Suffering under Siege (4:1–11)

Jackals offer their breasts to nurse … heartless … ostriches (4:3). The first expression is likely a reference to the Asiatic or golden jackal. Though these animals fed on carrion, they were commonly observed caring for their young. By contrast, the popular perceptions of the ostrich were otherwise. The poetry of Job pictures a creature that

lays her eggs on the ground

and lets them warm in the sand,

unmindful that a foot may crush them,

that some wild animal may trample them.

She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers;

she cares not that her labor was in vain. (Job 39:14–16)60

Ostrich eggs lying exposed in field

Paul Mundy

This perception may stem from the fact that the ostrich hen lays her egg(s) and leaves the nest. Other hens from the same social group will lay eggs in the same nest and leave. During the early part of the forty-two-day incubation period, eggs in a given nest are “left unattended for a large part of the time.” When they are tended, it is not by a single hen. Rather, both the cock and any of the several hens in the social group will tend to the eggs.61 Typically, fewer than 10 percent of the eggs hatch. This may give the appearance that the hen that laid the eggs is careless with them.

Nurtured in purple (4:5). The word used here (tôlā ʿ), rather than the more commonly used ʾargāmān,62 is probably crimson. Tôlā ʿ refers to the color produced by dye made from the insect kermes ilicis = coccus ilicis. This word is used in connection with another term in Isaiah 1:18 (“though your sins are like scarlet”) and in Proverbs 31:22, referring to the (costly?) clothing that the excellent woman provides for her family. The Hebrew parallelism of the lines implies that “those who once ate delicacies” (Lam. 4:5) is synonymous with “those nurtured in purple” (4:5), just as “are destitute in the streets” (4:5) is a synonymous parallelism with “now lie on ash heaps” (4:5). Being well-off provided no protection from the devastation of the Lord’s “fierce anger” (4:11).

Famine (4:8–10). Second Kings 25:1–3 describes the siege Nebuchadnezzar laid against Jerusalem, which lasted a year and a half (see sidebar on “Siege” at 2:2, 5). The text reports that “the famine in the city had become so severe that there was no food for the people to eat” (see also Jer. 32:24; 52:4–6).

Siege was one of the tactics used in the ancient Near East to subdue a city. Thutmose III (c. 1490–1436 B.C.) of Egypt had a granite stele inscribed at Jebel Barkal, which describes a campaign against Megiddo. The report says that “when they entered Megiddo, my majesty shut them up for a period of seven months, before they came out into the open, pleading to my majesty.”63 The population was cut off from the source of their food until their resistance broke. The Arameans are reported to have used this tactic against Israel’s capital city, Samaria. The severity of the famine coupled with the resolute resistance of the besieged occasioned some in the population to resort to cannibalism (2 Kings 6:24–31; see comment on Lam. 2:20).