the gates are buried in rubble” (TEV).

[2:9]  ² tn Heb “he has destroyed and smashed her bars.” The two verbs אִבַּד וְשִׁבַּר (’ibbad vÿshibbar) form a verbal hendiadys that emphasizes the forcefulness of the destruction of the locking bars on the gates. The first verb functions adverbially and the second retains its full verbal sense: “he has smashed to pieces.” Several English versions render this expression literally and miss the rhetorical point: “he has ruined and broken” (RSV, NRSV), “he has destroyed and broken” (KJV, NASB), “he has broken and destroyed” (NIV). The hendiadys has been correctly noted by others: “smashed to pieces” (TEV, CEV) and “smashed to bits” (NJPS).

[2:9]  ³ tn Heb “her bars.” Since the literal “bars” could be misunderstood as referring to saloons, the phrase “the bars that lock her gates” has been used in the present translation.

[2:9]  ⁴ tn Heb “are among the nations.”

[2:9]  ⁵ tn Heb “there is no torah” or “there is no Torah” (אֵין תּוֹרָה, ’en torah). Depending on whether תּוֹרָה (torah, “instruction, law”) is used in parallelism with the preceding or following line, it refers to (1) political guidance that the now-exiled king had formerly provided or (2) prophetic instruction that the now-ineffective prophets had formerly provided (BDB 434 s.v. תּוֹרָה 1.b). It is possible that the three lines are arranged in an ABA chiastic structure, exploiting the semantic ambiguity of the term תּוֹרָה (torah, “instruction”). Possibly it is an oblique reference to the priests’ duties of teaching, thus introducing a third group of the countries leaders. It is possible to hear in this a lament in reference to the destruction of Torah scrolls that may have been at the temple when it was destroyed.

[2:9]  ⁶ tn Heb “they cannot find.”

[26:36]  ⁷ tn Heb “And.”

[26:37]  ⁸ tn Heb “and.” The Hebrew conjunction ו (vav, “and”) is used in a concessive sense here.

[26:37]  ⁹ tn The term rendered “to stand up” is a noun, not an infinitive. It occurs only here and appears to designate someone who would take a powerful stand for them against their enemies.

[26:39]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “in” (so KJV, ASV; also later in this verse).

[26:39]  ¹¹ tn Heb “fathers’” (also in the following verse).

[28:66]  ¹² tn Heb “you will not be confident in your life.” The phrase “from one day to the next” is implied by the following verse.

[24:9]  ¹³ tn Or “an object of reproach in peoples’ proverbs…an object of ridicule in people’s curses.” The alternate translation treats the two pairs which are introduced without vavs (ו) but are joined by vavs as examples of hendiadys. This is very possible here but the chain does not contain this pairing in 25:18; 29:18.

[24:9]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “I will make them for a terror for disaster to all the kingdoms of the earth, for a reproach and for a proverb, for a taunt and a curse in all the places which I banish them there.” The complex Hebrew sentence has been broken down into equivalent shorter sentences to conform more with contemporary English style.

[5:12]  ¹⁵ sn The judgment of plague and famine comes from the covenant curse (Lev 26:25-26). As in v. 10, the city of Jerusalem is figuratively addressed here.

[5:12]  ¹⁶ sn Judgment by plague, famine, and sword occurs in Jer 21:9; 27:13; Ezek 6:11, 12; 7:15.