The Book of Lamentations

John Goldingay

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780802825421
• eBook ISBN: 9781467464048
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The book of Lamentations is one of the most vivid representations of grief and trauma in the Hebrew Bible. Written in the wake of the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonian Empire, it is comprised of five poems of twenty-two stanzas each, in a manner of tight formal unity unparalleled by any other work in the Scriptures. 

In this volume, widely respected Old Testament scholar John Goldingay analyzes these and other aspects of Lamentations while keeping a constant eye on the book's meaning and use as Christian Scripture. After a thorough introduction that explores matters of background, composition, and theology, Goldingay provides an original translation of the book from the Masoretic text along with verse-by-verse commentary.

Text and Commentary

LAMENTATIONS 1: “IS THERE PAIN LIKE MY PAIN?”

The first poem grieves over the destruction of Jerusalem by the city’s adversaries and by Yahweh, laments over the ongoing anguish of people who identify with the city, recognizes that the city’s rebellion justified Yahweh’s action, but pleads with Yahweh to look at its suffering and finally to take action against its devastators. It thus does not complain about Yahweh’s action, though it does begrudge the action of its human devastators, nor does it imply that the calamity was excessive. The description “lament” is more appropriate for Lam 1 than it is for the other poems and for most of the so-called “lament psalms,” which are characterized more by protest than lament. But accepting the propriety of Yahweh’s action does not rule out pleading with Yahweh to take a different sort of action.

Through the poem, the city is personified as an individual, and specifically as a woman. It is a key image in Lam 1, as it will be in Lam 2 and 4.¹ If “pain can only be experienced by individuals,” then speaking of the city’s pain as if it is the experience of an individual makes it possible to communicate that pain, and the personification also makes it possible for the city to become an interlocutor.² “The female personification of Jerusalem allows envisioning a relationship between the city, its inhabitants, and god.”³ Two voices engage in the grieving. Initially, the lamenting voice is that of a witness who narrates events in the third person. It represents the perspective of someone looking on at what goes on between the city and Yahweh.⁴ The equivalent voice in the second poem will actually use the verb “witness.” Then in due course, the poem reports how the city addresses Yahweh; the woman speaks for herself. The two voices are not exactly in dialogue in that they do not address one another, though they are in reaction to one another, and they express similar overlapping grief over what has happened to the city. The reporting voice speaks in support of the suffering voice.

While the poem comprises twenty-two verses beginning with the successive letters of the alphabet, it is only “rather unobtrusively” alphabetical,⁵ as there are three lines to each verse (four to v. 7). Each line comprises two cola. Thus the poem encompasses

• the witness’s descriptions of the event: vv. 1, 2e–f, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9a–d, 10a–d, 11a–d, 17;
• the witness’s descriptions of the ongoing situation: vv. 2a–d, 4;
• the witness’s implicit appeal to Yahweh: v. 10e–f;
• the city’s appeals to Yahweh and to other people: vv. 9e–f, 11e–f, 18c–d, 20a–b, 21f, 22a–b;
• the city’s descriptions of the event: vv. 12–13, 14, 15, 16c–f, 18a–b, 18e–f, 19, 20c–f, 21c–e, 22c–d;
• and the city’s descriptions of the ongoing situation: v. 16a–b, 22e–f.

At each point the poem’s perspective and spirituality correspond to those of Jeremiah; the people who came to attribute the poem to Jeremiah were not being dim-witted.

Broadly speaking, each verse in the poem is self-contained; there is no continuity from one verse to the next. The fragmentation of the poem⁶ and the jerkiness of the transitions between the verses correspond to the community’s situation.⁷ The main principle of formal structure in the poem is thus the alphabetical one, though the distinction between the two voices broadly divides it into two halves. Verses 1–11 mostly speak about Zion in the third person. But within this first half of the chapter, there is some movement from mostly factual description to more giving some account of the city’s feelings, which thus leads into two brief quotations from her words to Yahweh in vv. 9e–f and 11e–f. This development prepares the way for the focus on her words in vv. 12–22, the second half of the poem. Here Ms. Zion speaks in the first person, except in vv. 15e–f and 17. In vv. 21–22, Ms. Zion closes the chapter with a prayer for Yahweh to take action against her attackers; the verb deal acts as a bracket around vv. 12–22.⁸ But the themes of the two halves are the same, and with the exception of the way the prayer closes the chapter, the verses could be shuffled into a different order without loss.

