Women at ease . . . /
Complacent young women. A female audience is addressed both because it is
these women of Jerusalem who egregiously have been leading a self-satisfied
life of luxury (compare chapter 3) and because it is the role of women to take
up public keening in a time of disaster, which is about to come. The first of
the two terms here is nashim, the second banot, and while banot
(literally, “daughters”) are definitely young women, there is no persuasive
basis for the scholarly claim that nashim means “married women.” (Robert
Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2019], 2:725)
