SOURCE: O'Connor, Kathleen M. “The Book of Lamentations.” In The New Interpreter's Bible: Volume VI, pp. 1013-24. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, O'Connor examines the historical setting, authorship, liturgical uses, and literary features of the Book of Lamentations, calling the work “a literary jewel and a rich resource for theological reflection and worship.”]

INTRODUCTION

Lamentations is a searing book of taut, charged poetry on the subject of unspeakable suffering. The poems emerge from a deep wound, a whirlpool of pain, toward which the images, metaphors, and voices of the poetry can only point. It is, in part, the rawness of the hurt expressed in the book that has gained Lamentations a secure, if marginal, place in the liturgies of Judaism and Christianity. Its stinging cries for help, its voices begging God to see, its protests to God who hides behind a cloud—all create a space where communal and personal pain can be reexperienced, seen, and perhaps healed. Although the book of Lamentations is short, containing only five poems, it is a literary jewel and a rich resource for theological reflection and worship. Indeed, its recovery in our communal lives could lead to a greater flourishing of life amid our own wounds and the woundedness of the world.

HISTORICAL SETTING

A short collection of five poems, Lamentations is a poetic response to a national tragedy. Its poems reflect conditions following the invasion and collapse of the nation, particularly of its capital city, and of the destruction of economic and social life among the citizenry. A long-standing and firm tradition of interpretation places the book in the period following Babylonian military assaults on Judah in 597, 587, and 582 bce.

Iain Provan, however, has disputed the traditional dating and location of the book.¹ He claims that there is insufficient evidence to tie the book firmly to this or to any other precise historical period. Not only are the poems metaphoric and the language elusive, but also the author as a poet writes with great power in ways that do not represent particular events but simply evoke them. In Provan's view, other invasions and destructions of Jerusalem could equally have produced the conditions that gave birth to this literature.

The helpful conclusion to be drawn from Provan's refreshing academic heresy is that the biblical text need not be tied to a particular historical setting to be moving and effective literature. By severing the book from precise historical connections, the interpreter quickly enables the book to serve as a metaphor that may illuminate many different situations of intense pain and suffering. Provan does not succeed, however, in dislodging Lamentations completely from the Babylonian era. Though he is correct about the paucity of evidence explicitly connecting the book to this time, he does not credit the traditional interpretations that locate the book in Palestine after the Babylonian invasion. If the invasion of Judah and Jerusalem is not the precise tragedy underlying Lamentations, then it is at least a central catastrophe in Israel's history that provides an illuminating backdrop for understanding the fury, grief, and disorientation that this book expresses.

In the aftermath of the Babylonian invasions of Jerusalem, survivors would have wondered whether they could continue to survive as a people. Leading families had been deported to Babylon; the king's palace, the Temple, and the city walls had been razed. A long siege of the city had left many dead, ill, and suffering from famine. Along with overwhelming physical and social devastation came the collapse of the community's entire theological and symbolic world. The words of the prophets and the promises to Abraham and to David had turned empty. Where was the God who promised to dwell with them in Zion, to be with the house of David forever? Where was the God who brought them to the land of promise? How had God contributed to the devastation of their world?

Whether the Babylonian invasion actually occasioned the writing and composition of this book or whether later tradition emerged from reflection on the book in the light of the nation's fall and assigned it to that time and place cannot be known for certain. But the traditional connections of Lamentations with the fall of Jerusalem and Judah to Babylon indicate the way the book served the community. The book came to be seen as an expression of grief and outrage at heart-stopping tragedy—and the tragedy that provoked its composition was massive.

AUTHORSHIP, VERSIONS, CANONICAL PLACEMENT

One of the reasons for the traditional dating of Lamentations to the Babylonian period is because tradition has also held that the prophet Jeremiah was its author. The Hebrew or Masoretic Text (MT) does not name any author, but the later Septuagint (LXX) translation adds an interpretive opening line. After the captivity of Israel and the desolation of Jerusalem, “Jeremiah sat weeping and lamented this lamentation over Jerusalem.”

