What follows is a brilliant prophetic elegy. It contains two pronouncements from the Lord (vv. 17-21 and 22).
9:17 The Lord called Jeremiah to summon the professional mourners (Heb. meqonenoth) to come forward.
"In the Middle East even today, on the occasion of deaths or calamities, mourning is carried out by professional women who follow the funeral bier uttering a high-pitched shriek. Some of the Egyptian tomb paintings depict boatloads of professional mourners with their hair and garments disheveled accompanying a corpse on its way to a burial."201
9:18 The Lord wanted these women to come quickly and mourn on His behalf, wailing and shedding many tears.
9:19 The reason for this mourning was that the residents of Zion would bewail their ruin and shame in having to leave the land as captives with their homes destroyed.202
9:20 Jeremiah instructed the professional mourners in the Lord's name to teach their daughters how to wail and to teach their neighbors a dirge.
9:21 Death had invaded the city like a plague. It had entered homes and palaces, and it was cutting off children and youths from the public places.203
9:22 Men too would die in the open fields and lie there uncared for, like dung or like scraps of wheat left after a harvest.
"Here we see Death as the Grim Reaper. The custom was for a reaper to hold in his arm what a few strokes of his sickle had cut. Then he put it down, and behind him another laborer then gathered it into bundles and bound it into a sheaf. So death was to cover the ground with corpses, but the carcasses would lie there unburied because of the paucity of survivors and the great number of dead [cf. Rom. 6:23]."204
