Lamentations
Five poems written over the ruins of Jerusalem after the Babylonians burnt it in 586 BC — not a history of the siege but the sound a city makes afterwards. The Hebrew title is its first word, 'ekah, the cry that opens a funeral dirge: HOW. And the book is built with extraordinary care for something so raw: four of the five poems are alphabetic acrostics, each verse beginning with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the middle poem triples it, three verses per letter, sixty-six in all. Grief here is given a shape from A to Z. At the exact centre of that centre poem sit the three verses everyone knows — his mercies are new every morning — and they are surrounded on both sides by some of the bleakest writing in Scripture, which is the point rather than a contradiction. The book blames no one but itself for the catastrophe: Yahweh is righteous, for I have rebelled. And it does not end well. The last poem drops the acrostic, prays to be restored, and stops on a sentence nobody has managed to soften.
Themes
- How — The funeral cry that opens poems 1, 2 and 4, and gives the book its Hebrew name. It is the sound made at a graveside, used here over a city.
- There is no one to comfort her — Said five times in the first poem alone. The absence of a comforter is Lamentations' most repeated observation, and it is what makes the book a lament rather than a sermon.
- The Lord has become as an enemy — Chapter 2 is a list of what God did, in the active voice — bent his bow, swallowed up, cast off his altar. The book will not attribute the disaster to Babylon's strength or to bad luck.
- New every morning — The one turn, at the structural centre (3:22-24): steadfast love that has not ended, mercies renewed daily, and 'great is your faithfulness' — spoken by someone who has just described himself as walled in and shot at.
- Yahweh is righteous — The confession that keeps the poems from being complaint: the city fell because it sinned, and the prophets who told it otherwise are named as part of the reason (2:14; 4:13).
- The acrostic — Twenty-two verses for twenty-two letters, four times over, with the middle poem tripled — and then the fifth poem keeps the count and drops the alphabet, as though the form itself finally gives way.
- An ending that does not resolve — The last line is a conditional so hard that synagogue practice repeats verse 21 after it, rather than close the reading on it.
Outline
- 1. How the city sits solitary — The widowed city described, then given a voice — and the confession that Yahweh is righteous, with no comforter anywhere in the poem.
- 2. The Lord has become as an enemy — What God did, verb by verb, to his own sanctuary and city — and mothers holding children who are dying in the street.
- 3. New every morning — A triple acrostic in one man's voice: walled in, shot at, fed on gravel — and at the centre of it, mercies that never come to an end.
- 4. How the gold has become dim — Then and now, held side by side: nobles purer than snow now unrecognisable, and a famine that did what Deuteronomy warned it would.
- 5. Renew our days as of old — The acrostic drops away and the book becomes a prayer — 22 lines, a plea to be turned back, and a last sentence that refuses to console.
Chapters
- Lamentations 1 — The first poem walks around a city the way mourners walk around a body. Jerusalem is a widow, a princess put to forced labour, a woman whose friends have all left — and halfway through, she stops being described and starts speaking, which is when the poem turns from observation into testimony.
- Lamentations 2 — The second poem answers the question the first one raised, and the answer is unbearable: he bent his bow like an enemy, he swallowed up, he cast off his altar, he abhorred his sanctuary. God is the subject of nearly every verb in the first ten verses, and Babylon is barely mentioned.
- Lamentations 3 — The centre of the book, and the only poem in a single human voice: I am the man who has seen affliction. Sixty-six verses, three per letter of the alphabet — and at the exact middle, twenty verses into the darkness and with forty still to come, the sentence about mercies that are new every morning.
- Lamentations 4 — The fourth poem works by before-and-after. Gold gone dull, princes worth their weight in gold now treated as clay pots, nobles once whiter than milk now unrecognisable in the street — and the cause named plainly at the end: the sins of her prophets and the iniquities of her priests.
- Lamentations 5 — The last poem drops the acrostic — twenty-two lines, but the alphabet is gone — and stops describing to start asking. It is the only chapter addressed to God from beginning to end, and its final sentence is the hardest ending of any book in the Bible.