Lamentations

What This Book Is

Five poems written over the ruins of Jerusalem, refusing to look away from the horror, and finding at the exact centre a statement of mercy.

Overview

Lamentations is a small book about total loss. Jerusalem has fallen. The temple is burned. People have starved during the siege, and the poems do not spare the reader any of it.

The form matters. Four of the five chapters are acrostics, each verse beginning with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and chapter 3 triples it. Grief is poured into the strictest possible structure, which is what people often do when everything else has come apart. There is something to hold onto in the form itself.

The poems personify the city as a widow sitting alone, once great and now without comforters. They accuse. They confess. They ask God to look. They do not offer premature consolation, and they do not tell anyone to cheer up.

At the exact centre of the middle poem, at the point of maximum symmetry, come the lines that most people know: his mercies never come to an end, they are new every morning, great is your faithfulness. That statement is not a conclusion reached at the end of the book. It sits in the middle of the wreckage, surrounded on both sides by more grief, and the book returns to lament immediately afterwards.

The final chapter ends unresolved, asking God to restore them unless he has utterly rejected them. There is no tidy finish.

Structure

• Chapter 1: The widowThe city sits alone, with no one to comfort her.
• Chapter 2: The angerThe disaster named as judgment, without flinching.
• Chapter 3: The centreThe deepest lament, and the statement of new mercies.
• Chapter 4: The siegeThe horror of hunger inside the walls.
• Chapter 5: The prayerA community plea, ending unresolved.

Themes

Why It Matters

Lamentations gives the Bible's people permission to grieve out loud and at length. It shows that faith and devastation can occupy the same page, and that hope does not require the situation to have improved. Many Christians read it during Holy Week; Jewish communities read it annually on the fast of Tisha B'Av. For anyone in the middle of loss, its refusal to rush is itself a kindness.

How to Read It

• Read it aloud, slowly. It is meant to be voiced, not skimmed.
• Notice where the famous verses in chapter 3 sit: in the middle, not at the end.
• Do not look for resolution in the last chapter. There isn't one, and that is honest.
• Use it when someone you love is grieving and you have no words.

Key Verse

Did You Know?

• Four of the five chapters are alphabetic acrostics; the third has three verses per letter.
• The hymn Great Is Thy Faithfulness takes its title from chapter 3.
• In Jewish tradition the book is read on Tisha B'Av, remembering the destruction of both temples.

Where to Start Reading