The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

250 THE LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH
the water was lying so deep that he was completely
submerged. There is no reason to question that
definite statements such as these represent the exact
experience of the writer. At the first glance they call
to our minds the persecutions inflicted on Jeremiah by
his own people. But the allusion would be peculiarly
inappropriate, and the cases do not quite fit together.
The poet has been bewailing the sufferings of the Jews
at the hands of the Chaldseans, and he seems to identify
his own troubles in the closest way with the general
flood of calamities that swept over his nation. It
would be quite out of place for him to insert here a
reminder of earlier troubles which his own people had
inflicted upon him. Besides, the particulars do not
exactly agree with what we learn of the prophet's hardships
from his own pen. The dungeon into which he
was flung was very foul, and he sank in the mire, but
it is expressly stated that there was no water in it, and
there is no mention of stoning.-^ There were many
sufferers in that dark time of tumult and outrage whose
fate was as hard as that of Jeremiah.
A graphic picture like this helps us to imagine the
fearful accompaniments of the destruction of Jerusalem
much better than any general summary. As we gaze
at this one scene among the many miseries that followed
the siege—the poet hunted out and run down, his
capture and conveyance to the dungeon, apparently
without a shadow of a trial, the danger of drowning and
the misery of standing in the water that had gathered
in a place so utterly unfit for human habitation, the
needless additional cruelty of the stone-throwing—there
rises before us a picture which cannot but impress our
' Jer. xxxviii. 6.