Lamentations 2:22
Thou hast called as in a solemn day my terrors round about, so that in the day of the LORD’s anger none escaped nor remained: those that I have swaddled and brought up hath mine enemy consumed. Thou hast called as in a solemn day my terrors round about, so that in the day of the LORD’s anger none escaped nor remained: those that I have swaddled and brought up hath mine enemy consumed.
Chapter 2 contains twenty-two verses arranged as an acrostic in which the verses begin in Hebrew with the letters of the alphabet in order, except that the sixteenth and seventeenth letters are reversed. This shows poetic structure maintained even amid deep anguish. The verse is part of Jeremiah's mournful song commemorating the awful sufferings that came upon the apostate people of God, the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
It describes the Babylonian destruction as a day of overwhelming terror in which none escaped or survived the enemy's attack, and even the children Jerusalem had cared for and brought up were consumed. That severe tribulation under the Babylonians shows the Jews had already endured suffering comparable to the tribulation of Jerusalem's later destruction described in Matthew 24. Indeed, their suffering under the Babylonians was at least as great as the tribulation associated with Jerusalem's later destruction.