Lamentations

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The book opens on a single word held up to the light: Eikhah — “How.” It is the word a mourner uses standing over a body, and the Hebrew Bible names the book after it, as one might name a wound after the cry that escapes it. How lonely sits the city that once was full of people. What follows is five poems mourning the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple by the armies of Babylon. The catastrophe behind them is datable. In 587 or 586 BCE the Babylonian forces of Nebuchadnezzar breached the walls of the city, burned the sanctuary on the height that would later be called the Temple Mount, tore down the houses, and carried much of the surviving population into the exile that opened the long second period of Israelite religion. Lamentations is what was made of that wreckage in words — not a chronicle of the siege but the sound a city makes when it has become a thing to be wept over.

The discipline of grief

Its construction is exact to the point of severity. Four of the five poems are alphabetic acrostics: each stanza opens with a successive letter of the twenty-two-letter Hebrew alphabet, from aleph through tav, so that grief is poured into the most controlled of available forms. The first, second, and fourth poems run twenty-two stanzas, one per letter. The third — the book’s center — triples the device, three lines to every letter across sixty-six verses, the alphabet recited not once but three times over, the most rigid scheme in the collection laid over its most personal voice. The acrostic does several things at once. It promises completeness, an aleph-to-tav totality, the whole alphabet spent on the one subject of loss. It also imposes a measure on anguish that would otherwise have no edges: the form holds the speaker upright when nothing else does. Readers have long heard that tension — wild grief pressed inside a strict scheme — as the book’s defining gesture, the act of giving shape to what threatens to have none.

The reversal hidden in the scheme has its own eloquence. In the first poem the letters fall in the familiar order, ayin before pe. In the second, third, and fourth they swap: pe before ayin, the mouth set before the eye. The variation is too consistent to be error. It may preserve an older sequence of the alphabet — abecedaries scratched on potsherds from the early Iron Age show the same pe-ayin ordering — so that the poems carry, fossilized in their bones, a way of counting the letters that the rest of the Bible had let go. Even the spine of the book turns out to be a record of something lost.

Beneath the acrostic runs a meter built for mourning. The German scholar Karl Budde, in an 1882 study of the Hebrew dirge, gave it a name drawn from the text’s own world: qinah, the funeral lament. The qinah line is unbalanced on purpose — a longer first half of three stresses followed by a shorter, falling second half of two — so that each verse seems to catch its breath and then break off, a limping rhythm that enacts grief in the very gait of the words. Budde worked outward from the third poem, where the acrostic made the line-divisions plain, and the cadence he heard there has carried his name for the measure ever since. The book thus mourns on two clocks at once: the alphabet ticking forward toward an ending it cannot avoid, and the qinah falling short, line after line, of the breath a balanced verse would have.

What the poems say

The five do not repeat one another; they circle the same fire from changing distances. The first surveys the emptied city from the outside, then lets her speak in her own voice — Zion as a widowed woman, betrayed by her lovers, shamed before the nations, with no one to comfort her. The second turns the eye upward and lays the ruin squarely at God’s door: it is the Lord who has become like an enemy, who has bent the bow against his own sanctuary, who has swallowed up Jacob without pity. Here the children faint in the streets and ask their mothers for bread that is not there, and the poet runs out of comparisons — what can I liken to you, that I may comfort you, O daughter of Jerusalem? The center, the third poem, narrows to a single sufferer, an “I” who has seen affliction under the rod of God’s wrath, walled in, set as a target for the arrow — and it is from the floor of that pit, exactly midway through the book, that its one sustained passage of hope rises: the mercies of the Lord are not ended, they are new every morning. Then the fourth poem pulls back again to the city under siege, to the famine that turned tender women into figures of horror and dulled the gold of the sanctuary, to the fall of princes and priests. And the fifth changes everything by changing its form.

The poem that lets go of the alphabet

The last poem keeps the twenty-two-line length of an acrostic but drops the acrostic itself. After four poems disciplined letter by letter, the scaffolding comes down, and the effect is not relief but exposure — the controlling device abandoned just when the book reaches its rawest petition. It is the only poem addressed throughout to God, a communal prayer rather than a description of ruin: remember, O Lord, what has come upon us; look, and see our disgrace. It catalogs the indignities of the conquered — orphans, slaves, women violated, elders deprived of their place at the gate, the dance turned to mourning, the crown fallen from the head — and then, in its closing turn, it asks for restoration: Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored; renew our days as of old. But the book will not end on that. The final verse pulls the petition back into doubt — unless you have utterly rejected us, and remain exceedingly angry with us — leaving the question of whether the rejection is final hanging unanswered in the air. The Hebrew conjunction that opens that last line can be read as “unless,” as “for,” or as “but,” and the grammar declines to resolve which; the whole weight of the book balances on a word that means several things at once.