In substance the two voices do not express two points of view; they look at events and situations in the same way. But they do present two angles on what has happened—the angle of a witness who speaks about Zion and the angle of someone who reports or imagines what Zion says. They agree that Zion has gone through a terrible experience, that she is alone and abandoned by her allies, that she cries and has no comforter, that she is humiliated, that people starved, that Yahweh put her down because of her rebellions. The difference is that the first voice speaks more about the objective nature of the event and its consequences—about the fate of the city’s leaders and their helplessness, about the feelings of priests and young people, about the inability of refugees to find somewhere to settle, about the invasion of the sanctuary, and about the loss of treasures. The first-person report focuses more on Ms. Zion’s own feelings of grief, speaks more of Yahweh’s responsibility for what happened (he is the subject of many active and forceful verbs) while acknowledging that he was in the right, and relates her appeals to people and to Yahweh to look and for Yahweh to act against her attackers.⁹ Naturally the first voice speaks in terms of what the person can see, the woman-city in terms of what she experiences and feels.¹⁰ But the overlap of the two voices, whereby Zion speaks in vv. 9 and 11 and the witness speaks in vv. 15 and 17, signals the identity of their perspective. In some ways, the poem might parallel (say) a Brit composing a poem about 9/11 or about Hurricane Katrina that seeks to enter into the experience and the aftermath of the event. Speaking in the third person as the poem does is not an indication that the witness does not identify with the city; it can make it possible to articulate things in a more objective way. Both voices presuppose that Yahweh is the real God (e.g., vv. 17–18) and both address Yahweh (e.g., vv. 9, 10, 11). And the poem is not about a foreign town with which the poet does not identify, like the prophecies about other towns and nations in Jer 46–51. The poet is a Judahite, Jerusalem is the poet’s city, and the Judahites are the poet’s people. The poem as a whole could have expressed itself much more briefly. But “when we wish to penetrate into the hearts of those whose sorrow we desire to alleviate, it is necessary that they should understand that we sympathize with them.”¹¹

Intermingling the voices of witness and woman-city thus contributes to a combining of distance, objectivity, and factuality with involvement, subjectivity, and emotion. Intermingling factual and down-to-earth with figurative and metaphorical also contributes to the combining. The implication is not that the witness’s voice simply has the one and the woman-city has the other. The difference does not mean that the witness is detached or indifferent or that the woman-city is irrational or immoderate—neither of which would be true. It is the woman-city who refers to the breaking of young men, to people going into captivity, and to priests and elders perishing, while also speaking as a groaning mother whose insides churn. It is the witness’s voice that does much of the portraying of the city as a woman, a widow, a princess, and someone crying uncontrollably in her grief, as well as speaking of exile, invasion, hunger, and the loss of the city’s treasures. Such more objective portrayal can function like a photomontage,¹² and we know that “when properly used, photography, including TV, can also nourish empathy.”¹³ Both voices also refer to the wrongdoing that properly issued in the trouble that Yahweh brought about.

This common perspective also finds expression in the way the broad formal distinction between the two halves of the poem is qualified by some overlap. The woman-city already speaks in the last line of v. 9 and the last line of v. 11. Conversely, unless the last line of v. 10 also comes from the lips of Jerusalem, there in the first half the witness personally addresses Yahweh. Other lines in vv. 1–11 also suggest the witness looking at things from the perspective of the woman-city: “Yahweh, he made her sorrowful” (v. 5); “there was no one comforting for her” (v. 9). Here and throughout, there is another sense in which the witness identifies with the city in its suffering. It compares with the book of Job setting its discussion among non-Israelites yet having them work with a perspective that refl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Introduction
• Text and Commentary