Other features of the book associate it with Jeremiah. The speaker in Lam 3:52-54 portrays his captivity in terms that vaguely resemble Jeremiah's captivities in the court of the guard in Jer 37:11-21 and 38:1-13. Jeremiah's own reputation is that of the weeping prophet, and hence, the spirit of Lamentations accords with some of his gloomy prophecy.

Jeremiah is the author of Lamentations in a symbolic sense but probably not in a literal sense. Authorship in the ancient world did not follow modern customs. In order to bring books under the aura of heroes and their moral authority, writings were often ascribed to them. Despite loose thematic and metaphorical connections between Lamentations and the book of Jeremiah, numerous features of Lamentations argue against his authorship, not the least of which is the fact that many positions in Lamentations appear to contradict Jeremiah's prophecies.²

Just as there is inadequate data to determine Jeremiah's possible role in the production of the book, so also no clear consensus has emerged regarding how many authors were involved in composing the poems. The work of one poet or several may be gathered here. This commentary does not attempt to decide these questions but assumes a unity of material in the book's present form.

The Masoretic Text separates Lamentations from Jeremiah and places Lamentations among the Writings, though that position has varied.³ Hebrew practice places Lamentations among the Megillot, or five liturgical scrolls. By contrast, the LXX, which asserts Jeremianic authorship, also places Lamentations after the prophetic books, sometimes directly following Jeremiah and sometimes with the book of Baruch intervening between them. In addition to the MT and the LXX, there is a later Aramaic version, or targum, that translates the text in a midrashic manner to highlight and expand religious aspects of the Hebrew text.⁴

LITURGICAL USE

Lamentations holds a special place in liturgical services of Judaism and Christianity. The Jewish community reads the Lamentation scroll on the ninth of Ab. That date commemorates five calamities, including the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. The liturgical atmosphere for the reading is like a public funeral, and the text may be chanted.⁵

Christians use selections of Lamentations during Holy Week services in the recitation of Tenebrae and Good Friday liturgies. Christians lament the death of Jesus, their own sins, and, symbolically, their own eventual deaths. Beyond these special liturgical occasions, however, Lamentations is largely ignored in public worship, in preaching, and for meditative use. Many factors may contribute to this neglect of Lamentations, including its troubling content of relentless grief and anger and the predominance of denial in the dominant culture of North America.

STRUCTURE AND LITERARY FEATURES

Poetic beauty, dramatic power, and puzzling ambiguities converge in Lamentations. The book's artfulness gives it the capacity to draw readers into the overwhelming human struggles portrayed in the poems and to embroil readers in unanswerable questions. Alphabetical and formal structures, mixtures of voices, and the relationship of the five poems to each other contribute to the book's intense and terrible potency and raise key issues in its interpretation. These features overlap in interpretation, and decisions about form and voice contribute to the understanding of the relationships of the poems to each other.⁶

First, each of the five poems draws on the lament form and is built in some way upon the Hebrew alphabet, but within that framework are wide variations in form and structure. Second, a number of different voices or poetic speakers appear within and across the poems. Third, the relationships among the five poems are complex and strongly debated by modern interpreters, but readers must account for them in determining the book's purposes. What hangs in the balance in this decision are the purposes of the book and the status of hope in the book. Is the third, and only hopeful, poem the book's “monumental center,”⁷ or is hope swallowed up by the doubt and despair of the surrounding poems?

By their very presence, these literary dilemmas prevent swift resolution and easy dismissal of the enormous sense of abandonment and injustice expressed in these poems. The book's literary puzzles, its mixtures of forms, voices, and unevenly shaped poems may give evidence of deliberate crafting, a chiseling and polishing of words, images, and poetic forms that draw readers into a maelstrom and force them to find their own way out.

