A Beautiful City Destroyed: An Introduction to Lamentations

What a strange little book is the book of Lamentations!  It consists of five laments, five psalms of pain and weeping. It deals with the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar and has been attributed to the prophet Jeremiah and in the modern Bible, follows the book of Jeremiah. Although the writing of the book fits in with Jeremiah's prophecies, there is no claim to authorship in the text and there are good arguments against Jeremiah as author, with the possible exception of the third chapter.

The first four chapters are poems written in an acrostic structure. In chapters 1, 2 and 4, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is the first letter in a verse and so there are 22 verses in each of these chapters. In chapters 1 and 2, the acrostic verse involves three lines (or three sets of short parallelisms.) In chapter 4, the acrostic verse in a single line. In chapter 3, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is the first letter of three lines in a row, and so, viewing those lines as verses, the chapter has 66 verses.

Chapters 1-4 are in the Qinah metre, a lament meter that is a long line of five beats, in a 3+2 pattern. Many of these verses consist of three lines in that meter, with loose parallelism.

The fifth chapter has 22 lines, 22 verses, but no longer follow the acrostic pattern. 

Paul House, in his commentary, points out that the narration moves back and forth between first and third person. Sometimes the prophet speaks to Jerusalem, using the second person. Like Song of Songs, it is of value to keep up with the identity of the narrator. Sometimes it is the prophet speaking, sometimes Jerusalem, sometimes YHWH.  An example of this occurs in chapter 1 in which the prophet describes Jerusalem as a weeping, destitute queen in the first half of the chapter and then has the broken queen speaking in the second half.

The Setting

See 2 Kings 24-25 for a description of the destruction of Jerusalem. The final conquest and burning of the city occurred about 586 or 587 BC. Out of that event come five psalms of lament, each with a slightly different emphasis, together giving a sad and depressing view of the anguish of the devout Jew as their society collapses.

Resources and References

My practice is to read through the text from the New International Version (NIV), copied into the blog and italicized in blue.  At the head of each blue paragraph of text I place a short title; after the text I place my thoughts or comments in black.  I begin this process with my own reactions and thoughts and then supplement these comments with gleanings from a commentary or two.

The goal of this blog is to force us to read every verse thoughtfully, getting a deep picture for the text, as a whole.

I place hyperlinks in pink, created so that one can click on a link and see the linked site open in another window... and go down a rabbit hole if you wish!

For the book of Lamentations, I have relied mainly on a commentary by H. L. Ellison in The Expositors Bible Commentary series, edited by Frank E. Gaebelein, volume 6. After a first run through the text using Ellison's commentary I then used some comments from Song of Songs and Lamentations, Volume 23B (Word Biblical Commentary) by Duane Garrett and Dr. Paul R. House. (That book was recommended by the Ligonier ministry; see here for their top five commentaries on Lamentations.)

There are other resources online.

• Amongst the online commentaries provided by EasyEnglishBible, is an online commentary on Lamentations. (The Easy English Bible commentaries are easy to read, with deliberately simple language intended for those for whom English is a second language. The Old Testament text is included in the commentary.) 
• The Gospel Coalition now has a set of online commentaries. Here is their commentary on Lamentations.
• I highly recommend the Bible Project video on Lamentations. That video is part of a larger guide to the book.

Motivation

Paul House (p. 280) accuses the modern Western church of a certain "amnesia" regarding the book of Lamentations. "The Western church has gotten addicted to success and wealth..." and so "considering Lamentations could bring the church back into the real world depicted in Scripture. In Lamentations, sin is destructive; it must be confessed or there is not forgiveness for it." House goes on to describe the Old Testament genre of laments, both in this book and in the psalms and elsewhere. It is indeed true that the modern church, except for an abridged version of one verse, does not want to read or recite Lamentations or many of the other psalms of Lament. (On a different but related issue of grief and lament, see this article on the cancer battle of a child.)

And so we hope to correct that oversight by spending five days in this book. (I am tempted to say, "Enjoy!" but that would miss the point.) Let us lament the destruction of the beautiful city of Zion and the oh-so-human stubbornness of her people.