Great Is Thy Faithfulness?

Reading Lamentations as Sacred Scripture

Parry, Thomas

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781498275330
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Lamentations is a book that has never had a place of honor at the table of Christian spirituality. This is an unfortunate state of affairs because its challenging poetry has much to offer. This volume explores the how the biblical book of Lamentations may be engaged afresh so that it can function as Holy Scripture for the ekklesia. Four main chapters consider issues in hermeneutics, exegesis, the use of Lamentations in worship, and pastoral reflections. These chapters have been supplemented by seventeen reception history studies written by an international team of Jewish and Christian scholars. These studies introduce a wide range of interpretations and uses of the book of Lamentations from throughout the history of Judaism and Christianity. They include examinations of the use of Lamentations in Isaiah 40-55, the Targum, Rashi, and contemporary Jewish thought, the Patristic period, Calvin, Jewish and Christian worship, music, Rembrandt, and psychological and feminist interpretation. Appendices include new English translations of LXX Lamentations and Targum Lamentations.

1

Holy Scripture and Hermeneutics

Lamentations in Critical and Theological Reflection

Heath A. Thomas

Introduction

Lamentations remains a difficult book to appropriate as Holy Scripture, with its strident protestation against God (Lam 2:20), presentation of divine violence (Lam 1:15; 2:1–10; 3:1–17), as well as vivid images of cannibalism and rape (Lam 1:10; 4:10). How can this book be in any way holy? This is a delicate question, to say the least, with responses varying from an outright rejection of the text to its full-orbed embrace. The purpose of this chapter is to lay out the parameters of what it has meant, as well as what it might mean, to identify Lamentations as Holy Scripture.

To do so adequately, it is necessary to explore how the text of Lamentations has been read. So the first half of this chapter will explore how Lamentations has been read in the academy. Academic reading practices of the Bible have been influential in recent times, as Kugel’s How to Read the Bible demonstrates.1 An effect of critical readings, however, has been a fragmentation of focus, so that the Bible may be seen in various ways, such as a cultural artifact, literature, history, or even a political tool. The variety arises in part from particular interests in these different critical approaches that act as “lenses” that shape interpretative practice.

One should note that these approaches do not inevitably eventuate into appropriating Lamentations as a word from God. In my view, it is necessary to become cognizant of the literary, political, historical, and cultural aspects of Lamentations (or the Bible for that matter), and this is valuable in its own right, but still there remains another move to be made to begin to understand the book as Holy Scripture. So after the survey of academic approaches, it will be appropriate to press further to see exactly how Lamentations as “Holy Scripture” has been understood, with particular emphasis given to the hermeneutical “stance” of the question: “How have (and can) people interpret Lamentations as a sacred text?” This query necessitates deeper reflection regarding the need for an interpreter to embody or adopt certain religious or theological viewpoints (be they Jewish or Christian) in order to coherently construe the text of Lamentations.

Hermeneutical “Lenses” in Lamentations Research

How does one read Lamentations? This may seem, at first, a rather innocuous query, with a rather simple answer—“in many ways!” In the academy especially, Lamentations has been read as: history, political propaganda, quality literature, a cultural artifact, or even a tool of social oppression that needs to be jettisoned. This list is not exhaustive, but accounts for some major reading practices.2 Three major interpretative “lenses” however, have focused reading Lamentations particularly in the past century: history, literature, and culture.

Lamentations and History

One may read the Lamentations as history, or at least as a window through which one may view history, and then focus upon its particular facets such as religion, social structure, or politics, and so on. Reading the Bible as history has a rather distinguished pedigree, especially in the last 300 or so years. But the difficulty in this enterprise, of course, is how one conceives of, and then presents, the very concept of history and its relationship to the Bible!3 Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative exhibits the force that this reading practice exerted in the modern era (as well as its drawbacks).4

Even before the eighteenth century, historical reading certainly was advocated. For early Christian hermeneutics, a tension existed between those who emphasized reading the Bible historically—with a focus upon real “flesh-and-blood” events through the course of time (the Antiochene School)—and those who stressed symbolic and allegorical readings (the Alexandrian School), which moved beyond a purely historical accent.5 The Reformation is well known for refocusing interpretation upon literal and historical realities of the Bible, so as to see in what historical timeframe the texts spoke and why, and what information might be gained from this.6 Although it has a rich history of its own, reading the Bible as history remains a complicated enterprise indeed.

In Lamentations study, this focus upon history surfaces in two primary ways. On the one hand, there has been a concerted effort to read Lamentations alongside the book of Jeremiah, and through Jeremiah’s voice, as the liturgical text of the exilic period in Judah. As a historical text, it speaks of the people’s experience of pain concerning the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem in 587 BCE. This view is supported by ancient versions, especially the old Greek version of Lamentations (LXX), which evinces a prologue to the text that explicitly conjoins Lamentations, Jeremiah, and the aftermath of exile, whilst something similar appears in the prologue to the Aramaic version of Lamentations (Targum).7 The Greek tradition in particular reads the whole of Lamentations filtered through the historical framework of the trauma of Judahite exile as seen through the eyes of Jeremiah the prophet. Notably, however, the MT and Qumran Lamentations do not evince the prologue apparent in the LXX Lam and Targ Lam, leaving this explicit linkage somewhat looser than in these traditions. This point is significant if one holds the MT as being close to the original Hebrew parent text, as it reveals something of theological interpretation going on in the versions, especially in regard to the LXX Lam.

However, recent work understands Lamentations’ historical context(s) differently. Historical research in this vein ascertains disparate views of God as well as different genres, perspectives, and the like in Lamentations and then charts deviation upon a historical trajectory. In this way, theological variance is seen to be embedded within different historical strata of the text. Through rational assessment, the historian traces textual discrepancies and then maps out theological development along with the growth of the text.8 For this methodology, historical reconstruction is the clue for theological interpretation. Gottwald and Albrektson, for instance, attempt to understand Lamentations in light of either theological traditions in dialogue in its poetry (Albrektson) or a particular theological tradition attempting to cope with the hard reality of Jerusalem’s destruction (Gottwald).9 Both monographs centre upon the presence and nature of hope in Lamentations, and how it arises theologically in the text. Gottwald looks at this question from the perspective of both the history of Jerusalem and the presence of the Deuteronomic tradition in Judah at the time of Jerusalem’s destruction. Albrektson, like Gottwald, also seeks to understand the theological issues in Lamentations by locating them within the history of Jerusalem. However, Albrektson sees within Lamentations another purported tradition (Zion theology) being set in critical dialogue with Deuteronomic theology.

Other historical approaches generally argue that the book’s five chapters (or portions therein) are written at different times and therefore reflect different views of the disaster of exile. Often, this means that Lamentations 1, 2, and 4 are of a piece, whilst Lamentations 5 and 3 represent later texts, reflecting somewhat different theological views. Brandscheidt advocates this view, and she does so by exploring what she understands to be the redactional history of the book.10 Westermann somewhat differently focuses instead upon on the development of the theology of the Lamentations by observing early oral formulation and later written redaction.11 Perhaps the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Holy Scripture and Hermeneutics
• Chapter 2: Outrageous Demonstrations of Grace
• Chapter 3: Wrestling with Lamentations in Christian Worship
• Chapter 4: Confession and Complaint
• Appendix 1: A Translation of LXX Lamentations
• Appendix 2: A Translation of Targum Lamentations
• Appendix 3: Lamentations Rabbati on Lamentations 3:1–21
• Appendix 4: Rashi on Lamentations 3:1–21
• Appendix 5: Calvin on Lamentations 3:1–23