ALPHABETICAL FORMS AND LITERARY GENRE

The Hebrew alphabet contributes to the structuring of the book's individual poems in two ways. First, the book's first four poems are acrostics. They are written in alphabetical order so that each verse or line begins with a sequential letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The poem in chapter 3 intensifies the acrostic form by including three lines in each verse that begin with the same alphabetical letter.⁸

The second way the alphabet structures the poems concerns their length. In accordance with the twenty-two lines of the Hebrew alphabet, all five poems contain twenty-two lines or multiples thereof. The first three poems are each sixty-six lines long. The fourth poem contains only forty-four lines, and the fifth, and only non-acrostic, poem contains only twenty-two lines. While the poems gain from alphabetical structuring, the diversity of their relationships to the alphabet indicates tensions among them. Each poem stands freely on its own, but how do they relate to each other?

The acrostic form itself has been the subject of much scrutiny. What are the purposes of poetic alphabetizing? Acrostics may have been used for aesthetic purposes,⁹ to show off the poet's skill, or as an aid to memory.¹⁰ Mnemonic purposes alone, however, do not explain acrostic use, since there are many poems in the Hebrew Bible but few acrostics.¹¹ More evocative and symbolic purposes may better explain the use of the alphabet in Lamentations. Acrostics impose order and organization on shapeless chaos and unmanageable pain, and they imply that the suffering depicted in the poems is total. Nothing can be added to it, for suffering extends from “to” (aleph to taw).

Whatever the motivation for their use, however, Daniel Grossberg observes that acrostics impose unity upon various voices, images, and perspectives within the individual poems.¹² Heater observes that the acrostics divide the content of the poems with the middle letters of the Hebrew alphabet.¹³

Besides their alphabetical structures, the poems in Lamentations also draw on lament forms and funeral dirges and, in particular, on the lament over the fallen city.¹⁴ Laments abound in the Bible and in the literature of the ancient Near East. The book of Psalms contains communal laments that speak in the plural voice of the community, and individual laments in the voice of a single person.¹⁵ Laments are prayers of protest, complaint, and grief over a disaster, and with great passion they appeal to God for deliverance. They arise from faith in the power and willingness of God to save. They insist that the world is an open system in which divine intervention is always possible.

The lament over the city was a common literary form in the ancient Near East. Mesopotamian city laments, for example, exhibit some common features with Lamentations, including their somber mood at the destruction, themes of divine abandonment and involvement in the destruction, descriptions of calamity, massive weeping, as well as the use of poetic devices of many voices or personas, personification of the city, and marked reversals in the city's fate.¹⁶

Lamentations, however, significantly adapts the Mesopotamian form. It transfers the Mesopotamian treatment of the city's patron goddess to the figure of personified Jerusalem. Goddesses were heavenly patrons of their city, but they were powerless to prevent destruction caused by other gods and often wept over the city's destruction.¹⁷ In Lamentations, Jerusalem is personified as a female, but she is merely a city, not a goddess. The many similarities between the city laments and Lamentations indicate that the biblical book emerged from a world that possessed common artistic forms for the expression of grief, rage, and protest.

Interlaced with lament forms in the book are themes typical of the funeral dirge. These include a mournful cry for the one who has died, a proclamation of death, contrast with previous circumstances of the dead person, and the reaction of bystanders.¹⁸ When the poet or poets of Lamentations sought to give expression to the unspeakable pain their community endured, they drew on the repertoire of form, imagery, and metaphor available in the ancient world. From this familiar and traditional raw material, they created a complex artistic expression in the interplay of acrostic, lament, and dirge.

VOICES

One of Lamentations' most effective literary devices is its use of different speakers.¹⁹ Multiple poetic voices interweave, overlap, and contradict each other. The speakers are literary creations who offer testimony in the thick of catastrophe. Voices of a narrator, Daughter Zion, an unidentified man, and the community lament, protest, and attempt to cope with the tragedy they have survived. The book is dramatized speech.

A narrator, an omniscient third-person reporter, appears in chapters 1, 2, and 4. In the first two chapters he introduces and comments upon the circumstances and words of Daughter Zion, who appears only in the first two chapters. She is the city of Jerusalem, personified as a woman, a princess, a lover, a widow, a daughter, and above all, a mother. The principal speaker in chapter 3 is a man, a shamed and humiliated captive, entrapped and reaching for hope. The voice of the community appears briefly in chapters 3 and 4 but takes over in speech directed to God in chapter 5.

