Lamentations 5:6 Commentary: The Shame of Begging Former Enemies for Bread

Lamentations 5 was written in the shadow of Jerusalem’s fall in 586 BC. The city was destroyed, the temple burned, and many were killed or exiled. The rest of the chapter describes orphans, forced labor, and people paying for water and wood. Into this chaos comes verse 6: an admission that hunger has pushed them to submit to Egypt and Assyria.

Egypt and Assyria were ancient enemies of Israel and Judah. Prophets like Isaiah (Is 30:1, 31:1) and Jeremiah (Jer 2:18) had warned against trusting these powers for help. Yet now the people do more than trust: they “give the hand,” a gesture that in the ancient Near East signaled surrender or a plea for mercy (see II Kings 10:15, where Jehonadab gives Jehu his hand as a sign of alliance, and Jer 50:15, where Babylon “gives her hand” in defeat). The Cambridge Bible notes that Assyria had already fallen to Babylon, but their name survives here as the “traditional foes” of Israel, Egypt being the other great oppressor. For the exiles and those left in the land, the desperation was so complete that they would turn to any source for bread, even nations whose names were shorthand for cruelty and idolatry.

The cultural shame is nearly unbearable. To seek food from those who once enslaved your ancestors (Egypt) and destroyed your northern kingdom (Assyria) was to confess that God’s promise of a fruitful land had been revoked. Calvin writes that this was “a disgrace and reproach the most bitter,” and that God had every right to turn their pride into this public humiliation.

The consulted sources note no significant textual variants for Lamentations 5:6. The Cambridge Bible mentions that Ball proposed eliminating both proper names (“Egyptians” and “Assyrians”) and reading “To adversaries we submitted,” as well as transposing this verse with verse 5, but these suggestions are based on metrical speculation rather than manuscript evidence. The Masoretic Text is stable, and the idiom “give the hand” appears consistently across ancient witnesses.

From the Reformation onward, this verse has been read as a raw confession of national and spiritual failure. Calvin (1564) used it to warn against trusting human alliances over God’s provision, calling the need to beg from enemies a “disgrace and reproach.” Matthew Henry (1710) saw the verse as part of the people’s “pouring out their complaint to God” in prayer, not just as complaint but as a step toward restoration. In Wesley’s Explanatory Notes (1754), the focus was on the loss of kingly and fatherly protection. Across traditions, the verse has been used in liturgical settings of lament, especially during Advent and Lent, where communities identify with the shame of exile and the cry for deliverance.

Three-point outline

1. Desperation drives us to unfitting alliances. The people gave their hand to Egypt and Assyria, former enemies, for bread. Famine erased every boundary of loyalty or memory.
2. Shame reveals the cost of sin. What they once did in faith (making covenants without God) they now do in need (begging from the same powers). The disgrace is part of God’s discipline.
3. God hears the confession of the humbled. The prayer of Lamentations 5 is not a complaint only, it is a turn toward God, naming the very places of shame (see Lam 5:21).

Five-point outline

1. The gesture. “Giving the hand” is an act of submission, sometimes a pledge, sometimes a beggar’s plea (Calvin).
2. The recipients. Egypt and Assyria, the very empires that had enslaved and scattered them.
3. The motive. Not political gain, but bread. Basic survival.
4. The result. The shame that the people are willing to describe aloud, owning their condition before God.
5. The theology. God’s covenant curses (Deut 28:48) had come true: “You will serve your enemies in hunger, thirst, nakedness, and lack of everything.”

Illustration hooks

• Having to ask a person who wronged you for a job or a loan, just to feed your family.
• Seeing a former rival at a food bank and feeling the mix of gratitude and humiliation.
• Neighbors who fled conflict and now line up for aid at a border crossing, side by side with people from the nation that bombed their town.

Questions your congregation is asking

• “Is it wrong to accept help from people who have hurt me or my people?”
• “How do I deal with the shame of having to depend on others when I used to be self-sufficient?”
• “Does God hear prayers that are basically a list of complaints about my suffering?”

This verse sits inside a long prayer of lament. The people are not hiding their shame; they are bringing it directly to God. Before you begin, ask the group to think of a time when they had to ask for help from someone they would never have chosen to ask.

Discussion questions

1. Read Lamentations 5:6. What do you think “given our hand” meant in the culture of ancient Israel? Why is it significant that they mention both Egypt and Assyria?
2. Compare this verse with Jeremiah 2:18, where God asks, “What do you gain by going to Egypt… or to Assyria?” How does that earlier rebuke make the present situation even more painful?
3. The motivation in this verse is “to be satisfied with bread.” Why do you think the text emphasizes basic food rather than political freedom or military aid?
4. In verses 1-10, the people describe orphans, widows, and forced labor. Why do they list these specific hardships before confessing their own actions in verse 6?
5. Does the act of begging from enemies show repentance or just desperation? What clues does the rest of the chapter give you (see vv. 16, 19-22)?
6. Calvin says the phrase means “they begged bread,” and that it was “a disgrace and reproach.” Why would a loving God allow his people to be publicly ashamed like this?
7. How can a church today help people who are so desperate that they are considering unwise or degrading choices just to get by?