but now, when Jerusalem is destroyed, they have become regarded as earthenware pots, i.e., treated as if they were utterly worthless, as "a work of the hands of the potter," whereas Israel was a work of the hands of God, Isa 64:7. סלא = סלה, cf. Job 28:16, Job 28:19 to weigh; Pual, be weighed out, as an equivalent.
Verse 3
This disregard or rejection of the citizens of Zion is evidence in Lam 4:3 and onwards by many examples, beginning with children, ascending to adults (3-5), and ending with princes. The starvation to death of the children (Lam 4:3, Lam 4:4) is mentioned first; and the frightful misery that has befallen Jerusalem is vividly set forth, by a comparison of the way in which wild animals act towards their young with the behaviour of the mothers of Jerusalem towards their children. Even jackals (תּנּין for תּנּים, see on Jer 9:10) give their breasts to their young ones to suck. חלצוּ , extrahunt mammam = they present their breast. As Junius has remarked, the expression is taken a mulieribus lactantibus, quae laxata veste mammam lactanti praebent; hence also we are not, for the sake of this expression, to understand תּנּין as meaning cetus (Bochart and Nägelsbach), regarding which animal Bochart remarks (Hieroz. iii. p. 777, ed. Rosenmüller), ceti papillas non esseἐπιφανεῖς, quippe in mammis receptae tanquam in vaginis conduntur. Rosenmüller has already rejected this meaning as minus apta for the present passage. From the combination of jackals and ostriches as inhabiting desert places (Isa 13:21.; Job 30:29), we have no hesitation in fixing on "jackals" as the meaning here. "The daughter of my people" (cf. Lam 2:11) here means the inhabitants of Zion or Jerusalem. לאכזר, "has become cruel." The Kethib כי ענים instead of כּיענים (Qeri) may possibly have arisen from a purely accidental separation of the letters of the word in a MS, a reading which was afterwards painfully retained by the scribes. But in many codices noted by Kennicott and De Rossi, as well as in several old editions, the word is found correctly joined, without any marginal note. יענים means ostriches, usually בּת יענה ("daughter of crying," or according to Gesenius, in his Thesaurus, and Ewald, following the Syriac, "the daughter of gluttony"), the female ostrich. The comparison with these animals is to be understood in accordance with Job 39:16 : "she (the female ostrich) treats her young ones
