Old Testament · Prophecy · book 25 of 66 · 2 min read
The book of Lamentations
Five acrostic poems written in the ruins of Jerusalem, which contain the line about mercies new every morning and give it a context nobody expects.
“It is because of Yahweh's loving kindnesses that we are not consumed, because his mercies don't fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness.”
At a glance
- Chapters
- 5
- Author
- Traditionally Jeremiah; formally anonymous
- Written
- Shortly after 586 BC
- Written for
- Survivors of a siege
- Themes
- grief, siege, acrostic, mercy
What it is about
Lamentations is five poems mourning the destruction of Jerusalem. Four of them are acrostics, each stanza beginning with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet — a formal constraint imposed on grief, which is itself part of the meaning.
The contents are not decorous. It describes famine, siege, the deaths of children and the humiliation of a city, in language that does not look away.
In the exact middle, at the centre of the central poem, sits the passage about steadfast love that never ceases and mercies new every morning. It is not a change of subject; it is a man in the wreckage finding one thing he can still say, and the book returns to lament immediately afterwards.
Where to start
Chapter 3, which contains both the deepest despair and the famous lines, and shows how close together they sit.
The chapters worth knowing
- Lamentations 1 — The city personified as a widow sitting alone, which sets the book's voice.
- Lamentations 3 — The centre, where the mercies new every morning sit between two stretches of despair.
- Lamentations 5 — The closing prayer, which ends without resolution — restore us, unless you have utterly rejected us.
What people get wrong about it
That the famous verse is a cheerful morning devotional. It is spoken by a man who has just described the siege of his city and returns to lament in the next paragraph, which is what gives it its weight.
From this book
Questions
Who wrote Lamentations?
Tradition assigns it to Jeremiah; the book itself is anonymous. It was written soon after Jerusalem's destruction in 586 BC by someone who had evidently seen it.
Why is Lamentations an acrostic?
Four of its five poems run through the Hebrew alphabet. The formal constraint holds the grief in a shape, which is widely read as part of the point rather than decoration.