Lamentations: Five Poems for a Burned City

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. The book never names its author. Tradition, beginning with the Greek translation, gave it to Jeremiah. In the Hebrew Bible it is one of the Writings, not among the Prophets.

When: Soon after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC.

Where it fits: The poems mourn the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC, told in 2 Kings 25 and Jeremiah 39. They belong to the first years of the exile, after the kingdom of Judah was gone.

Where I quote it: Never. But when I wept over Jerusalem and spoke of its coming destruction, I was standing where this book stands (Luke 19:41–44).

If you only read three chapters: It has five. Read 1, 3 and 5.

Words to Know

Lament — a poem of grief, often sung at funerals.

Acrostic — a poem in which each verse begins with the next letter of the alphabet. Four of these five poems are built that way.

Daughter of Zion — a name for Jerusalem, pictured as a grieving woman.

The Book in Brief

Lamentations is a book of five poems, one in each chapter, grieving the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. It tells no story. Several voices speak in turn, and four of the five poems are acrostics.

In chapter 1, Jerusalem is a widow sitting alone, weeping in the night, with no one to comfort her. She asks God to look at her misery and admits that she rebelled. Chapter 2 is the angriest. The poet says God himself has torn down the city and its Temple, and he describes children fainting from hunger in the streets.

In chapter 3, one man speaks for himself. He has been shut in darkness and struck down by God’s anger. Then he remembers God’s mercy, new every morning, and urges everyone to wait quietly, to examine their ways and to turn back to God. Then he cries out against his enemies.

Chapter 4 looks back at the siege: starving children, and women who have boiled their own children for food. It blames the sins of prophets and priests, and ends by saying that Zion’s punishment is over and Edom’s is coming.

Chapter 5 is a prayer in the people’s own voice. They list what they have lost: their land, their fathers, their freedom, with foxes walking on Mount Zion. They ask God to bring them back, and the book ends with the fear that he has rejected them for good.

When Jerusalem fell to Babylon, the city was starved for months, broken open, looted and burned. The Temple was destroyed. The king was blinded. Thousands were killed or marched into exile.

Somebody sat in the ruins and wrote five poems.

How the city sits solitary, that was full of people! She has become as a widow, who was great among the nations! (Lamentations 1:1).

Go deeperThe city laments of Mesopotamia

Lamentations was not the first poem to mourn a ruined city. About 2000 BC the Sumerian city of Ur fell, and its dynasty ended. Poets wrote a long lament over it, and it survives on many clay tablets copied in the centuries afterward.¹ In it, Ningal, the goddess who guarded Ur, weeps for her city and begs the great gods to spare it. They will not change their minds. The storm that destroys Ur is sent by the gods, and the poem describes its people killed and the city broken. It ends with a prayer that Ur be rebuilt.¹

Scholars have found a good deal that Lamentations shares with these city laments: a ruined city pictured as a grieving woman, the dead and the starving in the streets, the Temple in ruins, and a plea for restoration at the end.² The poets of Judah knew how to mourn a city, and they used a form that was already very old.

The differences matter more. In the lament for Ur, the city’s own goddess is helpless to stop the gods who destroy it. In Lamentations, no goddess pleads in heaven for Jerusalem. The city cries out herself, and she says, The LORD is righteous; for I have rebelled against his commandment (Lamentations 1:18). The disaster is not the unexplained decree of a council of gods. The poets say it is the act of the one God, whom the people had wronged. And the book does not end with a promise. It ends with a plea to that same God, and with the fear that he has rejected his people.

The alphabet of grief

Four of the five poems are acrostics. Each verse begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, from the first letter to the last. The third poem goes through the alphabet once, but gives each letter three verses in a row.³

Why write grief in such a strict form? Perhaps because when everything has fallen apart, a pattern is something to hold on to. Perhaps because the poet wanted to say everything, from A to Z, and leave nothing out.

The fifth poem has twenty-two lines, the number of letters in the alphabet, but it does not follow the letters. At the very end, the pattern breaks.

What the poet saw

The poet does not look away.

The tongue of the nursing child clings to the roof of his mouth for thirst. The young children ask bread, and no one breaks it for them (Lamentations 4:4).

The hands of the pitiful women have boiled their own children. They were their food in the destruction of the daughter of my people (Lamentations 4:10).

That is what a siege does. The poet tells you so you will not pretend war is anything else.

Go deeperWhy tradition gave the book to Jeremiah

The Hebrew text never names its poet. The idea that he was Jeremiah comes from later. The Greek translation opens with a line that the Hebrew does not have: after Israel was taken captive and Jerusalem laid waste, Jeremiah sat weeping and sang this lament over Jerusalem. The Latin Bible kept that line.⁴ The Talmud agrees, saying that Jeremiah wrote his own book, the book of Kings and Lamentations.⁴

There was a reason to think so. Jeremiah lived through the siege, and the second book of Chronicles says he sang laments for King Josiah, and that they are written in the lamentations (2 Chronicles 35:25). Those laments were for Josiah, not for Jerusalem, and they have not survived.

Most modern scholars doubt that Jeremiah wrote it. Some point to words and ideas the book shares with Jeremiah. But most point to differences, and to the way the voice changes from poem to poem, as the city, a single man and the whole people speak in turn. They think the poems came from several writers who lived through the siege, or from the years just after.⁵

Great is your faithfulness

In the middle of the book, in the middle of the third poem, there is a turn.

It is because of the LORD’s loving kindnesses that we are not consumed, because his compassion doesn’t fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness (Lamentations 3:22–23).

You may know that from a hymn. It is lovely in a church. Now think of it where it was written: in a burned city, among starving children, by a man who had just said that God had walled me about, so that I can’t go out (Lamentations 3:7).

He did not say it because things were fine. He said it in the ashes.

No answer

The book does not end with the turn. It ends with a plea, and then a bitter word.

Turn us to yourself, LORD, and we will be turned. Renew our days as of old. But you have utterly rejected us. You are very angry against us (Lamentations 5:21–22).

The book ends on those words, and leaves them hanging.

When my people read Lamentations aloud in the synagogue, they repeat the second-to-last verse after the last one, so as not to end on rejection.⁶ But the book itself ends there. My scriptures allowed a book to end without being sure.

The day of mourning

My people read Lamentations on the ninth of Av, the summer fast day that mourns the destruction of the Temple.⁷ In time, that day came to mourn the second Temple too, the one I walked in, which the Romans burned in the year 70.

What I saw

As I came down the Mount of Olives toward Jerusalem for the last time, I saw the city and wept over it. If you, even you, had known today the things which belong to your peace! … The days will come on you, when your enemies will throw up a barricade against you … and will dash you and your children within you to the ground. They will not leave in you one stone on another (Luke 19:41–44).

I was looking at the city and seeing what this book saw. It had happened once. I knew it would happen again.

On the way to the cross, women followed me, weeping. I turned and said, Daughters of Jerusalem, don’t weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children (Luke 23:28).

Lamentations taught my people that there is a time to weep for a city, and to say so to God, out loud, letter by letter, without pretending to understand.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Lamentations 3:19–24.

You will find: “great is your faithfulness,” written in the middle of a destroyed city.

Then read Lamentations 5:19–22. See how the book ends.

The Short Version

• Lamentations is five poems of grief for Jerusalem, written after the Babylonians burned it in 586 BC.
• Four are alphabet poems, A to Z of grief. The last one breaks the pattern.
• “Great is your faithfulness” was written in the ruins, not in good times.
• The book ends with “you have utterly rejected us”, and doesn’t settle it.
• I wept over Jerusalem and foresaw it destroyed again, as this book had seen it the first time.