The hands of the compassionate women have boiled their own children: they were their food in the destruction of the daughter of my people.
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George Leo Haydock
AD 1849
Pitiful. So their nature dictates. (Worthington)
But hunger made them the reverse. Some think they slew their children, to prevent them being exposed to more cruel torments, (Calmet) as the people of Colchis do their sick. (Chardin.)
Sodden: boiled or roasted; coxerunt, ver. 5., and Deuteronomy xxviii. 55. At the last siege of Jerusalem, this barbarity was manifested. (Calmet) (Josephus, Jewish Wars vii. 8.; Gr. 21.) See chap ii. 20.
Daughter. So cities are styled. (Worthington)
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...
Here is considered the immense hunger of mothers, who eat their own children, through an excessive hunger. As said above in Chapter 2:20: "Should women eat their offspring, the children of their tender care?"
