The Lord Is Portrayed as an Enemy

Anger clouds the beauty that Zion was

A second alphabetic poem intensifies the first by bringing God-as-agent to the foreground. How hath the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger, and cast down from heaven unto the earth the beauty of Israel, and remembered not his footstool in the day of his anger. Habitations of Jacob are swallowed up; strongholds of the daughter of Judah are thrown down; the kingdom and the princes are polluted.

He hath cut off in his fierce anger all the horn of Israel; he hath drawn back his right hand from before the enemy; he burned against Jacob like a flaming fire. Human attackers remain in the poem even when the grammar makes the LORD the actor.

The shocking comparison is spoken twice

He hath bent his bow like an enemy; he stood with his right hand as an adversary, and slew all that were pleasant to the eye in the tabernacle of the daughter of Zion. The Lord was as an enemy; he hath swallowed up Israel, swallowed up all her palaces, destroyed his strong holds, and hath increased in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation.

Like an enemy and as an enemy are lament's accusatory rhetoric, not a command to imitate divine violence and not proof that a winning army has God's approval. The result named is multiplied mourning, not a triumphant explanation.