The Book of Lamentations
How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary! So opens the first of the…
Biblical Narrative
How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary! So opens the first of the five scrolls of grief that Jewish tradition has placed in the hand of the prophet Yirmeyahu — Jeremiah — who had warned and warned, and now in the smoking ruins of the burned city sat down to weep. The poems are five; the people are bereft; and the burning is fresh upon the page.
The poet walks the streets of fallen Jerusalem. The roads to Zion mourn, because none come to the appointed feasts; her gates are desolate; her priests sigh; her virgins are afflicted. Mothers cry to their mothers, ״Where is corn and wine?״ as they swoon as the wounded in the streets of the city, as their soul is poured out into their mothers' bosom. The hands of pitiful women have sodden their own children — the unspeakable sentence of the siege, recorded with a refusal to look away.
And yet, in the third of the five poems — the centre, the heart — the voice of grief turns. This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope: It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is Thy faithfulness. The Lord is good unto them that wait for Him, to the soul that seeketh Him. The book does not resolve into comfort; the fifth poem ends in a question — Wherefore dost Thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time? — but at the centre of the ruin a thread of trust is held.
From the destruction of the Temple in the summer of 586 BCE, through the destruction of the Second Temple by Titus in 70 CE, down to the present, every Tisha b'Av — the ninth of the month of Av — the scroll of Eikhah is read in synagogues by candlelight, on the floor, with the lights dimmed. The book has the strange, terrible distinction of being the oldest continuously recited liturgy of mourning in the Jewish year. The catastrophe of 586 was followed by every later catastrophe, and the people who survived attached each new wound to the same five poems.
It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is Thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The Book of Lamentations — Eikhah in Hebrew, named for its opening word ״how״ — is one of the most securely datable books of the Hebrew Bible. The detail of its testimony to the siege and burning of Jerusalem in 586 BCE — the famine, the cannibalism, the burning of the Temple, the slaughter of priests in the sanctuary, the false hope of Egyptian relief — fits so precisely with the Babylonian destruction layer excavated by Yigal Shiloh in the City of David and by Eilat Mazar on the Ophel that most scholars place its composition within a generation of the events themselves, c. 586–520 BCE. The vivid eyewitness register makes it a near-contemporary document.
Lamentations belongs to a recognised ancient Near Eastern literary genre: the city-lament. Sumerian precursors — the Lament for Ur, the Lament for Sumer and Ur, the Lament for Nippur, the Lament for Eridu, all composed after the fall of Ur in 2004 BCE — share with Eikhah the personification of the city as a weeping woman, the catalogue of destroyed shrines and slain inhabitants, and the address to the divine patron who has abandoned His city. Delbert Hillers's Anchor Bible commentary (1972) and F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp's Weep, O Daughter of Zion (1993) have demonstrated point-for-point structural parallels — though Eikhah's monotheistic theology refuses the Sumerian resolution in which the angry god is appeased and returns.
Traditional ascription to Jeremiah, going back to the Septuagint's prefatory note and to the Babylonian Talmud (Bava Batra 15a), is not generally accepted by modern critical scholarship. Linguistic and theological differences from the prose Jeremiah, and the multiple-author signature of the five poems' shifting voices, suggest a circle of poets — possibly Temple-singers and Levites who survived the destruction. The acrostic structure of chapters 1–4 betrays a high level of literary craft, not the white-hot extempore composition the tradition imagines.
The book's reception history is a study in liturgical persistence. By the Mishnaic period (c. 200 CE), Eikhah had been fixed as the central reading for Tisha b'Av, the fast commemorating both the First and Second Temple destructions. Cairo Geniza fragments preserve dirges (qinot) composed for the day from the 7th century onward; the medieval poets — Eleazar Kalir, Judah Halevi — built on the scroll's metaphors. The Babylonian destruction of 586 BCE, mediated through these five poems, became the prototype of Jewish catastrophe-memory, recurring in the responses to the Crusades, the Spanish expulsion, and the Shoah.
Lamentations is the closest thing in the Hebrew Bible to a war diary. It is the voice of the survivors, written in the immediate shadow of the worst thing that had ever happened to them.Adele Berlin, Lamentations: A Commentary (2002), paraphrased