Bible Strands
Lamentations 5:14
The elders have left the city gate; the young men have stopped their music.
Berean Standard Bible
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Study note
Setting — The narrator addresses an unnamed audience during Jerusalem’s final collapse, recording the exact moment civic authority and communal celebration are abandoned. The text states that elders depart the city gate and young men cease their music.
The words — זְקֵנִים (ze.ke.Nim) means old men, and שָׁבָ֔תוּ (sha.Va.tu) literally means they have ceased or stopped. מִ/שַּׁ֣עַר (mi./Sha.'ar) specifies the city gate, the traditional site of legal and civic assembly.
The thread — The same pattern of extinguished joy and silenced music appears in Jeremiah 7:34, Isaiah 24:7, and Ezekiel 26:13, where divine judgment removes celebration from Judah and conquered cities.
Why it lands — The verse requires the reader to acknowledge that societal breakdown begins when leadership withdraws and public worship is halted. It calls for sober recognition that spiritual desolation manifests concretely in abandoned civic spaces and silenced communal life.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Hebrew words
King James Version
The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick.
Cross-references
- Jeremiah 7:34 I will remove from the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem the sounds of joy and gladness and the voices of the bride and bridegroom, for the land will become a wasteland.”
- Isaiah 24:7 The new wine dries up, the vine withers. All the merrymakers now groan.
- Ezekiel 26:13 So I will silence the sound of your songs, and the music of your lyres will no longer be heard.
- Revelation 18:22 And the sound of harpists and musicians, of flute players and trumpeters, will never ring out in you again. Nor will any craftsmen of any trade be found in you again, nor the sound of a millstone be heard in you again.
- Deuteronomy 16:18 You are to appoint judges and officials for your tribes in every town that the LORD your God is giving you. They are to judge the people with righteous judgment.
- Job 29:7 When I went out to the city gate and took my seat in the public square,
- Job 30:1 “But now they mock me, men younger than I am, whose fathers I would have refused to put with my sheep dogs.
- Job 30:31 My harp is tuned to mourning and my flute to the sound of weeping.
- Isaiah 3:2 the mighty man and the warrior, the judge and the prophet, the soothsayer and the elder,
- Jeremiah 16:9 For this is what the LORD of Hosts, the God of Israel, says: I am going to remove from this place, before your very eyes and in your days, the sounds of joy and gladness, the voices of the bride and bridegroom.