Lamentations

An Introduction and Study Guide

Jill Middlemas

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780567696915
• eBook ISBN: 9780567696939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In this guide, Jill Middlemas introduces students to the Book of Lamentations by examining the book's structure and characteristics, covering the latest in biblical scholarship on Lamentations, including historical and interpretive issues, and considering a range of scholarly approaches. In particular, the guide provides students with an introduction to Hebrew poetry as it relates to Lamentations and includes insights from the field of trauma and postcolonial studies. With suggestions of further reading at the end of each chapter, this guide will be an useful accompaniment to study of Lamentations.

1

THE LITERATURE OF LAMENTATIONS: POETIC ART

As its English title suggests, the biblical book of Lamentations contains the laments or complaints of a grieving people captured in the evocatively emotive language of poetry. The collection is actually composed of five individual poems that correspond in their totality to the same number of chapters. Each chapter represents a complete interpretive unit that can be meaningfully understood independently of the other poems and there is no progression of thought in and through the chapters. Instead, each poem presents different perspectives on some unnamed disaster as well as different facets of the suffering and destruction that took place akin in some respects to a montage (Morse 2003). In literary studies, the poems of Lamentations are regarded as paratactic, that is, when images, themes and concepts are found side by side, jumbled associatively, with no clear rationale (Dobbs-Allsopp 2002: 12–14). As different speakers raise their voices and even interrupt each other in order to express reactions to and conceptions of tragedy, they also convey a sense of the enormity, perhaps even the totality, of a great loss and the accompanying sorrow experienced.

As poetry, the five chapters of Lamentations invite us to explore in greater detail the artistry and characteristic features of their expression. At the same time, it is also evident that although the five poems seem to represent isolated responses to a catastrophic event, they have been gathered together to form a single collection. The unified nature of the poems begs the question of its composition history. A literary examination of the book of Lamentations as literature, then, entails attention to the nature of the poetry itself as well as an exploration of issues related to its composition history, like those of form, genre and transmission. Here, we will consider Lamentations as poetry, while we turn to form, genre, and evidence of composition and shaping in the next chapter.

LAMENTATIONS AS POETRY

The five poems that comprise the book of Lamentations represent moving poetic portrayals of defeat, distress and despair that are similar in style to a number of psalms found in the Psalter. In the Bible, poetry is the mode of expression typically used by individuals and groups to convey a depth of feeling. It is found in the stirring exclamation of victory in the Song of the Sea (Exod. 15), of significant loss in Rachel’s weeping over her children (Jer. 31:15), and in declarations of and musings about love in the Song of Songs. The most concentrated use of poetry is found in the Psalter, which serves as a repository of prayers used by a congregation in public recital.

As with the psalms, the use of poetry to express the sentiments captured by the chapters in Lamentations suggests a strong connection to cultic use. As such, the individual poems seem to represent the actual prayers of people who were in mourning, angry, repentant, depressed and even fighting for survival. Notably, figurative language, the economy of expression, repetition and other characteristic features of poetry serve as an aid to memory. At the same time, poetry offers an evocatively graphic and emotive form that assists a community and its members to express depths of emotion and, in this case, the myriad reactions that accompany systemic and societal collapse. On the one hand, then, the poems of Lamentations function as catharsis in that they “may enable survivors, and their descendants, to remember and contemplate their loss – not coolly, not without emotion – but without unbearable and measureless grief” (Hillers 1992: 4–5). On the other hand, though, the nature of poetic expression that swirls images together suggests that it is timeless as well as memorable so that the poetry of Lamentations remains meaningful for and applicable to new experiences of loss, disaster and abandonment for individuals and communities (Mintz 1984: 17–48; Salters 2010: 15–16). Taken together, then, the poetic artistry of Lamentations corresponds to the needs of liturgical recital and stems less from aesthetic concerns. The poetry of Lamentations represents personal and communal cries of anguish and grief expressed with the economic use of descriptive language by people of faith in the context of worship.

The chapters of Lamentations have long been thought to represent highly skilled examples of biblical poetry. The study of biblical poetry is fraught with a great deal of uncertainty (for an accessible introduction, see Alter 1985; Schökel 1988). The actual system of accents, vowels and syllabification remains a mystery because the vocalization of Hebrew manuscripts took place at least a millennium later than the original texts were produced. From this perspective, the sound of biblical poetry will remain elusive. Another compounding difficulty is that poetry was not distinguished in the Hebrew manuscripts, which not only blurs the lines between prose and poetry, but also makes the exact determination of line breaks in poems when isolated a matter of conjecture. Although some help has come from comparative Semitic studies, especially from comparisons to poetry from the Northwest Semitic Ugaritic culture, there are a number of aspects that will remain not only unknown, but also impossible to recover (Alter 1985: 4).

