SOURCE: Linafelt, Tod. “‘None Survived or Escaped’: Reading for Survival in Lamentations 1 and 2.” In Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book, pp. 35-61. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Linafelt examines elements of the dirge and lament in the first two chapters of the Book of Lamentation, deeming these sections “literature of survival.”]

In my happier days I used to remark on the aptitude of the saying, “When in life we are in the midst of death.” I have since learnt that it's more apt to say, “When in death we are in the midst of life.”

—A survivor of the Belsen concentration camp

There are two kinds of discoveries in literary matters: the work that is complete in its very incompletion—an incompletion ineluctably carried to term—and the work that has come only halfway toward its always deferred completion.

—Edmond Jabès

To read for survival in Lamentations 1 and 2, … would mean attending to those elements of the poems that represent the paradox of death in the midst of life and life beyond the borders of death, the expression of pain for its own sake, and the way in which the rhetoric of the poetry is concerned to move beyond description to persuasion. In doing just this in what follows, I argue that survival is inscribed in the biblical text of Lamentations in the larger design of the chapters as well as in the details of their content.

LIFE AND DEATH IN LAMENTATIONS 1 AND 2

Biblical critics have had a difficult time settling on the technical genre of these two poems. One finds them identified variously as communal laments (Klagelieder des Volkes), individual laments (Klagelieder des Einzelnen), and dirges (Leichenlieder or Totenklagen), all of which genres are related but distinct. The initial form-critical designation of these chapters (along with Lamentations 4) as dirges in a classic work by Hermann Gunkel and Joachim Begrich has dominated the critical discussion.¹ According to this line of thinking they are funeral songs; but instead of referring to a dead individual they refer to the death of a nation.² Hedwig Jahnow's 1923 study, Das hebräische Leichenlied (The Hebrew dirge), explores in more depth the genre of the dirge, or funeral song, within the context of world folk literature. She concludes that certain elements of the dirge are identifiable in Lamentations 1 and 2: the opening mournful cry (“Alas” or “How”; the summons to weep, and the description of the mourner's suffering. One very important element is missing however; the announcement that someone has died. Moreover, there are elements in these chapters that do not show up in dirges, including “the summoning of Yahweh, the lamenting over the distress, the plea for Yahweh to take notice, the confession of guilt.”³ Jahnow concludes that these elements are borrowed from the “popular psalms of lamentation” in the service of “the transformation of an originally entirely profane type into a religious poem.”⁴ For Jahnow, Lamentations 1 and 2 are understood primarily as dirges that have borrowed motifs from the psalms of lament in order to make a theological statement about the death they describe.

Since these programmatic studies, scholars have tried in differing ways to account for the slippage in genre one finds in these poems. Most often it is decided, either explicitly or implicitly, that they represent what Gunkel and Begrich called mixed types (or Mischungen).⁵ Otto Eissfeldt writes:

Poems 1, 2, and 4 are, as their opening word, Ah, how! shows, funeral dirges and in fact political funeral dirges in which it is a political entity, Jerusalem, which is lamented over as dead … But in none of them does the type appear in its pure form.⁶

Eissfeldt goes on to separate the genres in chapter 1 by verse, finding that while 1:1-11 and 17 belong primarily to the genre of dirge, verses 9c, 11c, and 12-16 are completely in the style of the individual song of lamentation. Chapter 2 he identifies as a dirge, though in this case he does not attempt to deal with any divergence from the genre that the chapter may contain. Claus Westermann has devoted much energy to the form-critical analysis of Lamentations, coming to an essentially converse conclusion to that of Jahnow. With regard to chapter 1, he writes:

So the judgment of Jahnow—viz., that with regard to its structure Lam 1 is a dirge into which several motifs of the communal lament have been incorporated—must be rejected. Rather, in Lam 1 the structure of the communal lament can quite clearly be discerned. It is into the latter's structure that isolated elements of the dirge have been inserted.⁷

Chapter 2, for Westermann, belongs nearly exclusively to the category of communal lament: “Only the mournful cry at the beginning really belongs to the dirge.”⁸ Other interpreters agree with Westermann on the mixture of dirge and lament, yet identify the lament as that of an individual rather than a community.⁹ Gottwald takes a synthetic approach, writing that “[b]oth the funeral song and the individual lament as formal types are employed here and there, but always in the communal sense.”¹⁰

It is clear that we have in chapters 1 and 2 of Lamentations a certain mixture or combination of genres: the more common lament (whether understood as individual or communal) and the dirge or funeral song. What is less clear, and what I will argue now, is that the combination of the genres is not haphazard or confused. Rather it evinces the fundamental dynamic of survival literature identified above: the paradox of life in death and death in life.

It is apparent that when scholars have attempted to separate the genres in chapter 1, they have tended to do so along the lines established by the change in speaker between Zion and the poet.¹¹ The voice of the poet holds sway for nearly all of the first half of chapter 1 (vv. 1-11) and proceeds in dirgelike fashion to describe the ruination of Zion, personified as a woman.¹² Particularly characteristic of the dirge are the following elements: the opening exclamatory “Alas” or “How” the contrast between former glory and present circumstance, a description of misery, and the gloating onlookers. One of the only breaks with the genre is to blame Zion for her present state, which would have no place in a pure dirge. The scene is dismal, and what biblical scholars call the qinah (dirge-like) meter of the poetry is entirely appropriate for the tone of desolation. Yet there is already a certain amount of ambiguity with regard to genre even in the opening verses. For as much as the funeral dirge can be discerned here, the primary element that grounds all dirges is missing: a death. The ostensible event that necessitates a dirge is the death of an individual or personified individual, or, as in the derivative oracles against the nations, the ironically anticipated death. But even before the chapter switches voices and genres into lament in verses 12-22, one is aware that Zion has in fact survived. Given the deathly scene surveyed by the poet, the formal and thematic characteristics of the dirge do not seem entirely out of place; nevertheless, the dirge, which should properly signal the death of Zion, takes place while she is yet alive.