The interplay of these voices allows the book to approach the massive suffering of the destroyed city from many viewpoints. The city itself becomes a person, weeping over its pain, screaming for aid, and protesting its deplorable conditions. The defeated man in chapter 3 grasps for hope, but in chapters 4 and 5 his words are quickly replaced by dour accounts of suffering from the narrator and the community. Westermann observes that the speakers are not individuals but “are at the same time both lamenters and the lamented.”²⁰ They signify the destroyed city and its citizens. Each voice articulates the pain of the community.

The personification of Jerusalem as Daughter Zion, or “Daughter of Zion,”²¹ has an ancient tradition that receives further development in Lamentations. The ancient world commonly understood cities as female and personified them as divine wives of the resident god. Biblical representations of Daughter Zion draw on these depictions but do not understand the city as a deity. In Lamentations, the personified city is the punished wife of Yahweh, who fulfills all the prophecies against her in the books of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea.²²

Female personification of Jerusalem and Judah in Lamentations comes with strong associations that lend themselves to poetry of woundedness and grief and shame. Daughter Zion is a woman with a past, a disastrous present, and no future. Mintz observes, “The serviceableness of Jerusalem as an abandoned fallen woman lies in the precise register of pain it articulates.”²³ In contrast to the dead, whose sufferings are finished, the defiled woman who survives is a living witness to pain that knows no end.

Missing from the poetic voices in Lamentations is the voice of God. The missing voice looms over the book. The speakers refer to God, call for help, ask God to look, accuse God of hiding from them, of attacking and forgetting them—but God never responds. The speakers interpret, provide motives for, and attack the absent one, but God never steps into the sound studio. Thick, soundproof walls bar the suffering voices from the one who caused their suffering and the only one they believe can comfort them, save them, and stop the suffering. Unlike Job, who receives a divine response to his protestations, the suffering characters in this book never gain an audience. Why is God silent? No simple answer to this question emerges.

RELATIONS AMONG THE POEMS

How the five poems with their diverse voices and viewpoints and their varied alphabetic structures fit together and interact is the major issue in the book's interpretation. Until recently, many interpreters, both Christian and Jewish, claimed that chapter 3 is the book's literary and theological center.²⁴ There are good reasons for such an interpretive decision. Located in the middle of the book, chapter 3 intensifies the acrostic form and expresses hope in an extended way to suggest that the triumph of hope over suffering is the book's main point.

Despite its midpoint location, however, chapter 3 is not bordered by symmetrically composed poems to clinch such an interpretive decision. The poems that precede chapter 3 do not match the poems that follow it in length or form. Instead, chapters 4 and 5 grow shorter, and the acrostic form disappears altogether in chapter 5. These formal variations create a lopsided structure of the whole, leading some interpreters to think that hope is drowned by the reality of suffering and by a silent God.

William Shea suggested that the book's asymmetrical shape imitates the rhythmic pattern found in funeral dirges in ancient Israel, called the “limping,” or qînâ, meter.²⁵ This rhythmic pattern contains three long beats and two short ones. In Shea's analogy, the shortening of the poems and the disappearance of the acrostic form in the latter part of Lamentations construct an ending that drifts off, like the funeral dirge, in grief without resolution. The rhythmical pattern dies away “because it was written in remembrance of Jerusalem, the city that died away.”²⁶

Although the presence of this meter as a structuring device in the book is far from certain, since Shea transfers a meter found in single lines to five poems, his suggestion is provocative. His treatment of the book that decenters the importance of chapter 3 and its expressions of hope has found strong development in recent interpretation. Linafelt, Dobbs-Alsopp, and Provan deemphasize chapter 3 for a variety of reasons and point to the book's movement toward protest and doubt rather than faith and reconciliation.²⁷

