Lamentations 4

Purple was an expensive color because purple die came from the murex snail in the Mediterranean Sea. Jews weren’t seafaring people. They were dryland “sea-fearing” herders and farmers. It’s likely they had to import the dye from others who worked in the shallow coastal waters of the Mediterranean Sea, such as Phoenicians in what is now Lebanon.

Cannibalizing children was also reported in the earlier siege of Samaria, when Assyrians defeated the northern Jewish nation of Israel (2 Kings 6:28-29).

Jews taught that touching blood or a bleeding person rendered a person ritually unclean and unfit to worship God until they were cleansed. This condition was contagious. A person ritually unclean was not supposed to touch another person or go to the worship center because they ritually defiled whatever or whoever they touched. Israelites were able to get ritually clean again by following a set of procedures that included bathing, washing their clothes, getting sprinkled with “water of purification” (Numbers 19), and waiting for a stretch of time, often seven days.

Each king was anointed with oil to signify that God had chosen him. The king became known as God’s “anointed,” or “the anointed one.” In the original language of Hebrew, the word is “messiah.” Many Christians often see this word in the Old Testament as a foreshadowing of Jesus the Messiah a thousand years before he came to earth. But to the readers in Bible times, the word simply meant their king. Israel’s kings were presented to the nation as God’s chosen leader, literally God’s anointed one. The ritual of crowning someone king involved an anointing—pouring olive oil over the ruler’s head. Samuel anointed young David as Israel’s king (1 Samuel 16:12-13). The ritual sounds messy, but the olive oil would have felt refreshing poured onto someone living without air-conditioning in the ancient Middle Eastern heat.

Edom’s people were related to the Jews. Hard to tell, based on charges leveled against them by Obadiah and other prophets: “Those people are tagged for destruction” (Isaiah 34:5). God, apparently through a vision to Obadiah, accused the people of Edom with:

• Collaborating with invaders who decimated Jerusalem
• Gloating over the fall of the Israelite nation
• Arresting people of Judah as they tried to escape
• Turning them over to the enemy
• Pillaging Jerusalem’s ruins for leftover valuables

Obadiah said their doomsday was now on God’s calendar: “You killed the people of your brother, Jacob. For that, I’m shutting you down forever” (1:10).

Uz was the homeland of Job, starring character in the Book of Job. It’s unknown where this land was. Edom was just south of the Dead Sea, mostly to the east, in what is now the nation of Jordan. That suggests Uz was somewhere in that territory. Some place it in the far south of Edom, near the Gulf of Aqaba.