Content
Five poems make up the book of Lamentations. They all deplore the ruination of early 6thcentury-B.C. Jerusalem, including the temple, and the plight of the city's population. To the unexiled, rabble Hebrew remnant allowed to remain after the city's initial fall to Babylon in 597, the Babylonian conquerors' decimation of the former capital of Judah a decade later represented more than just a military victory. Theologically, the tragedy represented God's revoking of the covenantal blessings he had promised to his chosen people at Mount Sinai centuries earlier. The seeming finality of this judgment upended the Jerusalemites' falsely based confidence in God's unconditional protection of their city, which he had chosen as the site of his temple and the seat of an unending Davidic monarchy (2 Sam. 7:16).
Content
These poems trace the grieving process of the Hebrews, who despite repeated prophetic warnings remained stubbornly unpersuaded. Shock, desperation, and despair dominate chapters 1-2. Strong hope emerges in chapter 3, but chapter 4 puts the blame on former leaders. Chapter 5 ends the collection in a spirit of contrite resignation and hesitant faith for future restoration.
Literary Form
The poems display a funerary, dirge rhythm, and chapters 1-4 follow an acrostic pattern, in which each verse begins with a successive letter of the 22-letter Hebrew alphabet. (Chapter 3 devotes three verses to each letter.) Chapter 5 departs from the acrostic form, though its 22 verses maintain the parallel to the alphabet.
Authorship
The Septuagint, the 2nd-3rd century Greek translation of the Old Testament, names the prophet Jeremiah as the source of Lamentations, but the Hebrew text does not claim a particular author or authors. Some expressions in the book are similar to those of Jeremiah, but because of the long and complicated editorial history of that book, this similarity does not provide unquestionable evidence for Jeremiah's authorship. Nevertheless, the poems in Lamentations describe the devastation of Jerusalem in such personal terms as to suggest their authorship by an eyewitness or eyewitnesses to the 587/86 ravaging of the city. That the poems bewail the awful fulfillment of Jeremiah's prophecies against Judah makes appropriate their placement immediately after the book of Jeremiah.
The lost lament written by Jeremiah for the slain King Josiah (2 Chr. 35:25) does not appear in Lamentations. Since the destruction of the second temple in A.D. 70, the Jewish festal calendar has included the reading of this book on the anniversary of the 587/86 B.C. Babylonian assault on Jerusalem.
1 Lamenting the Demise of the Princess City
Verses i-u bemoan the reduction of personified Zion (= Jerusalem) to widowhood, slavery, and exile. Pilgrims no longer flood her streets at feast times; her friends have turned against her; and her enemies (the Babylonians) have become her masters. Famine threatens the few remaining inhabitants, who mourn the city's bygone better days. The poet acknowledges the punitive hand of God in humbling the former capital. The public nakedness of the divinely defrocked princess city brings such shame that she cannot even look at herself. Jerusalem lacked foresight by persisting in the sins that rendered her covenantally "unclean" and therefore deserving of punishment (v. 9). Worst of all, God's aiding the defilement of his temple by pagan invaders verifies the intentional withdrawal of his presence from Zion, whose inhabitants interject cries of affliction in verses 9c and llc.
The city deplores her own plight in verses 12-22, with a bewailing interruption by the poet appearing in verse 17. Jerusalem, the "virgin daughter of Judah," protests her unparalleled pain. That God will similarly strike the enemies of Zion is the dearest wish of the despondent, self-pitying city - not to vindicate God's righteousness, but merely as revenge for herself and to gain company in her misery.
2 Jerusalem Hits Rock Bottom
This poem recognizes God as the author of Jerusalem's devastation and questions the extent of his punishment. God's "footstool" refers to the ark of the covenant, which contained a written copy of the now revoked Mosaic covenant (i Chr. 28:2; Exod. 25:16). The patriarchal name "Jacob" (= "Israel"; cf. Gen. 32:28) refers to the entire Hebrew nation, and the "strongholds of daughter Judah" signify the fortifications of Jerusalem (cf. vv. 8-9). The "tent of daughter Zion" is the temple, God's home ("booth;' "tabernacle"; W. 4, 6). The enemies' celebration of capturing the temple makes God's rejection of his house all the more painful (v. 7). Verses 8-9 express God's demolition of Jerusalem as an architecturally calculated strategy (the stretching out of a line; cf. Amos 7:7-9) to collapse the city's defenses. The elders of fallen Jerusalem adopt the posture and practices of mourning (v io).