Linafelt identifies a number of interpretive biases that have led interpreters to find chapter 3 to be the book's hermeneutical key. These biases include preference for the male voice of the “strong man,” Christian identification of the figure in chapter 3 with Christ, and preference for interpretation that favors human reconciliation with God through repentance.²⁸ But hope does not triumph in the book; it is merely one point of view, more tenuously arrived at even in chapter 3 than commentators have admitted. What the book offers instead of resolute hope, confidence, and reconciliation with God are “intersecting perspectival discourses,”²⁹ speeches that move across trauma, rage, hope, doubt, and tired dismay. No single speaker, no particular viewpoint silences the others. Instead, multiple speakers try to find expression for grief, “to articulate the inexpressible, and turn death into beauty.”³⁰

The poems try to house grief in familiar and ordered language commonly found in other biblical laments. But these poems in Lamentations use traditional lament language in ways that are gripping and concrete. Within the poems the same Hebrew roots and sounds appear, get repeated, disappear, and reappear.³¹ Provan observes that the language is metaphorical, imagistic, and conventional, rather than representational.³² The book is not trying to mimic reality but to evoke and re-create the suffering of the community. The poems are masterpieces of artistic intricacy in which the speakers hammer out their pain in rhythms and circles of sorrow. Ultimately the poems cannot build a shelter for grief and rage. Landy proposes that the poetry conveys its own inadequacy to the task by fading out in a whimper and in an effectual cry for revenge.³³

LAMENTATIONS AND THE ARTS

A brief sampling of the artistic appropriations of Lamentations shows the potency of Lamentations in new contexts. Musicians have employed its lyrics for liturgical music and for more general compositions. In the sixteenth century, Thomas Tallis set “The Lamentations of Jeremiah” to music, and in the twentieth century Pablo Casals did likewise in “O Vos Omnes,” known in English as “O Ye People.” For Lent of 1956, Hungarian composer Lajos Bardos wrote a musical setting for eight verses of chapter 5 to lament national shame, entrapment, and guilt during the Soviet occupation of Hungary. Leonard Bernstein wrote a “Jeremiah” symphony that uses Lamentations, and Igor Stravinsky composed “Threni” in 1958.

Although Polish composer Henryk Gorecki's Symphony No. 3 has no direct connection with the book of Lamentations, the symphony is a haunting lament that employs lyrics of great sadness in the form of testimony from a prison wall and of a mother's lament for her disappeared child. In the exquisite sorrow of its music, this work expresses communal heartbreak at the unspeakable horrors of the twentieth century. The work's surprising popularity among classical music lovers in the United States may witness to the stored-up sorrow and unspoken anger in the general culture.

Among literary reincarnations of Lamentations two works demand attention. One is a short memoir by Naomi Seidman, “Burning the Book of Lamentations,” in which Seidman yearns for the end of lamenting and for the day all Jews can burn laments forever. The other is a work of fiction by Cynthia Ozick entitled The Shawl: A Story and Novella, in which Daughter Zion's loss of her children is reenacted in a mother's exceedingly tragic loss of her small daughter in a concentration camp.³⁴

A painting by Rembrandt, entitled The Prophet Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. For the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, New York, Marc Chagall created a small jewel of a stained-glass window of Jeremiah, whom he identified by referring to Lam 3:1-3. Fritz Eichenberg's etching of The Lamentations of Jeremiah pictures a man in chains, a woman clutching a baby, and a small child clinging to the captured man.³⁵

THE BOOK'S TITLES

Because the Hebrew Bible names its books by their first word or words, the Hebrew title of Lamentations is (Seper ’Êkâ), literally “the book of How.”³⁶ (’Êkâ) is an exclamation of shock that means “how” or “alas,” and should, perhaps, be pronounced with a catch in the voice or with a gasp: “How lonely lies the city upon the hill!” (Lam 1:1). Seidman suggests that behind the declarative how of the title lurks an interrogative “how” that questions the means and even the possibility of telling about this unspeakable catastrophe.³⁷ The opening exclamation of pity and astonishment hangs over the entire book and reappears as the first word of chapters 2 and 4. In the literal rendering of the title, “How,” as opposed to “Lamentations,” which derives from the Greek translation (Thrēnoi), Jean-Marc Droin finds a close approximation to the book's meaning. In his view, Lamentations is a quest for understanding in disaster more than simply a sorrowful lament.³⁸ But a lamentation, by its very nature, is also a complaint, a protest, as well as a search for meaning.