While Zion survives in the dirge of the poet, the import of this really becomes apparent only in the second half of chapter 1. It is here that Zion emerges most forcefully as a speaking subject, and it is here that elements of the funeral song increasingly give way to the elements of lament. The scene of death implied by the dirge, already undercut by the presence of Zion, begins to open out toward life even more. Not only is the one who should be dead alive, but she is speaking, and speaking vigorously. The genre of lament, like the dirge, arises out of pain and knows much about death. Yet unlike the dirge, its primary aim is life. The lament addresses God and expects an answer. Westermann writes:

There is not a single Psalm of Lament that stops with lamentation. Lamentation has no meaning in and of itself. That it functions as an appeal is evident in its structure. What the lament is concerned with is not a description of one's own sufferings or with self-pity, but with the removal of the suffering itself.¹³

While Westermann likely overstates the case, particularly with regard to the book of Lamentations, the basic point that the lament as a genre looks beyond the situation of death is important. The dirge of the poet recedes as the primary mode of discourse in the face of Zion's survival.

Zion's direct address to the Lord, which form-critically belongs in the realm of the lament, has already infiltrated the dirge of the poet as early as verse 9. The verse begins with a two-line summary of how Zion has so far been presented: her state of uncleanness is reiterated; she is blamed for this uncleanness (“she did not think of her future”); the reversal of fortunes is restated (“she has come down astonishingly”); and she is once more said to have “none to comfort her.” But there is a radical shift in verse 9c when what is unmistakably the voice of Zion herself interrupts the poet. This interruption is short, only two cola, but nonetheless compelling:

See, O Lord, my suffering—
          how the enemy triumphs.

The poet's monopoly on the reader is momentarily broken; the one spoken about now becomes the one who speaks. Likewise, while the poet has spoken about Yhwh in the dirge, it [is] Zion who first speaks to Yhwh in the form of a lament.¹⁴

Though the intrusion of Zion in verse 1:9 is brief, it may be taken as setting in motion the transition from dirge to lament, from death to life, that Lamentations 1 and 2 will develop further. For example, while the poem seems to resume the dirge in verse 10, there is a slight indication that the persona of the poet, if not that of Yhwh, has also become concerned with the outward movement of the lament in contrast to the dirge. For in verse 10 the poet uncharacteristically speaks to Yhwh, using the second-person form of address for the first time.

She has seen nations come into
          her holy place—
about whom you commanded,
          they shall not come into your assembly.

Up to this point the persona of the poet has employed third-person verbs only, with Zion breaking the pattern by addressing Yhwh directly. On the heels of Zion's speech comes the poet's own direct speech to Yhwh, indicating a beginning of a conformity of language between the two personae that will become more pronounced in later verses.

The poet's growing concern for life as well as his awareness of the threat of death both are present in verse 11 as well. He describes the inhabitants of Zion as having kept themselves alive, but only at great cost. The climax of the poet's speech is in 11b:

They have given their precious things for food,
          in order to keep themselves alive.

The connotation of the Hebrew word used here for “precious things” is debatable. It may mean expensive or treasured possessions, as it does in 1 Kings 20:6 and Joel 4:5, or it may mean children, as it does in Hosea 9:16. One need not decide between these two connotations, as the poetry is able to carry both simultaneously. Indeed, the two meanings are clearly juxtaposed in Hosea 9, where verse 16 refers to offspring but verse 6 refers to objects of silver. Given the poetic strategy of personification, both connotations are likely on the horizon of the poetry in Lamentations 1 as well. The connotation of “treasures” is aligned with the destruction of an actual city, while the connotation of “children” is aligned with the city in its personification as a woman. The second connotation makes the line bitterly ironic: only by sacrificing a future survival can the semblance of a present survival be maintained. Moreover, the trace of children in the phrase “precious things” anticipates 2:20 and 4:10, where children themselves are said to be eaten by their mothers.¹⁵

The second intrusion by the figure of Zion, in 1:11c, manifests an even stronger move away from the dirge and into the lament, the form of which dominates the remainder of the chapter. Zion's initial address to Yhwh in verse 9c, with its single imperative to “see” her pain, is echoed and compounded in the address in verse 11c, with its double imperative for Yhwh to “see” and “pay attention to” how abject Zion has become. As with the second-person address of Yhwh, the accusation against God that follows in verses 12-16 is a characteristic element of the lament genre, containing the typical threefold concern for the agony of the one suffering, the relationship of God to the suffering, and the mention of enemies.¹⁶

The voice of Zion holds sway for most of the second half of Lamentations 1, effectively excluding the elements of the dirge, based as they are in the finality of death. The traditional “setting in life” (Sitz im Leben) of a dirge is the funeral, where it serves as a stage in the work of mourning, a stage that one passes through in order to “overcome” the loss of the individual. In psychoanalytic terms, the ego attempts to break off its overwhelming attachment to the one lost.¹⁷ But as we have seen, Zion is not yet lost, and her move to direct lament in verses 12-16 forestalls the premature mourning that might allow either the poet or the reader to overcome her death.¹⁸

Although the poet interjects in verse 17, mirroring Zion's intrusion (in verse 9c) into his speech in the first half of the chapter, with possible allusions to death,¹⁹ such allusions are passed over as Zion speaks once more in verse 18. Any question of a genuine dirge over the death of Zion is here put to rest, though in keeping with the poem's awareness of the infiltration of death into the realm of life, Zion laments:

Outside, the sword slays—
          indoors, death.(20)

(1:20c)

Death has crossed the final border and entered even the safe haven of the house.

