Lamentations 5:4

Our wood is sold unto us— Our wood came at a price upon our necks; Lamentations 5:5. We are under persecution, &c. Houbigant. That numbers of the Israelites had no wood growing on their own lands for their burning, must be imagined from the openness of their country. See Judges 5:6. It is certain, the eastern villagers have now sometimes little or none on their premises. Dr. Russel says, that inconsiderable as the stream which runs by Aleppo and the gardens about it may appear, they however contain almost the only trees which are to be met with for twenty or thirty miles round; for that the villages are all destitute of trees, and most of them only supplied with what rain water the inhabitants can save in cisterns. D'Arvieux gives us to understand, that several of the present villages of the holy land are in the same situation; for, after observing that the Arabs burn cow-dung in their encampments, he adds, that all the villagers who live in places where there is a scarcity of wood, take great care to provide themselves with sufficient quantities of this kind of fuel. See 1 Samuel 2:8. The holy land, from the accounts we have of it, appears to have been as little wooded anciently as at present; nevertheless the Israelites seem to have burned wood very commonly, and without buying it too, from what the prophet says in the present verse. Had they been wont to buy their fuel, they would not have then complained of it as such a hardship. The true account of it seems to be this. The woods of the land of Israel being from very ancient times common, the people of the villages, which, like those about Aleppo, had no trees growing in them, supplied themselves with fuel out of these wooded places, of which there were many anciently, and several that still remain. This liberty of taking wood in common, the Jews suppose to have been one of the constitutions of Joshua, of which they give us ten; the first giving liberty to an Israelite to feed his flock in the woods of any tribe; the second, that he should be free to take wood in the fields any where. But though this was the ancient custom in Judaea, it was not so in the country into which they were carried captives; or if this text of Jeremiah respects those who continued in their own country for a while under Gedaliah, as the ninth verse insinuates, it signifies that their conquerors possessed themselves of these woods, and would allow no fuel to be cut down without leave, and that leave was not to be obtained without money. It is certain that presently after the return from the captivity timber was not to be cut without leave: Nehemiah 2:8. See Observations, p. 218.