Introduction to Lamentations

Title and authorship

The book names nobody. It has no heading, no superscription, and no first-person identification beyond I am the man who has seen affliction Lamentations 3:1 — a description rather than a name.

Its Hebrew title is its first word, 'ekhah, the cry How! that also opens chapters 2 and 4 Lamentations 1:1 Lamentations 2:1 Lamentations 4:1. That word begins a verse in only seven places in the Hebrew Bible, and three of them are these three chapter openings. It is the sound a funeral makes.

What the text supports about the writer is limited and worth stating exactly. He was present: the book describes children fainting in named streets, elders sitting in the dust, the sanctuary entered Lamentations 1:10 Lamentations 2:10–12. He was not a spectator to a rumor.

One connection is sometimes made from elsewhere in Scripture, and it will not carry the weight. A record exists of Jeremiah lamenting for King Josiah, with singers keeping those laments as an ordinance 2 Chronicles 35:25 — but Josiah died at Megiddo, and this book mourns a burned city and a captured king, which came a generation later. The two events are not the same, so that verse does not identify this book's author. Its picture of grief also runs close to what Jeremiah says of his own Jeremiah 9:1.

What can be affirmed is a witness of the fall of Jerusalem, writing in the most disciplined poetic form Hebrew possessed. Beyond that the book withholds, and nothing is gained by supplying it.

Date

The book is anchored to an event rather than a year, and the event is described from close range: the sanctuary entered by nations Lamentations 1:10, the walls destroyed by deliberate measurement Lamentations 2:8, fire kindled in Zion that devoured its foundations Lamentations 4:11, and the anointed king taken in a pit Lamentations 4:20.

Scripture records the same fall from the outside — the burning of the house of Yahweh, the king's house, and every great house in Jerusalem 2 Kings 25:9. The poems stand on the other side of that sentence, among the survivors.

How long after, the book indicates by what it does not describe. There is no exile in Babylon, no captive community abroad, no distance. The city is present tense and the ruins are still smoking: roads to Zion mourn because nobody comes to the festivals Lamentations 1:4, and the last chapter still lives among the wreckage — paying for water, hunted for bread, foxes walking on the mountain of Zion Lamentations 5:4 Lamentations 5:18.

And there is no rebuilding anywhere in it, no decree, no return. The book ends with the question still open Lamentations 5:20–22.

So the poems belong to the years immediately following the city's destruction, written where it happened by someone who had not left. A closer date cannot be recovered, and none is needed: the book's whole force is that it was written before anything got better.

Backgrounds

The setting is a city after a siege, and the book's most unbearable details are the ordinary ones. Children ask their mothers for bread and faint in the street Lamentations 2:11–12. The nursing infant's tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth Lamentations 4:4. Those raised in purple sit on refuse heaps Lamentations 4:5. Water must be bought and firewood paid for in a city that owns neither Lamentations 5:4.

Twice the book records mothers eating their own children Lamentations 2:20 Lamentations 4:10, and neither verse is rhetorical. The law had named that horror centuries earlier as what a siege would produce Deuteronomy 28:53, and the poems report it as having happened.

The institutions are all gone. No festival, no assembly, no sabbath kept Lamentations 2:6; king and priest despised; prophets without vision Lamentations 2:9; elders no longer sitting in the gate where cases were heard Lamentations 5:14. And the leadership is blamed by name of office: the prophets saw false visions and did not uncover the people's guilt Lamentations 2:14, and the blood shed in the city is laid at the door of prophets and priests Lamentations 4:13.

One political detail is exact: they had looked to a nation that could not save Lamentations 4:17, and had given their hands to Egypt and Assyria for bread Lamentations 5:6. The alliances failed.

The recurring absence in chapter 1 is a person rather than a thing — five times, no one to comfort her Lamentations 1:2 Lamentations 1:9 Lamentations 1:17.

Theology and purpose

The book's form is its first theological statement, and the form was verified letter by letter rather than assumed. Chapters 1, 2 and 4 are alphabetic acrostics of twenty-two verses, one for each letter. Chapter 3 is a triple acrostic of sixty-six verses, three to a letter. Chapter 5 has twenty-two verses and no acrostic at all.

That is grief under discipline. A man whose city has burned writes in the most exacting form his language possessed, running the alphabet through his sorrow from beginning to end — and then, in the final poem, keeps the count and lets the pattern go.

What the poems refuse is the easy resolution in either direction. They never deny the justice of what happened: Yahweh is righteous, for I have rebelled Lamentations 1:18, and the sin is named as grievous, repeatedly, by the sufferer. And they never soften what God is said to have done — he has become as an enemy Lamentations 2:5, bent his bow, drawn back his right hand, not pitied. The book puts both in the same mouth without reconciling them.

At its center stands the one passage that turns, and it turns on memory rather than on a change in circumstances: this I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope Lamentations 3:21. What is recalled is that God's covenant love has not ended and his compassions are new every morning Lamentations 3:22–23 — the word for that love falls only twice in the book, both times in this chapter Lamentations 3:32. From it come the three statements that carry the book's theology: he will not cast off forever, he shows compassion according to the abundance of that love, and he does not afflict willingly Lamentations 3:31–33.

And then the book does not end there. It ends in a question and an unanswered charge Lamentations 5:20–22, which is the honest place for a lament to stop.

Additional notes

Note — the acrostic, verified position by position. Every verse opening in the book was checked against the Hebrew alphabet in order, and the results are exact.

Chapter 1 runs the twenty-two letters in the standard sequence, all twenty-two matching. Chapters 2 and 4 also run the full alphabet, with one deviation each: pe stands before ayin, reversing the usual order of those two letters. Chapter 3 runs the whole alphabet three verses to a letter, sixty-six verses, with the same reversal — pe at verses 46 to 48 and ayin at 49 to 51. Chapter 5 has the twenty-two verses and follows no alphabetic pattern whatever; its openings are ordinary words.

Two things follow. The reversal is not an error, since it occurs consistently in three of the four acrostic poems and never in the first. And the pattern of the book as a whole moves from strict form toward its abandonment: full alphabet, full alphabet with a variation, tripled alphabet, full alphabet again, and then a poem that keeps only the number.

Note — the fathers' sin, and where the book stops. Lamentations 5:7 says our fathers sinned, and are no more; we have borne their iniquities. It is a statement of experience, not a doctrine of inherited guilt, and the same book has the sufferer confess his own rebellion four times over Lamentations 1:18 Lamentations 1:20 Lamentations 3:42 Lamentations 5:16. A prophet writing in the same period quotes the proverb about fathers eating sour grapes precisely in order to refuse it Ezekiel 18:2. What chapter 5 records is how the ruin felt to the generation standing in it.

Outline

---

Read Lamentations · About this commentary