Linafelt calls Lamentations a brutal book,³⁹ a book that assaults us, and it surely does, even in the violence-laden climate of media, entertainment, and the streets. But the book's unmitigated violence, its expression of loneliness, abandonment, and suffering, its descriptions of death, of helplessness, of the suffering of women, children, the elderly, all have a contemporaneity to them. The poems evoke an outer world and portray an inner landscape known to many contemporary people. The book's very brutality makes it a comfort, a recognition in its metaphorical construction of the way things are for many people. The book functions as a witness to pain, a testimony of survival, and an artistic transformation of dehumanizing suffering into exquisite literature. In the process, it raises profound questions about the justice of God.

Notes

1. Iain Provan, Lamentations, NCB (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991) 7-19.

2. Delbert Hillers, Lamentations, AB 7A (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972) xxi-xxii.

3. Ibid., xvii.

4. Etan Levine, The Aramaic Version of Lamentations (New York: Hermon, 1976); Shaye J. D. Cohen, “The Destruction from Scripture to Midrash,” Prooftexts 2 (1982) 1-17.

5. Levine, The Aramaic Version of Lamentations, 13.

6. Alan Mintz, “The Rhetoric of Lamentations and the Representation of Catastrophe,” in Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, ed. G. A. Buttrick et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) 19-48; reprinted from Prooftexts 2 (1982) 1-17.

7. Ibid., 33.

8. In chaps. 2-4 the alphabet is disturbed, reversing the usual ‘ayin-pê order, but this may indicate that the alphabet itself was not yet stable. See Frank Moore Cross, “Studies in the Structure of Hebrew Verse: The Prosody of Lamentations 1:1-22,” in The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth, ed. Carol L. Meyers and M. O'Connor (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1984) 148.

9. Claus Westermann, Lamentations: Issues and Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994) 99.

10. N. Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations, SBT (Chicago: Alec R. Allenson, 1954) 26-28.

11. Other acrostics in the Hebrew Bible include Psalms 9-10; 25; 34; 37; 111-12; 119; 145; Prov 31:10-31; and Nah 1:2-8.

12. Daniel Grossberg, Centripetal and Centrifugal Structures in Biblical Poetry, SBLMS 39 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989) 84-85.

13. Homer Heater, Jr., “Structure and Meaning in Lamentations,” BSac 149 (1992) 304-15.

14. Claus Westermann, Lamentations: Issues and Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994) 1-23; F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City-Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible, BibOr 44 (Rome: Editrice Pontifico Istituto Biblico, 1993); Paul Wayne Ferris, The Genre of Communal Lament in the Bible, SBLDS 127 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992); Norman K. Gottwald, “The Book of Lamentations Reconsidered,” in The Hebrew Bible and Its Social World and in Ours, ed. Norman K. Gottwald, SBLSS (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993) 165-73.

15. See Patrick Miller, They Cried to the Lord: The Form and Theology of Biblical Prayer (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994) 68-134.

16. Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep, O Daughter of Zion, 29-96.

17. J. J. M. Roberts, “The Motif of the Weeping God in Jeremiah and Its Background in the Lament Tradition of the Ancient Near East,” Old Testament Essays 5 (1992) 361-74.

18. Westermann, Lamentations, 1-23.

19. William F. Lanahan, “The Speaking Voice in the Book of Lamentations,” JBL 93 (1974) 41-49.

20. Westermann, Lamentations, 140.

21. F. W. Dobbs-Alsopp, “The Syntagma of bat Followed by a Geographical Name in the Hebrew Bible: A Reconsideration of Its Meaning and Grammar,” CBQ (1995) 451-70.

