The Lord has become like an enemy: once again the Lord is said to act as Israel’s enemy. Good News Translation has joined the two statements in the first unit to say “Like an enemy, the Lord has destroyed Israel.” We may also say, for example, “The Lord acts like our enemy by destroying Israel.” Destroyed translates the Hebrew for “swallowed,” which is used again in destroyed all its palaces. For comments see 2.2.

The palaces mentioned here in the plural were probably not so much royal residences as large houses inhabited by wealthy people. Such houses were fitted out for defense in time of attack. New English Bible translates the word here as “towered mansions.” Palaces may sometimes be translated as “the houses of the chiefs” or “the houses in which the rulers lived.”

Laid in ruins its strongholds: laid in ruins translates another of the numerous Hebrew verbs meaning “destroy, ruin, shatter.” Strongholds is the same term used in 2.2. See there for comments.

He has multiplied means that God has increased the number, that is, caused more people to mourn and lament. The increase in mourning and weeping is due to the deaths of people in Jerusalem and the country round about; here the territory is called the daughter of Judah.

Mourning is not the same term used in 1.4, but the sense is the same, that is, wailing and weeping as is done at the time of death. Lamentation is a noun related to the same verb as mourning, and so the two sound nearly alike in Hebrew and are synonyms. Since they have similar sounds in Hebrew, New Jerusalem Bible translates them as “Mourning and moaning.” If the translator’s language has a suitable pair of similar-sounding words to use here, they may add to the poetic effect. In Isaiah 29.2 Good News Translation translates this same pair of words as “weeping and wailing.” However, in some languages crying and mourning are not considered as associated activities and are not used in the same context. Accordingly in such cases it may be necessary to say, for example, “God made them mourn for the dead.”

Quoted with permission from Reyburn, William D. A Handbook on Lamentations. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1992. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .