Matthew Poole and continuators on Jeremiah 5:17

17 And they shall eat up thine harvest, and thy bread, which thy sons and thy daughters should eat, they shall eat up thy flocks, and thine herds, they shall eat up thy vines and thy figtrees, they shall impoverish thy fenced cities wherein thou trustest, with the sword.

They shall make clean riddance, leave thee no supports of life, but bring an utter famine upon thee, it is thus threatned, Deut. 28.30, 48, 51.

Or, they shall eat up thy sons and thy daughters, but this is only a Metonymy of the effect; but properly this aggravates the dreadfulness of the Judgment; Parents, out of the tenderness of their affection, chusing rather to die themselves, then to live to see their children starved before their eyes, and they no wayes able to relieve them, Lam. 2.10, 11.

A particular enumeration of the Desolation, that would be made, all tending to the greatness of the former.

i. e. Beside the waste that the Famine would make among Persons; their Cities also should be depopulated by the sword of the enemy: or rather, possibly the siege should be so streight, and strict, as may be implied in the word impoverish, that they should be forced to eat one another, till they were quite wasted, they should be reduced to such poverty and exigencies; or the sword may relate to the mentioned mischiefs, as the cause of them all, the sword shall do all this. In all which he doth not so much tell them, that the Chaldeans shall conquer them, for that is taken as it were for granted, as, what cruelties they shall use when they have conquered.

Marginal references: Lev. 26.16.