Lamentations 2:15
All that pass by clap their hands at thee; they hiss and wag their head at the daughter of Jerusalem, saying, Is this the city that men call The perfection of beauty, The joy of the whole earth? All that pass by clap their hands at thee; they hiss and wag their head at the daughter of Jerusalem, saying, Is this the city that men call The perfection of beauty, The joy of the whole earth?
Lamentations 2:15 belongs to Jeremiah's lament commemorating the awful sufferings that came upon the apostate people of God in Jerusalem. Lamentations 2 describes severe suffering and desolation among the Jews, with especially vivid details of that tribulation given in Lamentations 4:3-10. The verse depicts passersby mocking ruined Jerusalem by clapping their hands, hissing, and shaking their heads, deriding its downfall and contrasting its desolation with its former reputation as the perfection of beauty and the joy of the whole earth, as if asking how the city once so celebrated could be brought so low in reversal from former glory to ruin and public scorn. The severity of that scorned calamity shows that tribulation under the Babylonians had been as great as in Jerusalem's later history. Yet that suffering does not make the destruction of Jerusalem the greatest tribulation ever to befall God's people, since Christ's followers were spared at that time.