Lamentations 2:10
The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground, and keep silence: they have cast up dust upon their heads; they have girded themselves with sackcloth: the virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads to the ground. The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground, and keep silence: they have cast up dust upon their heads; they have girded themselves with sackcloth: the virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads to the ground.
The elders of Zion are pictured seated on the bare earth in utter silence, with dust thrown upon their heads and sackcloth wrapped about them, while the young women of Jerusalem bow their heads low to the ground in grief and humiliation. It is a mournful song remembering the dreadful sufferings that fell upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem when as God's people they had become apostate. Those sufferings were part of the severe affliction endured by the Jews under the Babylonians, an affliction comparable to the greatest tribulation spoken of in Matthew 24. That comparison shows the tribulation connected with Jerusalem's later destruction by the Romans was not without precedent and was not the greatest tribulation ever suffered by God's people. At that later Roman destruction the true people of God were mercifully delivered.