Lamentations
Author: Jeremiah
Lamentations is a set of funeral poems for Jerusalem after the Babylonian destruction.
Outline
The city as a widow (1)
Jerusalem sits alone, and the poem says her suffering came after her transgressions.
The Lord’s anger (2)
The destruction of the temple, the wall, and the princes is described as the Lord’s own act.
The man who has seen affliction (3)
A personal lament turns on the steadfast love of the Lord and a call to examine one’s ways.
The siege and the prayer (4–5)
The last poems remember hunger in the city and ask the Lord to restore his people.
Key verses
Lamentations 1:1
The city that was full of people is pictured sitting alone like a widow.
Lamentations 3:22–23
In the middle of the poems, the speaker says the Lord’s mercies are new every morning.
Lamentations 5:21
The book ends by asking the Lord to turn the people back so they may be restored.
Lamentations is what the fall of Jerusalem sounds like after the narrative is over. Jeremiah has told the kings the city will burn. Lamentations does not argue the case again. It mourns. Five poems, four of them acrostics that walk the Hebrew alphabet, give the grief a form when the speakers can hardly order their thoughts any other way. Tradition names Jeremiah as the author. The poems themselves speak as the city, as a man who has seen affliction, and as a congregation. The book is short because a funeral is not a history.
The first poem looks at the city from outside and then lets her speak. She was full of people and is now like a widow. Her friends have become her enemies. The roads to Zion mourn because no one comes to the appointed feasts. She says the Lord has afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions. The poem does not treat the siege as a random disaster or as Babylon’s private cruelty only. Babylon is the instrument. The grief includes confession. Children have gone into captivity before the enemy, and the poet says the comforters who should have refreshed her soul are far from her.
The second poem is harder, because it lingers on the Lord as the one who did this. He has cast down the beauty of Israel. He has swallowed up her palaces. The law is no more, and the prophets find no vision from the Lord. The elders sit in silence. Infants and sucklings swoon in the streets. The poet asks what he can take to witness for the city, and then he tells the wall to let tears run down like a river. If a reader wants Lamentations only for the mercies that are new every morning, this chapter will not let that line be cheap. The morning mercies are spoken by someone who has already described starving children.
Chapter 3 is the turn, and it is a turn inside the same suffering, not a denial of it. I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. He is hedged in. He has forgotten prosperity. Then he says he recalls something to mind and therefore has hope. It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed. His compassions do not fail. They are new every morning. Great is his faithfulness. The Lord is good to those who wait for him. The poem then tells the community to search their ways and turn again to the Lord. Waiting is not passivity. It is the alternative to the despair that says God has finally forgotten.
The fourth poem returns to the siege with a colder eye. Gold is dimmed. The precious sons of Zion are reckoned as earthen pitchers. The punishment of the daughter of my people is greater than the punishment of Sodom, the poet says, because Sodom fell in a moment and this death was prolonged. Edom is warned not to rejoice. The fifth poem drops the acrostic and prays. The inheritance is turned to strangers. Servants rule. The crown has fallen. The joy of the heart has ceased. The last request is simple: turn us to yourself, O Lord, and we shall be turned. Renew our days as of old. The final line of the book, in the Hebrew order many translations keep, does not pretend the prayer has already been answered. It asks whether the Lord has utterly rejected them, and whether his anger will continue forever. Lamentations teaches a people how to speak to God when the temple is ash and the answer has not come.