Introduction

The only reasonably safe conclusion one can draw about the origins of the Book of Lamentations is the likelihood that it was composed in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586 B.C.E. A tradition that goes back to Late Antiquity attributes the book to the prophet Jeremiah. The obvious grounds for this attribution, embraced by both Jews and Christians, are that Jeremiah repeatedly and grimly prophesied the demise of the kingdom and the exile and that he himself lived through the Babylonian conquest with all its depredations. Jeremiah’s authorship has not been accepted by modern scholars, and the poetry of these laments over the fate of Zion is altogether different stylistically and formally from the poetry one finds in Jeremiah.

Lamentations is unique among books of the Bible in that four of its five chapters are composed as alphabetic acrostics, with the third chapter being a triple acrostic, showing three lines that begin with each of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet in their conventional sequence. Even the fifth chapter, which is not an acrostic, comprises twenty-two lines of poetry, the number of letters in the alphabet. The formal differences among the five chapters have led some analysts to conclude that this is a collection of poems by five different poets, but that is not an absolutely necessary inference because the same elegist might have easily been impelled to try his hand at somewhat different forms. Another possible hypothesis is that the editor of the work of a single acrostic poet concluded the book with a poem of his own in which, perhaps not feeling up to the formal challenge of the acrostic, he made do with a poem that had the same number of lines as there were letters in the alphabet. In any case, it is unclear why the alphabetic acrostic form was felt appropriate for these laments. Could it be that the progress from aleph to taw was felt to imply a comprehensive listing of all the disasters that had befallen the people? Might it reflect the presence of a single elegist who simply was drawn to alphabetic acrostics? Might it be a mnemonic to facilitate public recitation?

If we look across at the psalms that are composed as alphabetic acrostics, we may conclude that the acrostic form encouraged the deployment of a great deal of formulaic language, giving us boilerplate where we might hope for poetry. The most egregious instance is Psalm 119, a sevenfold alphabetic acrostic that is little more than conventional formulas from beginning to end. Interestingly, the acrostic form for the most part does not have this consequence in Lamentations. Some of the language definitely echoes phraseology and imagery of the poetry of doom in the Prophets—the ways of Zion mourning and desolate, the implacable enemy gloating in his triumph, virgins ravished, babes wasting away in the famine. Yet, as the poems drive inexorably from the first letter of the alphabet to the last, they accumulate many powerful images of devastation. Representing God as an implacable enemy drawing His bow against Israel sounds more like an anticipation of Job than a reminiscence of the Prophets. The notion of the surrounding peoples called to Jerusalem like festival pilgrims to destroy rather than to celebrate, to raise in the sacred precincts a fierce cry instead of the festive songs, is a bitter expression of the pain of the loss of the Temple, even without images of crashing roofs and flaming walls. Cannibalism under the duress of starvation in time of siege is a recurrent theme in prophecies of doom, but here that ghastly act is twice given a horrifying immediacy: “Should women eat their fruit, / the dandled babes?” The speaker in these laments, who is sometimes a horror-stricken observer and sometimes the collective voice of the people, conveys his sense of distress through an anguished physicality: “He wasted my flesh and my skin, / He shattered my bones.” Or again, “He made my teeth crunch down on gravel, / crushed me in the dust.” Repeatedly, the poet conveys arresting images of a once glorious nation reduced to utter wretchedness, scarcely alive: “Their mien was darker than black, / they are not recognized in the streets. / Their skin is shriveled on their bones, / become as dry as wood.” If sometimes the poems look like the deployment of the familiar formulas of the Hebrew poetry of disaster, lines such as the ones just quoted express a sense of a poet who has seen with his own eyes all the horrors of the siege and the consequent destruction of Jerusalem. The figures of the blind in the streets of the city, smeared with blood from the corpses they stumble over at every step, whether based in actual observation or, more probably, poetic invention, are another kind of vivid vehicle for representing the terrible extent of the slaughter as the city is overrun by murderous invaders.

Against this panorama of horror, the elegist, not limiting himself to keening over the destruction, repeatedly affirms his faith in a just God Who has punished Israel for its transgressions but Who in the end will redeem it and exact retribution from its enemies for their cruel excesses. Lamentations, like most good literature, is a strong response to the historical circumstances for which it was framed while at the same time speaking to analogous situations in other times and places. Its catalogue of horrors is something that, alas, we continue to see reenacted in various guises across the globe. Its faith in the prospect of a restored order of justice is a sustaining belief that humankind may always need in the face of massive devastation and the traumatic displacement of exile. One readily understands why it is that Jewish tradition fixed the recitation of these five laments as an annual ritual, not merely in commemoration of the destruction of the First Temple or the Second but also as a way of fathoming the ghastly recurrent violence that has darkened two millennia of history.