Lamentations 1:11
All her people sigh, they seek bread; they have given their pleasant things for meat to relieve the soul: see, O LORD, and consider; for I am become vile. All her people sigh, they seek bread; they have given their pleasant things for meat to relieve the soul: see, O LORD, and consider; for I am become vile.
Lamentations 1:11 belongs to a sad funeral song lamenting Israel and Jerusalem in captivity, commemorating the terrible suffering of an apostate people at the end of the nation's former glory. It pictures all the people sighing as they seek bread, giving their pleasant and treasured possessions for food to keep themselves alive. In becoming vile the city is brought low and disgraced, and appeals to the Lord to see and consider its distress.
The word soul in the verse denotes the appetite and the life and strength sustained by food, so food relieves a bodily need and revives the soul, rather than denoting an immaterial being. The starvation and thraldom portray the abject social and moral bondage under divine providence of a people departed from the living God, whose inward sin fixes national doom regardless of foreign diplomacy or military strength. The appeal is the necessary cry of the haughty humbled in distress, troubled and turned within because of grievous rebellion, with death abroad and at home and no comforter near.
That humbling opens the way for the entrance of the Word to give light to those in darkness and the shadow of death and for the Lord to arise in glory to draw the Gentiles to His light.