Later text
"Go away! Unclean!" men shouted at them. "Away, away! Do not touch us!" So they fled and wandered. Among the nations it was said, "They can stay here no longer."
Intertextuality Pair
Allusion
Later text
"Go away! Unclean!" men shouted at them. "Away, away! Do not touch us!" So they fled and wandered. Among the nations it was said, "They can stay here no longer."
Earlier text
Isaiah 52:11BSB
Depart, depart, go out from there! Touch no unclean thing; come out from it, purify yourselves, you who carry the vessels of the LORD.
Both texts employ the imperative סוּרוּ (suru, "Depart!") paired with warnings about ritual contact. In Lamentations 4:15, bloodstained leaders are shunned with cries of "Unclean!" (טָמֵא, tame) and "Do not touch!" -- they wander among nations with nowhere to settle. Isaiah 52:11 redirects this language: now it is God's people who must depart from Babylon, touching nothing unclean, as "you who carry the vessels of the LORD." The allusion reframes the shame of Lamentations -- where Israel was treated as unclean by the nations -- into a purification imperative where Israel separates from the uncleanness of exile itself. Both passages actually double the imperative--"Depart! Depart!" (סוּרוּ סוּרוּ, suru suru)--and share the specific command "Do not touch!" (אַל־תִּגָּעוּ, al-tigg'u), intensifying the rhetorical force of the reversal.