Lamentations

← Encyclopedia

Lamentations is a short book of the Hebrew Bible — five poems mourning the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple by the armies of Babylon. In Hebrew it is called Eikhah, “How,” after the cry that opens it: How lonely sits the city that once was full of people. The catastrophe behind it is datable: in 587 or 586 BCE the Babylonians breached the walls, burned the sanctuary, and carried much of the population into exile. The book is what was made of that wreckage in words.

Its construction is exact. Four of the five poems are alphabetic acrostics, each stanza beginning with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, so that the ruin is poured into the most controlled of forms; the central third poem intensifies the device, running three lines to each letter. Scholars have long read that tension — wild grief held inside a strict scheme — as the book’s defining gesture, an attempt to give shape to what threatens to have none. The fifth poem drops the acrostic and ends not in resolution but in a question put to God about whether the rejection is final.

Jewish tradition long attributed the book to the prophet Jeremiah, who lived through the fall and whom the Greek and Latin Bibles place as its author; the work sits beside the book of Jeremiah in Christian arrangements for that reason. Most modern scholarship treats the attribution as later, reading the poems as the work of one or more anonymous poets writing in or near the ruined city. In the Hebrew canon the book stands apart from Jeremiah, among the Writings, and belongs to the group of five scrolls read at festivals.

In Judaism Lamentations is the text of Tisha b’Av, the summer fast that mourns the destruction of both Temples and other calamities; it is chanted in synagogue to a distinctive dirge melody, the congregation seated low as mourners. Christian use drew the book into the liturgy of Holy Week, where verses were set for the Tenebrae services of the days before Easter and composers from the Renaissance onward built some of their gravest music on its opening lines.

What gives the book its long reach is that it does not explain the disaster away. It names the loss, concedes the guilt its writers believed had earned it, and still presses the complaint upward — holding together, in the same breath, acceptance and protest. That refusal to settle the account is much of why it has remained a place readers go to put words to ruin.

→ Related: Temple Mount · Book Of Nehemiah · Book Of Nahum