New alphabet; prophet shares the city’s discipline

Terrible things have befallen the prophet both before the city was taken and when this had been captured. For which reason, beginning another alphabetic sequence, he bewails himself, seeing poverty and desolation of the city through the Lord’s discipline. And he himself no less has come to be in lack of good things—at once having come to be in circumstance when he was convicting these, so as to say “I continued being mocked the whole day,” and at once also sharing in the calamities of their terrible things and from sympathy. And he also says according to David: “a shadow of death overshadowed me.” For when he seems for a short while to give relief to the pains, again he runs back making continuous punishment.