EKLI - Life, together

Old Testament · Major Prophets

Lamentations

אֵיכָה

Grief in acrostics, the city sits alone, yet His mercies are new every morning.

5
Chapters
traditionally Jeremiah
Attributed
Babylon and the exile
Era
Ketuvim
Hebrew canon

Five poems for a destroyed city, and the Bible at its most unguarded about grief. Four of the five are acrostics running through the Hebrew alphabet, which is a strange discipline to impose on agony until you realise what it does: it gives the grief a container, a beginning and an end, so it can be walked through rather than drowned in. The third poem is the most intricate and holds the famous lines about mercies new every morning, which land very differently when read where they actually sit, at the exact centre of a book about starvation and ruin. It does not end in comfort. The last verse asks whether God has utterly rejected them, and leaves the question open, which is why it is read on the ninth of Av.

If you remember one thing

Five poems, four of them acrostics, imposing order on grief that had none. The famous line about mercies new every morning sits at the exact center of the book, surrounded on both sides by devastation.

Who, when, and why

Written
Traditionally Jeremiah, though the book does not name its author.
First readers
Survivors sitting in the ruin.
Why it was written
Jerusalem has fallen. This is what the grief sounded like.

How it is shaped

  1. 1The city sits alone
  2. 2The day of the LORD's anger
  3. 3The man who has seen affliction, and mercies new every morning
  4. 4The siege remembered
  5. 5A prayer that does not resolve

What it keeps coming back to

Grief without resolutionHonest accusationMercies new every morningWaiting

A verse to carry

“It is because of Yahweh’s loving kindnesses that we are not consumed, because his compassion doesn’t fail. They are new every morning.”

Lamentations 3:22-23

Passages that trouble readers

Lamentations 2:20

Women eating their own children during the siege, which the book states rather than implies. It is also recorded in the siege literature of the ancient world and should not be softened.

Lamentations 5:22

The last verse asks whether God has utterly rejected them and does not answer. Hebrew liturgical practice repeats the previous verse afterwards so the reading does not end there.

Named here rather than skipped. Where Christians read a passage differently, we say so instead of choosing for you.