Remember, O LORD, what is come on us: consider, and behold our reproach.
Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens.
We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows.
We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold to us.
Our necks are under persecution: we labor, and have no rest.
We have given the hand to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread.
Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities.
Servants have ruled over us: there is none that does deliver us out of their hand.
We got our bread with the peril of our lives because of the sword of the wilderness.
Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine.
They ravished the women in Zion, and the maids in the cities of Judah.
Princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of elders were not honored.
They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood.
The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their music.
The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning.
The crown is fallen from our head: woe to us, that we have sinned!
For this our heart is faint; for these things our eyes are dim.
Because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes walk on it.
You, O LORD, remain for ever; your throne from generation to generation.
Why do you forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time?
Turn you us to you, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.
But you have utterly rejected us; you are very wroth against us.
Canonical academic citations for Lamentations 5 (AKJV) — copy in your preferred format.
Lamentations 5 (AKJV). Prime Bible, accessed August 25, 2026. https://primebible.com/akjv/lamentations/5.
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A communal prayer recounts disgrace—land seized, hunger, slavery, rape, and mockery. The people confess sin and beg the eternal LORD to remember them, restore their fortunes, and not reject them forever.
Five laments mourning the destruction of Jerusalem.
Lamentations 5 is presented with the full Hebrew interlinear, Strong's numbers, and verse-by-verse cross-references on Prime Bible — a free, nonprofit Bible study platform.