The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

I.]
SIN AND SUFFERING
tion and shame of the fallen city, the poet supplies
indications of the effect of all this on the suffering
citizens. Despised by all who had formerly honoured
her, Jerusalem sighs and longs to retire into obscurity,
away from the rude gaze of her oppressors.
In particular, two further signs of her distress are
here given.
The first is spoliation. Her enemies have laid hands
on " all her pleasant things." It may strike us that,
after the miseries just narrated, this is but a minor
trouble. Job's calamities began with the loss of his
property, and rose from this by degrees to the climax
of agony. If his first trouble had been the sudden
death of all his children, stunned by that awful blow,
he would have cared little about the fate of his flocks
and herds. It is not according to the method of the
Lamentations, however, to move on to any climax. The
thoughts are set forth as they well up in the mind of
the poet, now passionate and intense, then again of a
milder cast, yet altogether combining to colour one
picture of intolerable woe. But there is an aspect of
this idea of the robbery of the " pleasant things " which
heightens the sense of miser}^ It is another instance
of the force of contrast so often manifested in these
elegies. Jerusalem had been a home of wealth and
luxury in the merry old days. But hoarded .money,
precious jewellery, family heirlooms, products of art
and skill, accumulated during generations of prosperity
and treated as necessaries of life—all had been swept
away in the sack of the city, and scattered among
strangers who could not prize them as they had been
prized by their ovmcrs ; and now these victims of
spoliation, stripped of everything, vv'ere in want of
daily bread. Even what little could be saved {vl m the