In verse 3 the women or people of Jerusalem were described as “cruel to their young,” but this was not because they deprived their children of food willingly. Here the same women are described as compassionate, but their actions appear to be the opposite. Circumstances force them to act in a way contrary to their nature. In 2.20 they were accused of “eating the bodies of the children they loved.” Now they are seen boiling them to eat. It is as though the poet is describing in detail the fulfillment of the threat made to Israel in Deuteronomy 28.53-57.

The hands of compassionate women: in some languages it will be more natural to say “Tender-hearted women….” Compassionate, which means showing concern for someone in trouble, is a descriptive term whose Hebrew form refers to the intestines. This is often translated in figurative language; for example, “women who have warm hearts,” “women who feel with their stomachs,” or “women with good livers.”

Boiled (see also 2 Kings 6.29) means cooked in water or oil. New International Version and others prefer the more general “cooked.” They (the boiled bodies of the children) became their (mothers’) food. The word translated food is different in Hebrew from any of the previous references to food; it is found nowhere else in this form in the Old Testament, but is usually taken as a form derived from a verb meaning “to eat.”

In the destruction of the daughter of my people: that is, “when my people were destroyed,” “at the time Jerusalem and its people were destroyed,” or “in the disaster which killed the people of Jerusalem.” The whole of verse 10 may be translated, for example, “The hands of loving mothers cooked their own children in order to eat them, when the people of Jerusalem were dying from war and famine.”

It will be noticed that Good News Translation has placed the last half-line of the Hebrew text at the beginning of the verse, so that eating the children is a specific instance of the more general disaster, or a consequence of the conditions of the destruction. Good News Translation supplies “brought horror” as introductory to the statement that “mothers boiled their own children for food.” In languages which require that reference to the circumstances be placed before events taking place in those circumstances, Good News Translation may be adapted to say, for example, “When my people were dying from starvation, compassionate women boiled and ate their own children.”

Quoted with permission from Reyburn, William D. A Handbook on Lamentations. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1992. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .