Polyglot Bible: Lamentations: Lamentations 4

This is Lamentations chapter 4, presented as a polyglot edition across four textual traditions simultaneously: the Hebrew Masoretic Text (Tanakh), Greek Septuagint, Latin Vulgate, and English King James Version, with Strong's concordance numbers embedded in the KJV column. The chapter is a sustained elegy over the fall of Jerusalem, most likely after the Babylonian destruction of 586 BCE, structured as a Hebrew acrostic poem with each verse beginning with a successive letter of the alphabet. Its central content is a devastating contrast between Jerusalem's former glory—its precious sons compared to fine gold, its Nazirites radiant as snow—and the catastrophic present, in which children beg for bread, the starving are worse off than the sword-slain, and mothers boil their own children during the siege. The poem assigns blame for the city's fall directly to the sins of its prophets and priests, who shed innocent blood, and presents the disaster as a divine judgment surpassing even Sodom's destruction. Distinctive in its scope, the chapter closes with a sharp reversal directed at Edom—the nation that profited from Jerusalem's ruin—promising that the same cup of divine wrath will pass to them. The polyglot format signals this is a scholarly or devotional reference edition designed for comparative textual study rather than devotional reading of a single translation.

Polyglot Bible: Lamentations: Lamentations 4

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