Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Lamentations · About this commentary
I Am the Man Who Has Seen Affliction
Lamentations 3:1-18
1 I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. · WEB
The central poem drops the city and speaks as one person, and the first eighteen verses give God no name at all.
The third poem changes everything about the book's voice. The city is gone as a speaker; in her place stands a single man: I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of his wrath.
This chapter also changes form. It is a triple acrostic, three verses to each letter of the alphabet, sixty-six in all — the most rigorously constructed passage in the book, and it carries its most personal material.
The first eighteen verses are a catalogue of what has been done to him, and the images are of enclosure and pursuit. Walled about so he cannot get out; his chain made heavy; his ways walled up with cut stone; his paths made crooked. Then hunting: a bear lying in wait, a lion in hiding, a bow bent with the speaker himself as the target Lamentations 3:10–12.
One detail is worth marking. Through all eighteen verses God is never named — only he, forty times over in pronouns and verbs. The name Yahweh does not appear until verse 18, and it appears there in a sentence of despair: my strength has perished, along with my expectation from Yahweh.
Verse 8 is the sharpest complaint in the book: when I cry and call for help, he shuts out my prayer. Not that God does not hear, but that the way is deliberately blocked — the same picture as the cloud through which no prayer passes Lamentations 3:44.
The section ends at its lowest point, with hope named as the thing that has died. What follows is the turn.
settled What this mark means