Lamentations 2:7, commentary and pictures

Lamentations 2:7 is part of Jeremiah's sad song commemorating the awful sufferings that came upon the apostate people of God, the inhabitants of Jerusalem. It refers to the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Babylonians after the people's wickedness and rebellion, after which the people were dispersed and the sanctuary lay desolate. The destruction was the Lord's own judgment: he cast off the altar, abhorred the sanctuary, and gave the walls and defenses of the palaces into the enemy's hand. That desecration and destruction fulfilled earlier predictions, with heathen entering its holy places and priests and prophets slain there. The sanctuary then lay desolate until the Persian kingdom began.

The enemy made a noise in the house of the Lord as in the day of a solemn feast, a noisy celebration that contrasted with and replaced the worship and solemn feasts once held there. That noise mocked the people's sabbaths. The feasts, solemn assemblies, and annual sabbaths belonging to the feasts ceased in Zion when the city was destroyed and the people were taken into captivity, leaving Sabbath observances unable to continue there. These are distinct from the Lord's weekly Sabbath, which was not limited to Jerusalem. In this setting the verse helps explain that Israel's failure to keep the Sabbath led to the captivity, though it does not say that every captive stopped keeping God's Sabbaths.

The tribulation under the Babylonians described in the chapter was as great as the suffering connected with Jerusalem's later destruction, so that later event was not the greatest tribulation ever experienced. For that reason the Jews suffering in the later destruction cannot be identified as the elect who experienced the greatest tribulation there.