Starvation Disfigures Bodies and Destroys Families

Radiant bodies become unrecognizable under famine

Her Nazarites were purer than snow, they were whiter than milk, they were more ruddy in body than rubies, their polishing was of sapphire. Their visage is blacker than a coal; they are not known in the streets: their skin cleaveth to their bones; it is withered, it is become like a stick.

Nazarites may mean consecrated persons or nobles. The color imagery describes famine-driven reversal of appearance, not ethnicity, not a racial hierarchy, and not a stigma on dark skin. They that be slain with the sword are better than they that be slain with hunger: for these pine away, stricken through for want of the fruits of the field.

The women are still called compassionate when the last food is named

The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children: they were their meat in the destruction of the daughter of my people. Sodden means boiled. Pitiful means compassionate.

The poem locates moral horror in siege conditions rather than removing compassion from the women trapped by them. The scene is atrocity witness, not spectacle, and not a license to condemn starving mothers or to embellish dead children.