Lamentations 4:8
What does Lamentations 4:8 mean?
A plain-English look at Lamentations 4:8 in WEB alongside six other public-domain English translations, with cross-references and chapter context.
What Lamentations 4:8 means
Now the same nobles are unrecognizable: their faces darkened like coal, their skin tightly drawn over bones, dried like sticks. Starvation has blotted out the features that once signaled health and honor. This is the physical imprint of judgment, not cosmetic sorrow. People who once stood out in beauty blend into the shadows of ruin. Their anonymity in the streets shows the leveling effect of disaster—no rank is visible when life itself is wasting away. The verse confronts the reader with the hard outcome of sinful security: the bodies that once testified to blessing now bear witness to deprivation and the sternness of God’s discipline.
Parallel translations
WEB
World English Bible · 2000Their visage is blacker than a coal; they are not known in the streets: Their skin cleaveth to their bones; it is withered, it is become like a stick.
KJV
King James Version · 1611Their visage is blacker than a coal; they are not known in the streets: their skin cleaveth to their bones; it is withered, it is become like a stick.
ASV
American Standard Version · 1901Their visage is blacker than a coal; they are not known in the streets: Their skin cleaveth to their bones; it is withered, it is become like a stick.
BBE
Bible in Basic English · 1949Their face is blacker than night; in the streets no one has knowledge of them: their skin is hanging on their bones, they are dry, they have become like wood.
YLT
Young's Literal Translation · 1862Darker than blackness hath been their visage, They have not been known in out-places, Cleaved hath their skin unto their bone, It hath withered--it hath been as wood.
DRA
Douay-Rheims (Challoner) · 1752Heth. Their face is now made blacker than coals, and they are not known in the streets: their skin hath stuck to their bones, it is withered, and is become like wood.
DBY
Darby Bible · 1890Their visage is darker than blackness, they are not known in the streets; their skin cleaveth to their bones, it is withered, it is become like a stick.
Context
Paired with verse 7, this verse completes the before-and-after portrait of the nobles. The intended effect is to make the theological claim of verse 6 concrete and inescapable. Next, verse 9 will generalize the misery: slow death by hunger is worse than a quick death by the sword. Then verse 10 will offer the most terrible image yet, drawing the reader to the brink of what covenant curses had warned. All of this sets up verse 11’s decisive interpretation that Jehovah Himself accomplished this judgment, kindling a consuming fire in Zion’s very foundations.
v.7Her nobles were purer than snow, they were whiter than milk; They were more ruddy in body than rubies, their polishing was as of sapphire.
v.8This passage
v.9They that are slain with the sword are better than they that are slain with hunger; For these pine away, stricken through, for want of the fruits of the field.
Cross references
Related passages from across Scripture, drawn from the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge.
- Psalms 102:11
My days are like a shadow that declineth; And I am withered like grass.
- Lamentations 4:1
How is the gold become dim! how is the most pure gold changed! The stones of the sanctuary are poured out at the head of every street.
- Lamentations 5:10
Our skin is black like an oven, Because of the burning heat of famine.
- Psalms 32:4
For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: My moisture was changed as with the drought of summer. [Selah
- Job 33:21
His flesh is consumed away, that it cannot be seen; And his bones that were not seen stick out.
- Isaiah 52:14
Like as many were astonished at thee (his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men),
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