Lamentations 4:8

8 But now they are blacker than coal. No one even recognizes them in the streets. Their skin is wrinkled on their bones. It has become as dry as a stick.

Lamentations 4:8 Meaning and Commentary

Lamentations 4:8

Their visage is blacker than a coal
Or, "darker than blackness"; or, "dark through blackness" F25; by reason of the famine, and because of grief and trouble for themselves and their friends, which changed their complexions, countenances, and skins; they that looked before as pure as snow, as white as milk, as clear as pearls, as polished as sapphire, now as black as charcoal, as blackness itself: they are not known in the streets;
not taken notice of in a distinguished manner; no respect shown them as they walk the streets, as used to be; nay, their countenances were so altered, and their apparel so sordid, as not to be known by their friends, when they met them in public: their skin cleaveth to their bones;
have nothing but skin and bone, who used to be plump and fat: it is withered, it is become like a stick;
the skin wrinkled and shrivelled up, the flesh being gone; and the bone became like a stick, or a dry piece of wood, its moisture and marrow being dried up.


FOOTNOTES:

F25 (rwxvm Kvx) "obscurior ipsa nigredine", Tigurine version; "magis quam nigredo vel carbo", Vatablus; "prae caligines", Calvin; "ex nigredine", Piscator.

Lamentations 4:8 In-Context

6 My people have been punished more than Sodom was. It was destroyed in a moment. No one offered it a helping hand.
7 Jerusalem's princes were brighter than snow. They were whiter than milk. Their bodies were redder than rubies. They looked like sapphires.
8 But now they are blacker than coal. No one even recognizes them in the streets. Their skin is wrinkled on their bones. It has become as dry as a stick.
9 Those who have been killed with swords are better off than those who have to die of hunger. Those who are hungry waste away to nothing. They don't have any food from the fields.
10 With their own hands, loving mothers have had to cook even their own children. They ate their children when my people were destroyed.
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