The hands of the compassionate women have boiled their own children: they were their food in the destruction of the daughter of my people.
All Commentaries on Lamentations 4:10 Go To Lamentations 4
John Chrysostom
AD 407
What were Israel’s sufferings in Palestine, famines, pestilences, wars, captivities, under the Babylonians and under the Assyrians, and their miseries from the Macedonians and those under Hadrian and Vespasian? I have something that I wish, beloved, to relate to you; no, do not run away! Or rather I will tell you another thing before it. There was once a famine, it says, and the king was walking on the wall; then a woman came to him and uttered these words: “O king, this woman said to me, Let us roast your son today, and eat him—and tomorrow [do the same to mine]. And we roasted and ate, and now she does not give me hers.” What can be more dreadful than this calamity? Again, in another place the prophet says, “The hands of the pitiful women have boiled their own children.” The Jews then suffered such punishment, and shall we not much rather suffer?
Would you also hear other calamities of theirs? Read over Josephus, and you will learn that whole tragedy, if perchance we may persuade you from these things, that there is a hell. For consider, if they were punished, why are we not punished? Or how is it reasonable that we are not now punished, who sin more grievously than they? Is it not manifest that it is because the punishment is kept in store for us?
