What is the meaning of Lamentations 5:13? Young men toil at millstones “Young men toil at millstones” • Millstones were heavy, circular stones used to grind grain. Normally animals or slaves turned them (Judges 16:21). • Here, the very strength of Judah—its young men—is bent to humiliating, back-breaking labor. Their vigor is spent grinding grain for their captors, echoing Deuteronomy 28:47-48 where disobedience led to serving enemies “in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and lacking everything.” • The picture is not just physical strain but loss of dignity. Isaiah 47:2 portrays grinding meal as a mark of forced servitude, and Psalm 89:44 laments that God “has cut short the days of his youth.” • Millstones were essential for daily bread (Deuteronomy 24:6), so compelling young men to the task shows the nation’s breadwinner generation reduced to bondage. Their energy, meant for building and defending, now sustains foreign oppressors. Boys stagger under loads of wood “boys stagger under loads of wood” • Even children are drafted into the drudgery—carrying heavy firewood or timber essential for siege works and domestic fuel. The verb “stagger” paints exhaustion and danger. • In happier times boys played in the streets (Zechariah 8:5); now they resemble the forced labor of Joshua 9:27, “woodcutters and water carriers.” • This fulfills warnings such as 1 Samuel 8:11-17, where a king would take sons and make them “run before his chariots” and “reap his harvests.” Under Babylon, that warning becomes brutal reality. • The sight of children crushed under weight underscores total societal collapse: no one is spared, not even the least. It mirrors Lamentations 1:5, “Her little ones have gone away as captives before the adversary.” • Sabbath rest is impossible (Jeremiah 17:21-22); the covenant blessings of protection and rest are reversed because the nation broke covenant with God. summary Lamentations 5:13 pictures a devastated society: the strong reduced to grinding grain, the young collapsing under wood. The verse records tangible evidence that God’s covenant warnings came true—disobedience has led to humiliating slavery for every age group. Yet by recording these details, Scripture also signals that the God who notices such suffering will, in His time, restore and redeem those who return to Him (Jeremiah 31:17; 1 Peter 5:10). |
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