Lamentations 2:11
Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people; because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city. Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people; because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city.
Lamentations 2:11 stands among the closing writings of Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, as a sad song commemorating the awful sufferings that came upon the apostate people of God, the inhabitants of Jerusalem. It voices deep grief over Jerusalem's destruction and the suffering of the people, with eyes failing with tears, inward parts troubled and in turmoil, and children and sucklings swooning and collapsing in the streets of the city. It records the severe tribulation that Jerusalem endured under the Babylonians, comparable to the suffering at Jerusalem's destruction.
That Babylonian suffering was as great as the suffering used to identify the greatest tribulation in Christ's prophecy of Matthew 24. It therefore challenges the claim that the Jews were the elect upon whom the greatest tribulation had fallen. Joined to the watchman's charge to warn the house of Israel and to the truth that the sinning soul shall die, with the son not bearing the father's iniquity nor the father the son's, it is a warning to be heeded in gathering, training, and saving the children and those that suck the breasts.