The final section of chapter 1 represents well the outward reach of the genre of lament. Zion employs the standard elements of a lament: a summons to participation (18b), a plea for Yhwh to take notice (20a), and a petition for reprisal against the enemy (22a).²¹ This final section of chapter 1 also represents well the manner in which the genre of lament intersects with the literature of survival. From the portrayal of a world hostile to life, to the attempt to sway its audience, to the undeniable dream of revenge, Zion's voice is that of the survivor. Holocaust survivor Jorge Semprun echoes Zion's appeal for revenge: “There's no point trying to understand the SS. It is enough just to exterminate them.”²² Jean Améry, though admitting that “resentment blocks the exit to the genuine human dimension, the future” and is therefore not something to be nurtured or desired by survivors, nonetheless goes on to speak of his “conviction that loudly proclaimed readiness for reconciliation by Nazi victims can only be either insanity and indifference to life or the masochistic conversion of a suppressed genuine demand for revenge.”²³ I considered the commingling of life and death and the desire to persuade in the previous chapter on survival [in Linafelt, Tod. Surviving Lamentations], but it must be noted that Zion's call for revenge also has its place in the literature of survival.

In keeping with the movement away from the dirge (with its world of death) and toward the lament (with its drive for life), Lamentations 2 continues the mixture of forms, or genres, but does so with the emphasis on lament. Indeed, as Westermann has noted, “In broad outline, the structure of Lamentations 2 corresponds to that of the communal lament. Only the mournful cry at the beginning really belongs to the dirge.”²⁴ The presence of “Alas” at the start of chapter 2 functions as a parallel to the start of chapter 1 as well as establishing the relationship with the dirge. Also preserved from the dirge, in verses 1-8 particularly, is the contrast between former and present status. God has thrown down the “splendor of Israel” from heaven to earth (2:1). God has torn down the strongholds of Judah. No longer an ally, “God has become an enemy” (2:5). The reversal is made most explicit and most far-reaching in verse 7:

The Lord has rejected his altar,
          spurned his sanctuary.
He has given the walls of her citadels
          into the hand of the enemy.
They shout in the house of the Lord,
          as though it were a feast day.

All that was formerly honored and held sacred is now rejected and profaned. The extent to which the city's fortunes have been reversed is epitomized by the portrayal of the temple, which should be the site of celebration, as the site of desecration.

In spite of these elements of the dirge in Lamentations 2, it is clear that the form of lament becomes more prominent. For example, the entire section of 2:1-10 represents an accusation against God, found in most laments, that has been transformed into a third-person description of misery. Though retaining elements from his dirgelike speech from Lamentations 1, the poet in chapter 2 begins to take into account the fact that the city still exists—that Zion remains alive—in spite of its dismal state. Language of elegy is progressively transformed into the language of lament, coming to a culmination in the second half of the chapter (which I will treat more thoroughly in the third section of this … [essay]).

Although it may well be that chapters 1 and 2 were written as separate compositions, as they stand now they manifest together a similar mixture of the forms of lament and dirge, with an emphasis on the movement from dirge to lament. Thus, when read together these two chapters draw the reader into the world of survival literature, a world characterized by death in the midst of life and life in the midst of death.²⁵

THE PRESENTATION OF PAIN IN LAMENTATIONS 1 AND 2

As literature of survival, chapters 1 and 2 of Lamentations not only demonstrate a commingling of life and death, but they also demonstrate the strong desire, found throughout survival literature, to make present to the reader the pain and suffering of survivors. In order to understand Lamentations 1 and 2 properly, one must maintain the distinction between the “presentation” of pain and the “interpretation” of pain. Both the presentation of pain and the interpretation of pain exist in Lamentations 1 and 2, but the extent and significance of each have been given very uneven treatment in modern critical interpretation. Biblical scholars have tended to focus on the interpretation of pain, and not surprisingly they have done so primarily by explaining pain and suffering as resulting from the guilt of the sufferer. Taking a clue from the literature of survival, however, I will refocus interpretation of chapters 1 and 2 around the presentation of pain, thereby balancing the penchant of biblical scholars to seek explanation for suffering and instead offering a fuller and more nuanced reading of these chapters.

Terrence Des Pres's evaluation of the role played by pain in the literature of survival offers a sobering corrective to the view that suffering can, or even must, be absorbed into a system of meaning (whether theological or otherwise). Des Pres writes:

One of the strongest themes in the literature of survival is that pain is senseless; that a suffering so vast is completely without value as suffering. The survivor, then, is a disturber of the peace.²⁶

Such an evaluation is very different from how pain and suffering are treated by biblical scholars, who seem overeager to make the move from the fact of pain to the recognition of guilt and subsequently to repentance. I contend that viewing Lamentations 1 and 2 from the perspective of the literature of survival enables one to perceive aspects of the presentation of suffering in Lamentations that have been obscured by the theological presuppositions of biblical scholars.

The survivor's desire to witness to pain rather than to find meaning in it can be seen clearly in the speeches of Zion in chapters 1 and 2. Especially striking in this regard are the two initial interruptive statements by which personified Zion enters the poetry as a speaking subject.