What is certainly true of Lamentations is that the poems in the collection lack features found in prose compositions and epic literature which evidence narrative elements such as plot, argumentation, and the description and interaction of characters. When seen in this way, the poems in Lamentations can be profitably classified as lyric poetry, which is characterized by a lack of narrative devices as well as the dependence on the use of language to convey meaning (Dobbs-Allsopp 2002: 12–20). Although there is a lack of consensus about the formal characteristics of biblical poetry, it is possible, nevertheless, to isolate a few features that enable greater appreciation of the artistry of Lamentations (see also the discussions in Hillers 1992; Dobbs-Allsopp 2002; Berlin 2008). Since the poems of Lamentations are carefully constructed literary masterpieces, “An appreciation of [their] lyricism is the key to the structure and dynamics of the individual poems, to the way in which the sequence as a whole coheres and interacts, and even to how the poet articulates theological interests” (Dobbs-Allsopp 2002: 6). In Wilfred Watson’s now-classic study of biblical Hebrew poetry, he shows how poems have external and internal structure, whereby different techniques are used to organize the entire poem or elements within it (Watson 1984). The following introduction considers matters related to the external and internal structure of the poems of Lamentations as well as internal stylistic features of the poetry itself in order to convey a sense of its distinctiveness and beauty.

EXTERNAL STRUCTURE

Alphabetic and acrostic poems

One of the most striking external structuring devices found in the book of Lamentations is the use of the alphabetic acrostic (Watson 2001: 190–5; cf. Brug 1990). The twenty-two consonants of the Hebrew alphabet from aleph to taw are used to introduce the lines of the strophes in chapters 1–4. The acrostic is a highly artificial scheme imposed on the poems that attests to its written rather than oral or aural character. Watson, for example, notes that an acrostic is “intended to appeal to the eye rather than the ear” (Watson 2001: 191). In the early part of the twentieth century, J. P. Wiles reproduced the acrostic poems and metre for English readers (Wiles 1908: 123). A few lines from the first chapter exhibit the artistry of Lamentations and the skill of the poet:

Lamentations 1

Verse 1	Alas, lone city! Where is now thy throng?
	Where is thy majesty, thou widowed queen?
	Where, empress of the lands, thy freedom strong?
Verse 2	By night thine eye with streaming sorrow flows:
	No lover loves thee now, nor shares thy grief;
	Thy friends are false, yea, all thy friends are foes.
Verse 3	Canst thou by flight escape thy bonds and pain?
	Or seekest thou among the heathen rest?
	Thy swift pursuer scorns the effort vain.
Verse 4a	Deserted are thy feasts, thy ways forlorn …

The use of the acrostic actually dominates the structure of each chapter in Lamentations except for the last, where it unceremoniously disappears. Although not an acrostic, the fifth chapter is still associated with the Hebrew alphabet and interpreters consider it an alphabetic poem because its total number of verses equals twenty-two or the amount of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. Furthermore, its appearance within a collection otherwise determined by and explicitly associated with the acrostic suggests that with its twenty-two verses it should be classified as alphabetic.

Additional matters of style connect the poems on the basis of external characteristics. Three poems, chapters 1, 2 and 4, are stylistically and thematically similar. They each begin with the same Hebrew word ʾêkah (‘how’, ‘alas’) and focus on the consequences of the fall of Jerusalem from different angles. In addition, chapter 1 contains the expected sequence of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, but chapters 2, 3 and 4 reveal a reversal between two of the letters in the central verses of the poem. Instead of the more common order of ayin before peh found in chapter 1, chapters 2–4 evidence the inverted sequence peh before ayin (2:16-17; 3:46-51; 4:16-17). Extra-biblical inscriptions provide evidence that the order of the Hebrew alphabet varied (Cross 1980: 8–15), so the variance could be attributed to the instability of the alphabetic sequence. At the same time, however, the use of the alphabet and acrostic in Lamentations suggests a degree of intentionality and purpose in its composition that speaks against a random change related to the lack of a fixed alphabetic sequence at the time of composition. What appears to be the case is that the striking change in the order of the alphabet in chapters 2–4 represents an intentional choice by which the poet signalled the introduction to the collection. Arguably, the striking similarities between chapters 1 and 2 in terms of theme, acrostic use, number of lines and two speaking voices provided the reason for a visible way to distinguish the first poem from the second as a means to reinforce its priority. The distinctive order in the second chapter, then, was carried forward into the subsequent acrostic poems in chapters 3 and 4 (Renkema 1998: 47–9).