The most heart-rending result of God's wrathful display consists in the death of infants and children, some starving in their mothers' arms and others victims of cannibalism by the women who bore them (vv. 12,20). The poet questions this slaughter of the defenseless, as well as the execution in the temple of priests and prophets (v. 20), whose failings he nevertheless recognized in verse 14. The poet approaches the depths of despair by portraying an utterly humiliated, divinely terrorized, survivorless Zion (vv. 15-22).
3 The Triumph of Hope
The book's central poem personalizes God's judgment of Jerusalem by portraying it from the perspective of an individual inhabitant of the city. The afflicted speaker bewails his physical deterioration, unanswered cries for divine help, and public humiliation. His eating of the bitter herb "wormwood" represents the sorrow-stricken nature of his graceless existence (vv. 15, 19; cf. Jer. 9:15). Physically and emotionally crushed, he nevertheless offers an inspiring declaration of faith in God's abiding love and compassion (contrast vv. 18 and 21ff.).
The speaker's acknowledgment of God as his "portion" (inheritance), demonstrates his appropriate assignment of priority to the Lord rather than to the covenantal promise of land and material blessing (v 24). He contritely proclaims the virtue of accepting corrective punishment (the "yoke, v. 27) in the knowledge that God, who afflicts neither eagerly nor unjustly, will ultimately bestow love and compassion (vv. 26-33). Injustices do exist in the human sphere, but the "ill" that "goes forth" from God does not equate with those evils, and sinners have no grounds for complaining about suffering the adverse consequences of human transgression (v\'• 34-39).
Bittersweet wormwood, symbolic of utter calamity. (Wikimedia Commons)
Verses 40-47 speak from a collective perspective, and the rest of the poem reads much like an individual psalm of lament. The poet pleads for God's attentiveness to his cry for help and expects God to judge the unrelenting oppressors. The invocation of their "anguish (= hardness) of heart" (v. 65) seeks to prevent their repentance and thus ensure their judgment (cf. Exod. 7:2-5).
4 Jerusalem's High Society Laid Low
This poem focuses largely on the humbling of Jerusalem's socially privileged but morally insensitive upper class, in whom the masses placed false hope. Like the temple treasures, they have lost their value and cannot even provide basic sustenance for the children of Jerusalem. The purple-clad people reared in royal circles now mourn in the ash pits of Zion (vv. 5, 7-8). Sin worse than Sodom's invited the degradation (v. 6). A quick slaying by sword would be a more fortunate end than this slow death by starvation and the horrors it provokes (vv. 9-10).
The fall of Jerusalem caught the world by surprise (v 12). No one took seriously enough the covenantal requirement of righteousness to guarantee God's preserving the capital from assault (2 Sam. 7:1-17). Now the sinful prophets and priests, who bear the greatest responsibility for God's punishment of the misled masses, must publicly declare themselves ritually unclean as they flee into exile.
The reversal of fortunes prophesied in verses 21-22 injects a surprise ending of hope for demoralized Zion. Though at present the Edomite descendants of Esau gloat about the downfall of their historic Judean rival, Edom too will reap God's punishment.
5 Divine Restoration or Enduring Rejection?
In this final, communal plea for God to take note of his people's plight, the shock and desperation evident in chapters 1-4 give way to contrite resignation. The siege and conquest of Jerusalem have ended, but their memory and effects linger as the economically crushed Hebrew subjects of triumphant Babylonia deplore the loss of their landed inheritance, the ravishing of their women, the humiliation of their leaders, the forced labor of their children, and the joylessness of their existence (cf. Jer. 25:10). They have become a nation of widows and orphans - a socially and politically powerless people. The famine-stricken Judahites' liferisking forays to obtain food from the similarly subjected Egyptians and Assyrians reveals the extent of the Hebrews' dilemma (vv. 6, 9). Worn out from the struggle to survive, they admit their sinfulness - an extension of their ancestors' covenantal unfaithfulness, for which the current generation bears the punishment.
The Hebrews' only hope lies in the possibility of restoration and renewal by God. But unlike the optimistic individual in chapter 3, the collective community is not convinced that God will take them back (v. 22; cf. 3:21-25). Thus Lamentations ends with the gnawing question, "Is it too late for forgiveness?"