How is the author's environment described?

The writer’s environment, turned into hostility, is described by the following phrases in Lamentations 3:5–6:

1. Besieged and enveloped. A clearer translation of this difficult phrase would be, He has surrounded you with a building. The image is taken from the siege of a city. As such, a city is surrounded by a siege rampart. The writer is surrounded by a rampart of misfortunes.¹ See also Psalm 17:9, Psalm 22:16, and Psalm 88:17, where this imagery is applied to persons. The writer felt himself hemmed in by God with circumstances of bitterness and tribulation. As the writer stands for the people who live in Jerusalem, verbs that are appropriate for the description of the assault of a city are used to depict how God surrounded and besieged the man and the city.² 

2. Bitterness and tribulation. Bitterness is used in reference to an unidentified wild plant with a very bitter taste which was unpleasant and poisonous (see also Deuteronomy 32:33; Psalm 69:21; Jeremiah 8:14). The term is used as an emblem of bitter suffering and extreme adversity. Tribulation described Israel's severe wanderings in the wilderness (see Exodus 18:8; Numbers 20:14). As those wanderings were the outworking of God’s judgment, the writer now finds himself in a similar environment.³ Taking the first two phrases together, the siege is not accomplished by soldiers, but with bitterness and tribulation.⁴ 

3. Dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago. The darkness refers not only to imprisonment in dungeons that have no access to sunlight, it also refers to the grave (see Psalm 88:6, Psalm 88:18; Psalm 143:3). The intensity of the suffering is described as the darkness of the grave - that of the forgotten deceased (see also Job 10:21–22; Psalm 88:5–7,Psalm 88:12; Psalm 143:3; Ecclesiastes 6:4; Ecclesiastes 11:8).⁵ The writer is in prison where it is dark—as was common in prisons at the time. He experiences the atmosphere of death, as if he were already in the underworld (see also Psalm 69:4; Psalm 77:10; Psalm 88:4–12; Job 30:20).⁶ The hostility he experienced was so severe that it felt as if he was virtually living in the grave like the dead of long ago. While those who died recently are still mourned by others and their absence is keenly felt, the writer felt as one who is forgotten and no longer cared for.⁷ Psalm 88:4–7 provides a supporting explanation for this phrase. Just as those who have died a long time ago disappear completely from the memory of people, so too the writer is hidden as if in a dark recess, so that no one pays attention to him anymore - no one takes him into account anymore. He no longer counts, just as if he had already gone to the grave.⁸