Lamentations

Overview

Five poems over the ruins of a city. The temple is burned, the walls are down, the king is blinded and gone, and people who once ate delicacies are searching rubbish for food. The book does not look away from any of it.

Four of the five poems are acrostics, running through the Hebrew alphabet — grief given a shape so it can be carried. At the exact center, in the longest poem, comes the line about mercies new every morning.

Background

Jerusalem fell in 586 BC after an eighteen-month siege. The book reads like an eyewitness account, and Jewish tradition assigns it to Jeremiah, who was there.

It has been read every year on the ninth of Av, the day both temples are remembered as having been destroyed. It is a book the community kept for the purpose of mourning well.

Key themes

• Grief spoken honestly, without tidying it up.
• The disaster is deserved, and saying so is part of the lament.
• God’s mercies are new every morning, even here.
• Hope is a decision made in the dark: therefore have I hope.
• The last word is a question, not a resolution.

Outline

1. The city sits aloneChapter 1

   Jerusalem as a widow, with none to comfort her.

2. The Lord’s handChapter 2

   The destruction traced not to Babylon but to God’s anger.

3. I am the manChapter 3

   Personal affliction, then the turn: it is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed.

4. Then and nowChapter 4

   Gold dimmed, children starving, and the sins of prophets and priests.

5. A prayerChapter 5

   Remember, O LORD, what is come upon us — turn thou us unto thee.

Key passages

• Lamentations 1:1 How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!
• Lamentations 1:12 Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?
• Lamentations 2:11 Mine eyes do fail with tears.
• Lamentations 3:21-23 This I recall to my mind — his compassions fail not; they are new every morning.
• Lamentations 3:26 It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait.
• Lamentations 5:21 Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned.

Christ in Lamentations

The man of sorrows who sat over Jerusalem and wept for it was quoting this grief without saying so. Chapter 1’s question — is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? — has long been read on Good Friday, and the mercies that are new every morning are the ground the cross stands on.

Reading it

• Read it aloud, slowly; it is a funeral song and rushes badly.
• Notice the acrostic shape: grief given a form so it can be finished.
• Read chapter 3 whole rather than lifting verses 22–23 out of it.