“Ground my teeth with gravel”
He has ground my teeth with gravel and trampled me in the dust. (Lamentations 3:16 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A vague metaphor for suffering or gritted teeth.
The cultural key
The image is drawn from the actual experience of eating in hard times. Bread was made by grinding grain between stone millstones and often baked directly on hot stones or in ashes, so small bits of grit and sand regularly ended up in the loaf, cracking against the teeth. In ordinary life this was a minor nuisance; under siege and in captivity, when good grain was gone and people scraped together whatever coarse, dirty flour they could, biting down on gravel-filled bread became a constant, grinding humiliation, a daily reminder of degradation and want. So the poet's complaint that God 'has ground my teeth with gravel' is not abstract; it evokes the specific, wretched sensation of the besieged and the destitute, crunching stones in the only bread they have. Read as a metaphor it is vague; read against siege bread, it is painfully concrete.
Recovered meaning
Grit routinely got into stone-ground, stone-baked bread, and in siege and captivity the coarse bread was full of it; crunching gravel was a real, degrading misery of the destitute. The line evokes that concrete humiliation, not a vague pain.