So heavy is that ending that the synagogue would not let the reading stop there. In the chanting, and in many manuscripts, the verse of restoration is repeated after the verse of doubt, so that the lection closes on renew our days as of old rather than on the dread of a final no — the same mercy the reading-cycle extends to the harsh last verses of Isaiah, of Ecclesiastes, of Malachi. The book as written ends on the abyss; the book as read is given one more breath of hope. Both endings stand: the text’s own refusal to close the account, and the community’s refusal to let it close on despair.

Whose grief, and where it sits

Jewish tradition long named the prophet Jeremiah as the author. He had lived through the fall, his own book gathers oracles and laments from those same years, and a verse in Chronicles recalls him lamenting over a dead king — material enough for the rabbis of the Talmud to assign the five poems to his hand. The Greek translators went further: the Septuagint prefaces the book with a superscription describing Jeremiah seated, weeping, taking up his lament over Jerusalem, and the Latin Vulgate carried that frame into the Western Bible. For that reason the Christian Old Testament files Lamentations directly after the book of Jeremiah, as an appendix to the prophet’s life — the arrangement that gave the music its standing title, the Lamentations of Jeremiah.

The Hebrew canon places it elsewhere. There the book stands among the Writings, the Ketuvim, the third and most varied division of the scriptures, with no Jeremiah attached to its name. It belongs to a set of five short scrolls — the megillot — each bound to a day in the festival year, and within that set it is the scroll of catastrophe. Modern scholarship, weighing the language and the eyewitness immediacy of the poems, treats the attribution to Jeremiah as a later and honorific framing and reads the work as the achievement of one or more anonymous poets writing in or near the ruined city, close enough to the disaster to have its smell still on them. The two placements preserve two truths the book holds together: that this grief belongs to a named witness of the fall, and that it belongs to no one in particular — to the city itself, to anyone who has stood where she stood. Around it stand the other voices of the same calamity, the visionary Ezekiel among the exiles by the Chebar canal, the laments and curses on Babylon scattered through the Psalms.

Scholarship and editions

The book’s compactness has drawn commentary out of all proportion to its length. The standard English-language study, and the source on which this account leans, is Adele Berlin’s Lamentations: A Commentary in the Old Testament Library series (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), which offers a fresh translation and reads the poems as deliberately crafted literature for grief rather than raw outcry; the volume’s reception is gauged in a review for Horizons in Biblical Theology. Delbert Hillers’s Anchor Bible volume (Lamentations, Doubleday, 1972; revised 1992) set the modern philological baseline and gathered the ancient Near Eastern city-lament parallels, the Mesopotamian laments over fallen Sumerian cities that supply the genre’s deeper background. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp’s Lamentations in the Interpretation series (Westminster John Knox, 2002) pressed the formal analysis of the acrostic and the qinah. The meter itself traces to Karl Budde’s 1882 essay Das hebräische Klaglied, the study that first isolated the limping 3+2 cadence and named it for the dirge; the verse-by-verse structure is laid out in the expository notes hosted at StudyLight. For the canonical setting among the Writings, the entry on the Ketuvim and the five scrolls supplies the frame the Hebrew Bible gives the book.

Two liturgical lives

The book lives, still, in two rites that approach it from opposite directions. In Judaism it is the text of Tisha b’Av, the fast of the Ninth of Av, the summer day that mourns the destruction of both Temples and the long chain of disasters that Jewish memory has gathered onto that date. It is one of only two of the five scrolls read in every community. On that night the scroll is chanted to a distinctive dirge trope, slow and descending, and the congregation does not sit in the ordinary way: the lights are lowered, the people sit low — on the floor or on overturned benches — in the posture of mourners observing the first grief for the dead, the city wept for as one weeps for a person.

Christian use drew the same poems into the dark of Holy Week. In the office of Tenebrae, sung in the small hours of the last three days before Easter as the candles were extinguished one by one, the opening verses of Lamentations were chanted, and from the sixteenth century onward composers built some of their gravest music on them — Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso, Tomás Luis de Victoria, Thomas Tallis, and later, in France, Marc-Antoine Charpentier and the Leçons de ténèbres of François Couperin; the surviving polyphonic settings are catalogued at the Choral Public Domain Library. These settings keep a strange detail of the source: because the Vulgate had printed the Hebrew letter-names that head each acrostic verse — Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Daleth, He — the composers set those names too, unfolding them in long melismas before the words of grief begin, so that the scaffolding of the original poem became the most ornamented music in the piece. The acrostic that disciplined the lament in Hebrew became, in Latin polyphony, the place the voices opened out.

What the book finally offers is not consolation and not despair but the two held in one grip. It names the loss without softening it, concedes the guilt its poets read into the catastrophe, and still presses the complaint upward — and then, at the last, hands the matter to God and refuses to say how God will answer. The fifth poem prays for restoration and ends on the word that means unless; the synagogue answers by singing the line of hope a second time. Neither reading cancels the other. To take up Eikhah is to stand in that gap and speak from it, acceptance and protest in the same breath, the alphabet of grief recited to its end and then, deliberately, abandoned.

→ Related: Temple Mount · Book Of Nehemiah · Book Of Nahum · Jeremiah · Babylon · Ketuvim · Second Temple Judaism · Ezekiel · Psalms