Lecture 6

^1:6^ Vau. And from the daughter of Zion all her beauty is departed: her princes are become like rams that find no pastures: and they are gone away without strength before the face of the pursuer.

6. Here he weeps over the captivity of the adults; and concerning this, he does three things.

First, he presents the loss of ornaments: from the daughter of Zion, that is to say, of Jerusalem, all her beauty is departed: the vessels that were taken away, and the treasures, and the princes, and the priests with Jekoniah, the grandson of Josiah (2 Kings 24:12–14). (Joachin, the son of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah. As Thomas Aquinas notes in his commentary on Jeremiah, Joachin is also referred to by the name Jekoniah (Commentary on Jeremiah, ch. 1, lect. 2).) They shall take away the vessels of your beauty (Ezek 16:39).

Second, the lack of food: her princes are become like rams that find no pastures, neither for themselves nor for the people; for even bread was lacking in the city when it was besieged in the time of Zedekiah (Jer 34:1–3, 17, 2 Kgs 25:1–3). Their nobles have perished with famine, and their multitude were dried up with thirst (Isa 5:13).

Third, he presents the captivity of the princes: and they are gone away without strength, not able to resist, before the face of the pursuer, fleeing, as one reads in Jeremiah (Jer 52:8). The princes fled into the plains of Jericho: my strength has left me (Ps 37:11).

At the beginning of this verse is placed the letter, vau, which means “and”; in other words, even these things are joined by the Lord to higher things for our vengeance.

And this is the fifth topic of complaint. (“The fifth topic is that by using which all disadvantages are brought separately before the eyes of the hearer, so that he who hears of them may seem to see them, and by the very facts themselves, and not only by the description of them, may be moved to pity as if he had been actually present” (Cicero, De inventione 1.55).)

Allegorically, the Church, the daughter of the heavenly Zion, after whose pattern she was made, whenever the beauty of faith departs from her, and her princes, the prelates, go into various errors, before the face of the pursuer: the devil or heretics who pervert the faith; that find, in the Scriptures, no pastures, of the word of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.