See, O Lord, my suffering—
          how the enemy triumphs.

(1:9c)

See, O Lord, and pay attention—
          how abject I have become.

(1:12c)

In the previous section of this [essay], I identified these imperatives to Yhwh as the beginning of a strong move away from the death represented by the genre of the funeral song and toward the drive for life represented by the genre of lament. The move, however, is not easy or automatic, but proceeds through the survivor's acute experience of suffering. Such suffering must be “seen,” in the words of Zion. The lament requires that the experience of the one lamenting be looked at and acknowledged.

The importance of this requirement that suffering and pain be acknowledged is demonstrated by the compounding of imperatives in the beginning of Zion's first speech in Lamentations 1. The single imperative in 1:9c for Yhwh to “see” becomes the double imperative in 1:11c for Yhwh to “see and pay attention”. This double imperative is then immediately repeated (in an inverted form) to the passersby in 1:12:

Pay attention and see!(27)
Is there any pain like my pain,
                    like my continual suffering?
Which the Lord inflicted on me,
          on the day of his wrath?

(1:12)

The five imperatives in a row, combined with the double repetition of “pain” and the use of the harsh words “suffering” and “inflicted,” lend a rhetorical significance to Zion's presentation of pain as pain, rather than as the raw material for ruminations on guilt. As long as the voice of the poet holds the reader's attention in the opening verses of chapter 1, the pain of Zion has been kept at arm's length. Not only is her suffering described in the third person, but the poet is wont to make sense of Zion's suffering with reference to her sins (1:8), rebelliousness (1:5), or impurity (1:9). The irruption of first-person misery into the poem via the voice of Zion, however, defers all such sense making. Zion is, to use Des Pres's phrase, a “disturber of the peace” in that she will not let the subject of her suffering be settled so easily. Unlike the poet in verses 1:1-11, Zion makes little correlation between her sins and her suffering. Zion's first speech in 1:12-16, outside of one textually very uncertain phrase in 1:14,²⁸ contains no reference to sin whatsoever. In other words, there is no attempt here to interpret or explain suffering.

Instead of explanations for suffering, one finds in Zion's speech an accusation against God combined with a terrifying description of misery. The command to “see” gives way in 1:13-15 to the description of what may be seen, as the character of Zion gives concrete detail to fill out her general statement in verse 12 that Yhwh has afflicted her. While the poet tended to focus in verses 1-11 on the human agents of destruction—referring repeatedly to foes, enemies, betrayers, despisers, invaders in the temple, and exile among the nations, but only once naming Yhwh as the subject of affliction—Zion repeatedly names Yhwh as the one who afflicts and she repeatedly attributes active verbs of violence to Yhwh.

In this section one begins to feel more keenly the import of the author's use of the poetic technique of personification to convey the destruction of a city, as the language of actual physical pain that can be experienced only by living beings pervades the accusation against God. Thus, in 1:13 Zion portrays herself as being attacked by Yhwh-as-warrior, who catches her feet in a net and hurls her backward. Fire, no doubt a vivid image in reference to the destruction of cities, is said in this verse to penetrate to the very bones of Zion. At the same time as the personification allows for the presentation of the pain of the city itself, it also allows one to continue to speak of the suffering of the inhabitants of the city, who are portrayed as the children of personified Zion (1:15; 1:16). The first speech of Zion presents to the reader the sheer fact of pain, told from the perspective of a figure who has survived that pain. It leads to a climax in verse 16:

For these things I weep … My eyes, my eyes!
          They stream with tears.
How far from me is one to comfort,
          one to restore my life.
My children are ravaged,(29)
          the enemy has triumphed.

The twofold cry, “my eyes, my eyes”, is by no means simply a “clear case of dittography,”³⁰ but is another way of intensifying the presentation of pain and grief.³¹ Zion's lament is that of a survivor—one who has lived through death and destruction—culminating with a mother's wailing over the loss of her children.

It is important to note that the character of Zion, for all her challenging of Yhwh, never claims complete innocence. Zion's lament in 1:18-22, following the brief interruption of the poet in 1:17 (to be treated more fully below), begins by acknowledging that “Yhwh is in the right” and that she has been “rebellious.” And at the end of her speech in 1:22 she admits that Yhwh afflicted her because of her rebelliousness; though it must be noted that the admission is in the context of a call for a similar affliction on her enemies. Zion is, of course, not a completely autonomous figure divorced from the culture of lament characteristic of the ancient Near East in which the book of Lamentations was written. Zion is rather a literary persona created by an author who participated in that common culture, which included the notion of divine punishment on the basis of human misbehavior or disloyalty. While participating in these cultural and theological presuppositions, the author nevertheless saw fit to shift the focus of these poems away from the issue of guilt and toward the experience of pain and suffering, regardless of guilt. Even, for example, in 1:18-22 where the figure of Zion refers to sin and rebelliousness, the rhetoric continues to shift to the experience and extent of pain. Immediately on the heels of the admission of Yhwh's “righteousness” (or perhaps “victory”) in 1:18a come echoes of her earlier imperatives to the passersby:

Listen, each and every one,
          look at my agony.
My young women and my young men alike
          have gone into captivity.

Also repeated from her earlier description of pain is the desertion of allies and the hunger of the city's inhabitants (1:19). The imperative for Yhwh to see her distress is repeated in verse 20, as is the leitmotif “there was no one to comfort me” in verse 21. Brief allusions to guilt in Zion's second speech thus give way to extended expressions of misery and desolation.

