Lamentations 4:5

New English Translation

Footnotes

1. Lamentations 4:5 tn Heb “eaters of delicacies.” An alternate English gloss would be “connoisseurs of fine foods.”
2. Lamentations 4:5 tn Heb “are desolate.”
3. Lamentations 4:5 tn Heb “were reared.”
4. Lamentations 4:5 tn Heb “in purple.” The term תוֹלָע (tolaʿ, “purple”) is a figurative description of expensive clothing, a metonymy of association where the color of the dyed clothes (= purple) stands for the clothes themselves.
5. Lamentations 4:5 tn Heb “embrace garbage.” One may also translate “rummage through” (cf. NCV “pick through trash piles”; TEV “pawing through refuse”; NLT “search the garbage pits”).
6. Lamentations 4:5 tn The Hebrew word אַשְׁפַּתּוֹת (ʾashpatot) can also mean “ash heaps.” Though not used as a combination elsewhere, to “embrace ash heaps” might also envision a state of mourning or even dead bodies lying on the ash heaps.