Lamentations 1:1–11

Worthless, Cheap, Abject!

¹1Oh, oh, oh …

How empty the city, once teeming with people.

A widow, this city, once in the front rank of nations,

once queen of the ball, she’s now a drudge in the kitchen.

²She cries herself to sleep each night, tears soaking her pillow.

No one’s left among her lovers to sit and hold her hand.

Her friends have all dumped her.

³After years of pain and hard labor, Judah has gone into exile.

She camps out among the nations, never feels at home.

Hunted by all, she’s stuck between a rock and a hard place.

⁴Zion’s roads weep, empty of pilgrims headed to the feasts.

All her city gates are deserted, her priests in despair.

Her virgins are sad. How bitter her fate.

⁵Her enemies have become her masters. Her foes are living it up

because God laid her low, punishing her repeated rebellions.

Her children, prisoners of the enemy, trudge into exile.

⁶All beauty has drained from Daughter Zion’s face.

Her princes are like deer famished for food,

chased to exhaustion by hunters.

⁷Jerusalem remembers the day she lost everything,

when her people fell into enemy hands, and not a soul there to help.

Enemies looked on and laughed, laughed at her helpless silence.

⁸Jerusalem, who outsinned the whole world, is an outcast.

All who admired her despise her now that they see beneath the surface.

Miserable, she groans and turns away in shame.

⁹She played fast and loose with life, she never considered tomorrow,

and now she’s crashed royally, with no one to hold her hand:

“Look at my pain, O God! And how the enemy cruelly struts.”

¹⁰The enemy reached out to take all her favorite things. She watched

as pagans barged into her Sanctuary, those very people for whom

you posted orders: keep out: this assembly off-limits.

¹¹All the people groaned, so desperate for food, so desperate to stay alive

that they bartered their favorite things for a bit of breakfast:

“O God, look at me! Worthless, cheap, abject!