Lamentations 2:6

And he hath violently … of a garden The expression is obscure. The natural sense of the Eng. would be that He has taken away His tabernacle (the Temple) out of Jerusalem as unconcernedly as a pleasure booth might be removed from a garden (cp. Job 27:18). But as a gardenis a better rendering of the Heb., and so we get the thought that the Temple was destroyed and broken up with as much ease as a garden that had failed to please its owner. The fact that the LXX has as a vine(Heb. gephen) while the Heb. as it stands has gan, a garden, has led to the conjecture (so de Hoop Scheffer) that gannab, a thief, was the original reading. On this hypothesis the MT. might easily have been altered, if considered as an indecorous comparison, into one of the other two words. If we accept Scheffer's view we must understand that Jehovah has broken through the hedge(see mg.) which protected Zion, as a thief would make his way through a hedge in order to steal property which it protected. Secrecy rather than violence, however, is what we associate with theft (cp. Jeremiah 49:9), and so far the comparison is inappropriate.

place of assembly The same word in the Heb. as that which is immediately afterwards rendered solemn assembly(mg. appointed feast) which is its usual sense, although the former one occurs Psalms 64:8. The occurrence of the same word in somewhat different senses in two consecutive clauses is suspicious, but no very satisfactory emendation has been suggested.

the king associated here with the priest by virtue of his theocratic character. Cp. Lamentations 4:20.