I do not mean to claim that the notion of guilt in the book of Lamentations or the ancient Near Eastern genre of lament is the same as that in twentieth-century literature of survival. I admit the very real differences between the two, even as I suggest that one might nevertheless learn something about Lamentations by reading it alongside twentieth-century survival literature. A brief comparison is thus in order. Des Pres writes:

With very few exceptions, the testimony of survivors does not concern itself with guilt of any sort. Their books neither admonish nor condemn nor beg forgiveness; not because survivors are drained of their humanity, but because their attention lies wholly elsewhere.³²

Compare this with the judgment of Westermann concerning Zion's admission of sin in verse 18.

Just how important the acknowledgment of guilt is for Lam 1 has already been shown (with ref. to vv 5 and 9). Here, at the high point of the whole song, this motif is brought into conjunction with an acknowledgment of the justice of God's ways such that the whole preceding lament is set off: God must act in this way, because we have transgressed against his word.³³

Des Pres is arguing against the prevalent concept of “survivor guilt,” the notion that those who have lived through atrocities such as mass murder are plagued by a sense of guilt over the fact that while so many others died, they somehow escaped alive. Des Pres does not claim that such guilt is nonexistent, but rather that it is not the primary drive of survivor testimony, which is chiefly devoted to conveying the experience of atrocity and survival. What Des Pres is arguing against in the reading of twentieth-century survival literature—the elevating of the single theme of guilt to the status of an interpretive key—is precisely what Westermann is demonstrating in his readings of the biblical laments. Westermann has taken the element of guilt, which is undeniably present, and made it the lens through which all else is read. This element becomes the “high point” of the chapter and sets off “the whole preceding lament.”

Both Des Pres and Westermann likely overstate their cases. In the current debate over the nature and extent of survivor guilt, Des Pres's statement would no doubt need to be nuanced. As a biblical scholar, however, I find that it offers a helpful corrective to the statement of Westermann. The persona of Zion does indeed admit her sins or disobedience. Such an admission is a genre convention of the lament, and Lamentations 1 and 2 does not excise it. Yet rather than making her sins the primary concern of her speeches, she admits them flatly and not altogether wholeheartedly. Westermann's celebration of guilt as the hermeneutical key to the entire chapter is unwarranted. Using Des Pres's analysis to nuance Westermann's, it is clear that Zion, as a survivor, does not “beg forgiveness.” And as I will argue below, it also becomes clear that Zion's attention, and that of the poet, ultimately lies wholly elsewhere.

The insistence on the sheer fact of suffering, with little reference to its deservedness or merits, becomes even more apparent in chapter 2 of Lamentations. On the heels of Zion's utterances, which are densely packed with the presentation of pain, the poet's language changes significantly, leaving behind the interpretation of suffering in terms of guilt and placing the focus on the presentation of divine wrath and Zion's pain. In a stance similar to that of Zion, who in chapter 1 emphatically identified Yhwh as the source of destruction, the poet now portrays God as an enemy warrior in line after line. Verses 1-4, for example, are a poetic whirlwind of fire and wrath. Verse 1: Yhwh “in his wrath” has shamed Zion, and has forgotten his footstool “on the day of his wrath”. Verse 2: “In his fury” Yhwh has razed Judah's defenses. Verse 3: Yhwh has cut down “in blazing wrath” the horn of Israel, and has “burned against Israel like a blazing fire, consuming on all sides.” Verse 4: Yhwh pours out against Zion “his wrath like fire.” The English language is exhausted in an attempt to describe the destructive inferno unleashed by the Lord's anger.

With its double use of “swallowed up”, verse 5 serves as an introduction to the systematic dismantling of the city that follows. First, Yhwh eradicates the public institutions in verses 6-7, eliminating all public modes of access to the divine: Yhwh's “booth” and “(tent of) meeting” are destroyed, festivals and Sabbaths are ended, the altar and sanctuary are rejected, and the temple desecrated. Second, Yhwh demolishes the actual physical structures of the city in verses 8-9a: walls and ramparts languish, gates are sunk into the ground with their bars smashed to bits. Third, the conquered state of the inhabitants of the city is described in their abandonment by Yhwh in verses 9b-10: the king and the princes are exiled, the teachers of Torah are no more, the prophets receive no vision, the elders sit about in mourning, and the young women lower their heads to the ground. So while the opening speeches by the poet in both chapters 1 and 2 are similar in their description of misery, destruction, and death, there is a noticeable change in the poet's voice. Not only does the poet attribute the destruction to Yhwh in chapter 2, but any reference to the sin of Zion drops away. This change in the persona of the poet, as he begins to conform more and more to the speech of Zion, leads into the next element of the literature of survival that is manifested in Lamentations: the desire to persuade.

THE RHETORIC OF PERSUASION AND THE CHILDREN OF ZION

The description of pain in literature of survival exists, in the first instance, for its own sake. That is, such description needs no other validation than the fact and experience of the pain that has given rise to it. But in many cases, as I described above in chapter 1 [in Linafelt, Tod. Surviving Lamentations], literature of survival functions not only to describe but to persuade; the literature moves from the basic need to give voice to pain to the project of giving testimony or bearing witness. In this second function, description may serve an end beyond itself: that of drawing the reader, to the extent that it is possible to do so, into the experience of survival and to make the concerns of the survivor the concerns of the reader as well. Des Pres, once again, states this well:

In the literature of survival we find an image of things so grim, so heart-breaking, so starkly unbearable, that inevitably the survivor's scream begins to be our own. When this happens the role of the spectator is no longer enough.³⁴

This desire to persuade is one of the most striking correspondences between Lamentations 1 and 2 and modern literature of survival, though the differences also must be kept in mind.

