Lamentations 4:3-5

New English Translation

Footnotes

1. Lamentations 4:3 tn The noun תַּנִּין (tannin) means “jackals.” The plural ending ־ִין (-in) is diminutive (GKC 242 §87.e) (e.g., Lam 1:4).
2. Lamentations 4:3 tn Heb “draw out the breast and suckle their young.”
3. Lamentations 4:3 tn Heb “the daughter of my people.”
4. Lamentations 4:3 tc The MT Kethib form כִּי עֵנִים (ki ʿenim) is by all accounts a variation from an original text of כַּיְעֵנִים (kayʿenim, “like ostriches”) which is preserved in the Qere and the medieval Hebrew mss, and reflected in the LXX.
5. Lamentations 4:4 tn Heb “bread.” The term “bread” might function as a synecdoche of specific (= bread) for general (= food); however, the following parallel line does indeed focus on the act of breaking bread in two.
6. Lamentations 4:4 tn Heb “there is not a divider to them.” The term “divider” refers to the action of breaking bread in two before giving it to a person to eat (Isa 58:7; Jer 16:7; Lam 4:4).
7. Lamentations 4:5 tn Heb “eaters of delicacies.” An alternate English gloss would be “connoisseurs of fine foods.”
8. Lamentations 4:5 tn Heb “are desolate.”
9. Lamentations 4:5 tn Heb “were reared.”
10. 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.
11. 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”).
12. 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.