In Scripture a woman predominantly symbolizes a city, and a city stands for its nation. Lamentations 1:1-7 shows this: the same entity is called a city, a widow, a princess, Judah, Zion, the daughter of Zion, and Jerusalem, with feminine pronouns used 28 times in seven verses. Each of these female symbols depicts Jerusalem and Judah from a slightly different perspective, and none of them depicts a church. Zion is an alternate name for Jerusalem, and "daughter of Zion" is the personified city seen in her sin, shame, and affliction when God afflicts her for her transgressions and her splendor departs. The term daughter is also collective. The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery explains that a capital city was personified as a woman and its inhabitants collectively as her daughter, so the daughters depend on her for identity but shape her future by their actions. Daughters therefore includes men as well, as Lamentations 3:51 shows when Jeremiah calls all the inhabitants of Jerusalem "the daughters of my city." The same collective sense carries over to the harlot children of Babylon in Revelation 17, which refers to all the inhabitants of that city and not to church denominations.

In Lamentations the phrase daughter of Zion designates the religious dimension centered in the Temple, with the wall of the daughter of Zion representing Jerusalem itself as the protective fortification that should have risen to defend that sacred center. The poet therefore addresses the wall directly, urging it to let tears run down like a river day and night, to give itself no relief, and to cry out in the night at the beginning of the watches, pouring out its heart like water before the Lord for the life of its young children who faint from hunger. This appeal arises because the city has recognized that the Lord has carried out His ancient purpose announced in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, strengthening its enemies and bringing devastation upon it, yet He remains the only source of deliverance and the only one able to grant repentance. The call to persistent prayer therefore expresses the conviction that, although God has acted in wrath, His faithfulness and covenant loyalty still offer the sole ground for hope that the religious life symbolized by the daughter of Zion might be preserved and restored.