There are slight variations in the use of the acrostic and the number of lines in the individual poems. In chapters 1 and 2, the acrostic introduces a three-line strophe, (v. 1 aleph-x-x, v. 2 beth-x-x, v. 3 gimmel-x-x etc.) that yields sixty-six lines in total. Only very rarely is the three-line strophe extended to four lines in these chapters (1:7; 2:19). In the third chapter, where the only clear articulation of hope is found, the acrostic use is noticeably intensified. Each letter of the alphabet introduces three short lines apiece (v. 1 aleph, v. 2 aleph, v. 3 aleph, v. 4 beth, v. 5 beth, v. 6 beth and so on). On the basis of the frequency of the use of the letters of the alphabet, interpreters sometimes refer to the third poem as a triple acrostic. Although each letter of the alphabet appears more frequently, the total number of verses in the third poem still equals sixty-six lines. These features suggest that the third chapter represents the stylistic, if not also thematic, highpoint of the collection. The fourth poem follows the general pattern of chapters 1 and 2, but the acrostic introduces a strophe of two lines (v. 1 aleph-x, v. 2 beth-x, v. 3 gimmel-x and so on), which results in forty-four verses. The fifth chapter breaks free from the acrostic form, but remains, nevertheless, inextricably linked to the alphabet by containing twenty-two evenly balanced lines.

Acrostic poems are attested to in ancient Near Eastern (ANE) literature as well as elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. The acrostic form is found in Akkadian, Egyptian, Ugaritic and paleo-Canaanite writing (Soll 1989; Hillers 1992: 24–5 nn, 25–7). In Ugaritic, the acrostic is not found in poetry, but rather appears in compositions that seem to be training exercises for students learning to write the alphabet. Because of the nature of their writing systems, the acrostic in Egyptian and Mesopotamian compositions were not alphabetic. In Egyptian, corresponding stanzas opened with the same word and in Akkadian the individual stanzas began with the same syllable. In the Old Testament, the acrostic is found relatively infrequently, and sometimes only partially. Examples appear in a number of Psalms (Pss. 9–10 when read as one, 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119 and 145), Proverbs (Prov. 31:10-31) and in the deutero-canonical book of Sirach (Sir. 51:13-20) as well as in a partial acrostic in Nahum (Nah. 1:2-8) (Watson 2001: 192–200).

Various proposals have been advanced to explain the use of the alphabet and the acrostic in Lamentations. Older arguments, generally discounted today, regarded the acrostic form as a late and stylistically inferior imposition on poems handed down in tradition and cultic use. Equally less persuasive have been arguments based on the belief that the letters of the alphabet possessed the magical ability to ward off evil or that the acrostic served a pedagogical function to aid teaching the alphabet to the young as in the Ugaritic examples. Slightly more persuasive have been arguments in favour of the use of the acrostic to aid recital in the cult, but its lack in the fifth chapter speaks against this view. Watson suggested two likely explanations. The first has to do with the attempt to convey either a sense of completeness of the survey of the topic of destruction and accompanying despair and human suffering or the finality of the execution and experience thereof. The second reason focuses on the use of the acrostic to display the skill of the poet. Both explanations have received varying degrees of support in the literature, although the idea of completeness tends to have a stronger following among interpreters.

The acrostic and alphabetic poems represent the work of significant literary and thematic skill. At the same time, the use of the alphabet that either dictates the contents of each poem (chs. 1–4) or informs its composition (ch. 5) functions as a stylistic way to convey something about the message of each chapter and the collection as a whole. The acrostic provides a framework for what is otherwise a senseless mishmash of emotion, depictions of human suffering, and disjointed statements of painful exclamation, protest, complaint, hope and hopelessness. As such, the skilful use of the acrostic and the related alphabetic form freezes the many disparate perspectives that are found in ongoing rolling testimony. A number of interpreters connect the use of the acrostic and alphabetic poems to the purposes of the poet. For example, the acrostic either serves as a means to highlight the message of each poem at the central point of the alphabet or the book itself (Johnson 1985; Heater 1992), conveys movement through the poems (Dobbs-Allsopp 2002: 18; Thomas 2013: 82), or focuses ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• Introductions
• 1 The literature of Lamentations: Poetic art
• 2 The literature of Lamentations: Composition history and matters of form
• 3 The historical background of Lamentations
• 4 Theological and contextual readings in Lamentations
• 5 Readings in Lamentations
• Works cited by chapter
• Bibliography
• Index of author
• Index of reference
• Imprint