Lamentations 2:6, commentary and pictures

The verse belongs to Jeremiah's lament commemorating the awful sufferings that came upon the apostate inhabitants of Jerusalem when the Babylonians destroyed the sanctuary and places of assembly. The destruction was God's wrathful judgment after Judah rejected Him, giving the people over to their delusions, removing the despised blessings and protective hedge, and despising the king and the priest in the indignation of His anger. The Lord causing the solemn feasts and sabbaths to be forgotten in Zion means that with Jerusalem and its temple ruined, the land made desolate, and the enemy in possession, those occasions could no longer be observed there in former prosperity as public worship during desolation and captivity.

The feasts and sabbaths are the annual sabbaths associated with the feasts, the observances of the ceremonial law recorded in Leviticus 23, belonging to Israel's temporary ceremonial system of annual feast-days which God caused to cease. They do not refer to the weekly seventh-day Sabbath of the Lord among the Ten Commandments, which is still called the Sabbath in the Christian dispensation. The ceremonial sabbaths could be withheld as punishment, just as a person may now be excluded from the Lord's Supper.

The loss was of public religious life in Zion, left without Sabbath observance. Kings and princes were among the nations where God's law was absent, yet this does not mean every captive ceased to keep the Sabbath, since some continued to obey God. Lamentations 2, with chapter 4, shows that Jerusalem's tribulation under the Babylonians was at least as great as its later suffering under the Romans. Therefore the Roman destruction was not the greatest tribulation ever to come upon God's people foretold in Matthew 24.