Chapter 5

¹ Remember, O LORD, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach.

² Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens.

³ We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows.

⁴ We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us.

⁵ Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest.

⁶ We have given the hand to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread.

⁷ Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities.

⁸ Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand.

⁹ We gat our bread with the peril of our lives because of the sword of the wilderness.

¹⁰ Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine.

¹¹ They ravished the women in Zion, and the maids in the cities of Judah.

¹² Princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of elders were not honoured.

¹³ They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood.

¹⁴ The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick.

¹⁵ The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning.

¹⁶ The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned!

¹⁷ For this our heart is faint; for these things our eyes are dim.

¹⁸ Because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes walk upon it.

¹⁹ Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation.

²⁰ Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time?

²¹ Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.

²² But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.