One significant difference between the book of Lamentations and modern literature of survival, in their respective tasks of persuasion, is the issue of whom they are trying to persuade. Insofar as modern literature of survival has a persuasive function, it is addressed to those who did not share the experience of suffering that it describes and who are not, for the most part, to be considered survivors. By contrast Lamentations, though also likely written by survivors of the destruction it describes, is written (at least originally) for other survivors as well. The status of Lamentations as liturgical poetry gives it a different initial rhetorical situation from modern literature of survival. The one whom these poems, as liturgical laments, are desperately trying to persuade is God.³⁵ It is my argument that the task of persuasion is compounded in Lamentations 1 and 2 to an exceptional degree, both in the internal workings of the poetry and in their afterlife. One finds not only an appeal to Yhwh to see and to intervene to alleviate the suffering described but, failing that, the task of persuasion implicates in a remarkably self-referential way the persona of the poet. And as the history of interpretation shows, Lamentations does indeed get bound up with the persuasion of readers who did not share the original experience, whether or not such persuasion was on the horizon of its initial rhetorical situation. I argue as well that the survival of Zion's children occupies a privileged and critical role in this rhetoric of persuasion, representing a key to the literary and emotional structure of Lamentations 1 and 2. As the drive for life becomes more apparent in the shift in genre from the dirge to the lament and in the increasing emphasis on the function of persuasion, the drive for life also becomes more apparent in the content of Zion's lament. The laments of both Zion and the poet culminate in a concern for the lives of the children who are dying in the streets.

The subject of Zion's children is first raised in the poet's opening speech in chapter 1, where the fact that “infants have gone into captivity” (1:5) is presented as part of the third-person description of the destruction. Here it seems to hold no special place in the description. Zion's first extended speech in 1:12-16, however, comes to a rhetorical, and one could say an emotional, climax in her emphasis on the fate of her children. I refer to verse 16 (cited and translated above) as the rhetorical climax of her speech because it occurs there as the culmination of her accusation against God and is marked for emphasis as the point at which the poet breaks into her speech. I allude to the emotional aspect of the verse because it is here that Zion describes a sort of upheaval of passion: “For these things I weep … My eyes, my eyes! They stream with tears.” Given the lament's function of persuasion, the interruption of the poet coming just at this climactic point of the chapter is no accident. Zion has appealed to Yhwh twice (1:9 and 1:11), but the reader is given no indication of a response or a shift toward praise or a vow of confidence that might indicate a salvation oracle, that is, a sign that Yhwh has heard or intends to answer Zion.

Instead of some indication of the desired response from Yhwh, the reader meets in 1:17 the persona of the poet once again, thereby beginning the inscription of the rhetoric of persuasion but with the poet standing in for Yhwh as the one who is persuaded. The poet's language in verse 17 has begun to reflect, albeit subtly, the presence of the Zion persona in the poem. For example, in addition to the leitmotif of “none to comfort,” the poet repeats in verse 17 language that had previously clustered around the initial intrusion of Zion into the poem in 1:9c. While the enemy spread his hands over Zion's precious things in verse 10, it is now Zion who desperately spreads out her hands, perhaps in a futile attempt to protect herself or to find something that might keep her from falling. And while in verse 10 the invading army is presented as those whom Yhwh has commanded to not come in, in verse 17 the poet speaks of Yhwh commanding the enemy to surround Jacob. The persona of the poet has, of course, already been recruited to the task of witnessing to the destruction via his role as the speaker of the dirge in 1:1-11. Though making reference to the sin and guilt of the city, he nevertheless expresses genuine grief at the reversal of fate that Zion has experienced. As the genre of the poetry moves from dirge toward lament, the poet moves also from one who elegizes Zion to one who laments in solidarity with her and even attempts, albeit futilely, to provide the response to the lament that Zion is seeking. Using Des Pres's language, while it is wrong to say that the poet has been up until this point a “spectator,” it is true that as Zion's situation becomes “starkly unbearable” her scream begins to be the poet's scream as well. Only a hint of such a persuasion exists at this point, but it is a hint that gets fully developed in the larger movement of chapters 1 and 2. For example, although the poet's voice is given the most space in chapter 2, his speech becomes progressively more like the speech of Zion in chapter 1. As Westermann notes, the poet's description of misery in the first half of Lamentations 2, especially in its repeated portrayal of what “Yhwh has done,” corresponds closely to an accusation of God. Thus, the form of the poet's speech here has begun to resemble the form of the speech of Zion in chapter 1.

The intensification of personal, emotional speech on the part of the poet—in other words, his alignment with the experience of Zion—comes to a head in verses 11-12. Like the first chapter, this halfway point in the poem marks a climax and transition. In the face of the plight of Zion, the voice of the poet here expresses precisely the sort of emotional upheaval that we saw with the persona of Zion herself in 1:16.

My eyes are spent with tears,
          my stomach churns,
my bile is poured out on the ground,
          because of the brokenness of the daughter
          of my people,
broken over the children and the infants
          collapsing in the streets of the city.
They kept saying to their mothers,
          “Where is bread and wine?”
as they collapsed like the wounded
                    in the squares of the city,
as their lives ran out
                    in the bosoms of their mothers.

