I will turn your feasts into mourning, And all your songs into lamentation; And I will make you wear sackcloth on all your bodies, And baldness on every head. I will make it like the mourning for an only son, And the end of it like a bitter day.
I will bring up sackcloth - (that is, the rough coarse haircloth, which, being fastened with the girdle tight over the loins (see above Joel 1:8, Joel 1:13, pp. 107, 109), was wearing to the frame) “and baldness upon every head.” The mourning of the Jews was no half-mourning, no painless change of one color of becoming dress for another. For the time, they were dead to the world or to enjoyment. As the clothing was coarse, uncomely, distressing, so they laid aside every ornament, the ornament of their hair also (as English widows used, on the same principle, to cover it). They shore it off; each sex, what was the pride of their sex; the men, their beards; the women, their long hair. The strong words, “baldness, is balded Jeremiah 16:6, shear Micah 1:16; Jeremiah 7:29, hew off, enlarge thy baldness” , are used to show the completeness of this expression of sorrow. None exempted themselves in the universal sorrow; “on every head” came up “baldness.”