Imamat 26:29

26:29 You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters. ¹ 

Ulangan 28:53-57

28:53 You will then eat your own offspring, ²  the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you, because of the severity of the siege ³  by which your enemies will constrict you. 28:54 The man among you who is by nature tender and sensitive will turn against his brother, his beloved wife, and his remaining children. 28:55 He will withhold from all of them his children’s flesh that he is eating (since there is nothing else left), because of the severity of the siege by which your enemy will constrict ⁴  you in your villages. 28:56 Likewise, the most ⁵  tender and delicate of your women, who would never think of putting even the sole of her foot on the ground because of her daintiness, ⁶  will turn against her beloved husband, her sons and daughters, 28:57 and will secretly eat her afterbirth ⁷  and her newborn children ⁸  (since she has nothing else), ⁹  because of the severity of the siege by which your enemy will constrict you in your villages.

Yeremia 19:9

19:9 I will reduce the people of this city to desperate straits during the siege imposed on it by their enemies who are seeking to kill them. I will make them so desperate that they will eat the flesh of their own sons and daughters and the flesh of one another.”’” ¹⁰ 

Ratapan 2:20

Jerusalem Speaks:

ר (Resh)

2:20 Look, O Lord! Consider! ¹¹ 

Whom have you ever afflicted ¹²  like this?

Should women eat their offspring, ¹³ 

their healthy infants? ¹⁴ 

Should priest and prophet

be killed in the Lord’s ¹⁵  sanctuary?

Yehezkiel 5:10

5:10 Therefore fathers will eat their sons within you, Jerusalem, ¹⁶  and sons will eat their fathers. I will execute judgments on you, and I will scatter any survivors ¹⁷  to the winds. ¹⁸ 

[26:29]  ¹ tn Heb “and the flesh of your daughters you will eat.” The phrase “you will eat” has not been repeated in the translation for stylistic reasons.

[28:53]  ² tn Heb “the fruit of your womb” (so NAB, NRSV); NASB “the offspring of your own body.”

[28:53]  ³ tn Heb “siege and stress.”

[28:55]  ⁴ tn Heb “besiege,” redundant with the noun “siege.”

[28:56]  ⁵ tc The LXX adds σφόδρα (sfodra, “very”) to bring the description into line with v. 54.

[28:56]  ⁶ tn Heb “delicateness and tenderness.”

[28:57]  ⁷ tn Heb includes “that which comes out from between her feet.”

[28:57]  ⁸ tn Heb “her sons that she will bear.”

[28:57]  ⁹ tn Heb includes “in her need for everything.”

[19:9]  ¹⁰ tn This verse has been restructured to try to bring out the proper thought and subordinations reflected in the verse without making the sentence too long and complex in English: Heb “I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters. And they will eat one another’s flesh in the siege and in the straits which their enemies who are seeking their lives reduce them to.” This also shows the agency through which God’s causation was effected, i.e., the siege.

[19:9]  sn Cannibalism is one of the penalties for disobedience to their covenant with the Lord effected through the Mosaic covenant. See Deut 28:53, 55, 57. For examples of this being carried out see 2 Kgs 6:28-29; Lam 4:10.

[2:20]  ¹¹ tn Heb “Look, O Lord! See!” When used in collocation with verbs of cognition, רָאָה (ra’ah) means “to see for oneself” or “to take notice” (1 Sam 26:12). The parallelism between seeing and understanding is often emphasized (e.g., Exod 16:6; Isa 5:19; 29:15; Job 11:11; Eccl 6:5). See also 1:11 and cf. 1:9, 12, 20; 3:50, 59, 60; 5:1.

[2:20]  sn Integral to battered Jerusalem’s appeal, and part of the ancient Near Eastern lament genre, is the request for God to look at her pain. This should evoke pity regardless of the reason for punishment. The request is not for God to see merely that there are misfortunes, as one might note items on a checklist. The cognitive (facts) and affective (feelings) are not divided. The plea is for God to watch, think about, and be affected by these facts while listening to the petitioner’s perspective.

[2:20]  ¹² tn For the nuance “afflict” see the note at 1:12.

[2:20]  ¹³ tn Heb “their fruit.” The term פְּרִי (pÿri, “fruit”) is used figuratively to refer to children as the fruit of a mother’s womb (e.g., Gen 30:2; Deut 7:13; 28:4, 11, 18, 53; 30:9; Pss 21:11; 127:3; 132:11; Isa 13:18; Mic 6:7).

[2:20]  ¹⁴ tn Heb “infants of healthy childbirth.” The genitive-construct phrase עֹלֲלֵי טִפֻּחִים (’olale tippukhim) functions as an attributive genitive construction: “healthy newborn infants.” The noun טִפֻּחִים (tippukhim) appears only here. It is related to the verb טָפַח (tafakh), meaning “to give birth to a healthy child” or “to raise children” depending on whether the Arabic or Akkadian cognate is emphasized. For the related verb, see below at 2:22.

[2:20]  sn Placing the specific reference to children at the end of the line in apposition to clarify that it does not describe the normal eating of fruit helps produce the repulsive shock of the image. Furthermore, the root of the word for “infants” (עוֹלֵל, ’olel) has the same root letters for the verb “to afflict” occurring in the first line of the verse, making a pun (F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Lamentations [IBC], 99-100).

[2:20]  ¹⁵ tc The MT reads אֲדֹנָי (’adonay, “the Lord”) here rather than יהוה (YHWH, “the Lord”) as at the beginning of the verse. See the tc note at 1:14.

[5:10]  ¹⁶ tn In context “you” refers to the city of Jerusalem. To make this clear for the modern reader, “Jerusalem” has been supplied in the translation in apposition to “you.”

[5:10]  sn This cannibalism would occur as a result of starvation due to the city being besieged. It is one of the judgments threatened for a covenant law violation (Lev 26:29; see also Deut 28:53; Jer 19:9; Lam 2:20; Zech 11:9).

[5:10]  ¹⁷ tn Heb “all of your survivors.”

[5:10]  ¹⁸ tn Heb “to every wind.”