(2:11-12)

That the poet has been forcefully recruited to the plight of Zion is indicated by the way that his words, at this important juncture, echo closely the earlier words of Zion. Even as Zion's eyes flowed with tears (1:16), so the poet's eyes are spent with tears. The poet also employs the same phrase used by Zion in 1:20, “my stomach churns”, to describe his physical or emotional distress. The scream of Zion has, almost literally, become the scream of the poet. But most significantly, what magnifies the emotional register both for Zion in 1:16 and the poet in 2:11-12 is the image of children under threat. It may be that the passage under consideration not only portrays the poet's emotional state as similar to Zion's, but explicitly calls attention to the function of persuasion. Notice that the Hebrew particle (“because of”) in verse 11 introduces the causative clause that follows: it is because of the brokenness of Zion, here called the “daughter of my people,” that the persona of the poet is in such distress. What follows this line may well be another causative clause, introduced by the infinitive construct of the Hebrew term with a bet prefix (“collapsing”), which may be taken as a reference back to the cause of Zion's distress. On this reading, reflected in my translation above, a causal chain exists in the verse, in which the cause of the poet's distress is identified as the brokenness of Zion, and the cause of the brokenness of Zion is identified as the children collapsing like the wounded in the squares of the city. Thus it is Zion's presentation of the plight of her children that has recruited the poet so forcefully. Since the lament as a genre is concerned to get a response from God to the suffering it describes, the poet is modeling the response to Zion's lament that should come from God.

In a now-classic article on the theological implications of the Holocaust, Irving Greenberg has suggested the following as a working principle: “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.”³⁶ The force of Greenberg's criterion, of course, is to point up that no speech is adequate as an explanation of such suffering. Immediately following the emotional climax of 2:11-12, the poet of Lamentations comes to a similar conclusion in verse 13.

What can I say for you, to what can
          I compare you, daughter Jerusalem?
To what can I liken you,
          that I may comfort you, Daughter Zion?
For your breach is as vast as the sea—
          who could heal you?

(2:13)

For the first time in the book the poet acknowledges his own subjectivity. He speaks in the first person and refers in fact to his task as poet: to attempt to translate into language the suffering he sees. Also for the first time the poet makes explicit his dialogical relationship to the figure of Zion by addressing her in the second person. So the task of the poet is not only to search for language adequate to the destruction, but to do so in order to console Zion. Against his earlier statements that there was none to comfort her, the poet here explicitly attempts to fill the role of “comforter” (2:13b). With acute poignancy, however, the poet admits at the same time the futility of his attempts at consolation. The questions of verse 13 are rhetorical: only the inadequate can be said; only the inadequate comparison can be made; there is no healing for a breach as vast as the sea. The poet is caught in the survivor's dilemma. “But how is one to say, how is one to communicate that which by its very nature defies language? How is one to tell without betraying the dead, without betraying oneself?”³⁷ To speak is to betray the memory of the dead, for all metaphors are wanting. To remain silent, however, is a worse betrayal: “[h]ence the vital necessity to bear witness.”³⁸

One can hardly consider the poet's predicament in relation to twentieth-century survival literature without thinking of Theodor Adorno's famous remark from 1949 that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.³⁹ After much literal-minded criticism of the remark, Adorno wrote the following in 1966:

Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living.⁴⁰

So the poet continues, as even Adorno conceded must be done. His continued speech in 2:14-17 surveys the cast of characters and further elaborates Zion's destitute condition: the prophets are found wanting, as they prophesied only “emptiness and whitewash” (2:14); the passerby only clap and mock Jerusalem, reveling in her downfall (2:15); and the enemies, of course, jeer and gloat over their triumph (2:16). The poet comes finally in verse 17 to Yhwh, but the only one who might be able to comfort Zion is also the author of the wreckage and the drive behind the enemies' victory: “The Lord has done what he planned … he has torn down without pity … he has made your enemies gloat over you” (2:17).

Having taken up the cause of Zion, but able neither to find a comforter nor to comfort Zion adequately himself, the poet urges Zion, with a final intensification of rhetoric at the end of his speech, to cry out herself once more to Yhwh (2:18-19).

Cry out to the Lord from the heart,(41)
          wall of Daughter Zion.
Shed tears like a torrent,
          day and night!
Give yourself no rest,
          no relief for your eyes.
Rise up! Wail in the night,
          at the start of every watch.
Pour out your heart like water
          before the Lord.
Life your hands to him
                    for the lives of your infants,
who collapse from hunger
          at the corner of every street.

The poet has just exhausted the Hebrew language in an attempt to find enough metaphors to depict Yhwh the arch-warrior; yet it is this same Yhwh to whom Zion is to appeal.

This sort of appeal to the destroyer to become the one to heal is a conventional element in ancient Near Eastern laments. But can one see here what Westermann repeatedly calls a plea for “God's gracious intervention”?⁴² That is surely too benign a characterization. The notion of an abused and violated woman turning for help to her abuser, and the one who abused her children, should inspire in the modern reader something less than the notion of gracious intervention. Westermann is, even more than most biblical scholars, heavily invested in the form-critical judgment that lament is a stage through which the prayer moves on the way back to a restored relationship with God.⁴³ Essential to Westermann's analysis of the structure of laments is the transition to a vow of praise (in the communal laments) or to praise itself (in the individual laments).⁴⁴ In fact, Westermann identifies 2:18-19 explicitly with the move to praise found in psalmic laments: “Form-critically speaking, these lines correspond to the imperatively-worded summons to praise known from the Psalms.”⁴⁵ Even Westermann, however, must admit that what we find in these verses, and in Zion's response in 2:20-22, is far from praise. So he judges that, “in terms of their content, these imperatives more closely resemble the call to wait patiently upon Yahweh.”⁴⁶ But certainly this final section of chapter 2 no more advocates a patient waiting than it does a stance of praise toward Yhwh.