22. Julie Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel: The City as Yahweh's Wife, SBLDS 130 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992) 25-59; Dobbs-Alsopp, Weep, O Daughter of Zion, 75-91; A. R. Pete Diamond and Kathleen M. O'Connor, “Unfaithful Passions: Coding Women, Coding Men in Jeremiah 2-3 (4:2), Biblical Interpretation (1996) 288-310; Elaine Follis, “The Holy City as Daughter,” in Directions in Biblical Hebrew Poetry, ed. Elaine Follis, JSOTSup 40 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1987) 173-84; Renita J. Weems, Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets, OBT (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995).

23. Alan Mintz, “The Rhetoric of Lamentations and the Representation of Catastrophe,” in Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, ed. G. A. Buttrick et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) 24.

24. Norman K. Gottwald, “The Book of Lamentations Reconsidered,” in The Hebrew Bible in Its Social World and in Ours, SBLSS (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993) 165-73; Delbert Hillers, Lamentations, AB 7A (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972) XVI; Mintz, “The Rhetoric of Lamentations and the Representation of Catastrophe,” 33.

25. William H. Shea, “The qînāh Structure of the Book of Lamentations,” Bib 60 (1979) 103-7.

26. Ibid., 107.

27. Tod Linafelt, “Surviving Lamentations: A Literary-Theological Study of the Afterlife of a Biblical Text” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1997); F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible, BibOr 44 (Rome: Editrice Pontifico Istituto Biblico, 1993) 22-24; Iain Provan, Lamentations, NCB (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991).

28. Linafelt, “Surviving Lamentations,” 6-25.

29. Burke O'Connor Long, Planting and Reaping Albright: Politics, Ideology and Interpreting the Bible (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).

30. Francis Landy, “Lamentations,” in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1987) 329.

31. Frank Moore Cross, “Studies in the Structure of Hebrew Verse: The Prosody of Lamentations 1:1-22,” in The Word of the Lord Shall God Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman, ed. Carol L. Meyers and M. O'Connor, ASOR (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1983) 129-55.

32. Provan, Lamentations, 13.

33. Landy, “Lamentations,” 329.

34. Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl: A Story and a Novella (New York: Knopf, 1981). Linafelt, “Surviving Lamentations,” studies the story as a “survival” of the biblical book.

35. Fritz Eichenberg: Works of Mercy, ed. Robert Ellsberg (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1992).

36. See Naomi Seidman, “Burning the Book of Lamentations,” in Out of the Garden: Women Writers on the Bible, ed. Christian Buchmann and Celina Spiegel (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994) 282.

37. Ibid., 282.

38. Jean-Marc Droin, Le Livre des Lamentations: “Comment?” Une Traduction et un commentaire, La Bible, porte-Parole (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1995).

39. Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations, 2.

Works Cited

Commentaries:

Hillers, Delbert. Lamentations. AB 7A. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. A nontechnical commentary intended for the general audience. Includes a lengthy introduction on text-critical and translation issues, and brief discussions of interpretation and contemporary application.

Provan, Iain. Lamentations. NCB. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991. A brief commentary based on the RSV that emphasizes translation and text-critical issues; limited attention is given to issues of theology and interpretation.

Westermann, Claus. Lamentations: Issues and Interpretation. Translated by Charles Muenchow. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994. An excellent, concise introduction to Lamentations by one of the twentieth century's leading interpreters of both the lament form and the book of Lamentations. Analyzes the ancient Near Eastern origins of laments, reviews the history of twentieth-century Lamentations research, discusses interpretive methodology, provides commentary, and explores the theological significance of Lamentations.

Specialized Studies:

Dobbs-Allsopp, F. W. Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible. BibOr 44. Rome: Editrice Pontifico Istituto Biblico, 1993. An interpretation of Lamentations in the light of ancient Mesopotamian laments for the destruction of a great city.

Gottwald, Norman K. “The Book of Lamentations Reconsidered.” In The Hebrew Bible in Its Social World and Ours. SBLSS. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993. Takes the measure of literary, tradition-historical, redactional, and sociological contributions to the study of Lamentations written since Gottwald's earlier work.

———. Studies in the Book of Lamentations. Chicago: Alec R. Allenson, 1954. A technical discussion of Lamentations' acrostic form, genre, theology, and significance as a unified response to a specific historical event.