Lamentations 1:20 - Exposition

My bowels. The vital parts, especially the heart, as the seat of the affections, like σπλάγχνα . Are troubled; literally, are made to boil. So Job 30:27 , "My bowels boil" (a different word, however). Is turned; or, turns itself; i.e. palpitates violently. At home there is as death . So Jeremiah 9:21 , "For death is come up into our windows, and is entered into our palaces." By "death," when distinguished, as here, from "the sword," pestilence is meant; so e.g. in Jeremiah 15:2 ; Jeremiah 43:11 . But the poet says here, not that "there is death," but merely " as death ," i.e. a mild form of pestilence, not the famine typhus itself. Or, perhaps, he means "every form of death" (Virgil's " plurima mortis imago ") .