Study Notes by Avraham ben Yaakov
from Azamra.org
As discussed in the commentary on EICHAH Chapter 1, the elegy contained here in Chapter 4 was said by the rabbis of the Talmud to have been composed by Jeremiah on the death of the saintly King Josiah in Megiddo at the hands of Pharaoh Necho (II Chronicles 35:25; Rashi ad loc.).
"How is the gold become dim!" (v 1) – "This lament was said over Josiah, and with it he wove in the other children of Zion" (Rashi on v 1). Rashi here is explaining why it is that if this is an elegy for Josiah, almost all of its contents relate not specifically to the slain king but to the entire people. The elegy is truly about the loss of Josiah, whose importance lay in the fact that he "went in the ways of David his father without turning to the right or the left" (II Chron. 34:2). As such Josiah was the last hope of Judah – had he had time to complete his mission of bringing the people to genuine repentance, he could have saved Jerusalem from destruction, and thus he had the potential to be Mashiach (as he is indeed called here in verse 20). But he was cut down in his very prime and his death sealed the fate of Jerusalem, making the destruction of the Temple and the cruel exile all but inevitable.
Thus with the death of Josiah twenty-two years prior to the actual destruction, Jeremiah already prophesied the horrors of the coming calamity. "The hallowed stones are poured out at the top of every street" (v 1) – "these are the children, who radiated like precious jewels. And there is also a Midrash telling that Jeremiah gathered every cupful of blood that flowed out of each of Josiah's arrow wounds and buried it in its place, chanting, 'The hallowed stones have been poured out…'" (Rashi on v 1).
The children are cast out like broken shards (v 2). Their starving mothers, who ignore their pleas for food in order to find something to eat themselves, have been reduced to a cruelty that even jackals do not show to their young (v 3, see Rashi). Those brought up in the lap of luxury are thrown out on the streets clutching at the garbage heaps (v 5). Even as Jeremiah depicts the horror, he weaves in his teaching about its cause: "For the sin of the daughter of my people is greater…" (v 6). The fire that was to consume Zion was from God (v 11). The enemy was able to do the unthinkable and enter the gates of Jerusalem "on account of the sins of her prophets, the transgressions of her priests" (vv 12-13).
Verse 15 portrays the terrible victimization of Israel in their places of exile, rejected as an unclean caste by the sanctimonious nations. The face of anger God shows them in their exile is the penalty for their having failed to give the proper respect to their priests and elders in their time of tranquility (v 16, see Rashi).
"As for us, our eyes do yet fail for our vain help: in our watching we have watched for a nation that could not save" (v 17). The kings of Judah who followed Josiah expected that Egypt would intervene to save Israel from the clutches of Babylon, but in vain (see Rashi ad loc.). In our time it seems that many in Israel somehow expect the country they see as her closest ally to come to her defense, but as the threats around little Israel grow ever more menacing with the apparent complicity of her ally, it seems that any hopes that this ally will ever help may also prove to have been in vain.
After the Elegist's depiction of the horrors of the calamity that was to come as a result of the death of Josiah, we now understand why it was such a disaster that "The breath of our nostrils, HaShem's anointed, has been captured in their pits – he of whom we said, Under his shadow we shall live among the nations" (v 20).
The concluding verses of this elegy promise that God will take vengeance upon the nations that persecuted Israel and destroyed the Temple. Although Jeremiah was living at the time of the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians, he already sees prophetically to the eventual destruction of Edom, i.e. Rome, which perpetrated the destruction of the Second Temple.
Targum on verse 21 identifies "the daughter of Edom who dwells in the land of Ootz" with "KOUSTANTINA (=Constantinople), the city of the wicked Edom that was built in the land of Armenia with a great population from the people of Edom – upon you too is He destined to bring punishment, and the Persians will destroy you…" Constantinople was indeed until its demise in the Middle Ages the center of the Latin Empire, which was actually called the Roman Empire. The Talmudic rabbis had a tradition that "Rome is destined to fall by the hand of Persia" (Yoma 10a) and "this will take place just before the coming of Mashiach" (Tosfos on Avodah Zarah 2b). Zion's punishment will then be complete and they will know no more exile (v 22).
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