Lamentations 1:19

I called for. — Better, to. The “lovers,” as in Lamentations 1:2, are the former allies of Judah.

My priests and mine elders. — The pressure of the famine of the besieged city is emphasised by the fact that even these, the honoured guides of the people, had died of hunger. On the phrase that follows, see Lamentations 1:11. A conjectural addition, at the end of the verse, “and found not,” is supplied in the LXX and Syriac versions; but rhetorically there is more force in the aposiopesis, the suggestive silence, of the Hebrew.