At this point, the project of reading for survival in Lamentations can be instructive once again. It is significant that there is no mention here of “comfort.” It is not inconceivable, as I note above, that in the context of ancient Near Eastern laments the destroyer could also be imagined as the potential comforter (see also for example Isa. 54:7-8). In Lamentations 3 one can identify a similar dynamic. In Lamentations 1 and 2, however, that is not what happens. Indeed, 2:13 tells the reader nothing if not that the very category of comfort has been called into question. Neither is there any indication in the poet's urging (or in Zion's response in 2:20-22) that a move to praise is on the horizon. No, the rhetorical move imagined by the poet is for Zion to affront Yhwh with the intolerable suffering of children, precisely on behalf of the children. As the chapter moves toward its close, what has become clearly at stake is neither a reconciled relationship with Yhwh nor the possibility of praise, but the very survival of the children who are dying in the street.

What makes the image of suffering children so important for the literary and emotional structure of Lamentations 1 and 2 is the way it works on both a literal and a figurative level. Children are, of course, among the literal victims of the destruction of a city and represent perhaps the most poignant image of such victims even in our time. The force of the image is compounded, however, by the poetic mode of personifying the city as a grieving mother. The children, while retaining the concrete and disturbing images associated with the destruction, also become “summary” figures for the totality of the city's losses. The privileged image of a mother's loss of children serves to express how devastating it is for a city to lose not only altar and sanctuary, but prophet, priest, and king, in addition to the citizens, young and old, of the city.

The subtle artistry of the poetry's emphasis on the image of children nicely sets off its more forceful rhetoric of 2:18-19. Thus for example the occurrence of the Leitwort “pour out” (Hebrew root:) at this critical point in the poem represents a nexus of interrelations between the characters. Indeed, it is possible to see each character defined by what he or she is said to pour out. Mother Zion is told to “pour out your heart like water … for the lives of your children.” In 2:12 it is precisely the “lives of the children” that are being “poured out in the bosoms of their mothers.” Moreover, in that same passage it is the pouring out of the children's lives that moves the poet to “pour out” his grief (2:11). In sharp contrast, when the word is used with Yhwh as the subject, it describes the pouring out of Yhwh's raging fire (2:4). This is a far cry from Westermann's “call to wait patiently upon Yahweh.” There is no pretension of reconciliation or praise here, but a central concern for the lives of the children. It is the threat to the children that led to Zion's breaking down into tears in 1:16, as well as the poet's brief interruption into Zion's speech in 1:17 where he first names Yhwh as the purveyor of destruction. It is also the perishing children that lead to the poet's own breakdown in 2:11. Perhaps, then, the lives of the children will be enough to move even Yhwh.

Chapter 2 closes with Zion responding to the poet's urging, culminating in the most accusatory passage in the book.

Look, O Lord, and pay attention to whom it is
that you have so ruthlessly afflicted!
Alas! Women are eating their offspring,
the children they have borne.

(2:20a-b)

Zion employs the same imperative that she did in 1:11c in an attempt to command the attention of Yhwh and to gain the survival of her children. Translators have typically watered down the accusatory nature of the first line by rendering the second colon as “to whom you have done this” (JPSV; NRSV). But the Hebrew verb that is used here carries the much stronger force of “to afflict” or “to abuse” and may even imply capriciousness.⁴⁷ In Judges 19:25, for example, the same verb is used to describe the fate of the Levite's concubine, where it is a parallel to the verb “rape.” In 1 Samuel 31:4 it is used by Saul to describe what he imagines the Philistines will do to him if he is caught, and it is here used in parallel to “run through” with a sword. In Job 16:15 it is used in the midst of a passage that describes God's rushing Job like a warrior, piercing his kidneys and showing no mercy, despite Job's protestations of innocence. The verb (pronounced ‘ôlaltā) is sardonically placed in Lamentations 2:20a in a parallel position with the similarly written and sounding noun (pronounced ‘ōlalê, “children,” 2:20b), thereby contrasting the ruthlessness of Yhwh with the suffering of children, and making clear that these are the ones whom Yhwh is afflicting.

Zion continues in the final section to elaborate on the suffering of the population: priest and prophet are slain in the sanctuary, old and young alike die in the streets, young women and young men are fallen by the sword. The function of children as summary figures, or symbolic condensations, of the entire population of the city is indicated by the bracketing of “priest and prophet” (2:20c) and “young and old” (2:21a) by the images of perishing children in 2:20a and 2:22c. This privileged image of loss surrounds the others, not in order to exceed them but rather to gather up and express the multiform dimensions of grief and loss to which the destruction of the city has given rise.

In the final lines of her speech, the persona of Zion employs ironically the language of the cult: after slaughtering her inhabitants, Yhwh invited people from all around, “as if on a feast-day” (2:22a). A feast does indeed take place, but it is a gruesome perversion of the cult that affronts the reader in the last line of verse 22: “those whom I bore and reared, the enemy has consumed!” Zion's final speech of 2:20-22, bounded at beginning and end by the cannibalizing of children, is the last we hear from her in the book of Lamentations. Her penultimate line (2:22b) rings fitting as a summary of Lamentations 1 and 2: “none survived or escaped.”

FROM LITERATURE OF SURVIVAL TO THE SURVIVAL OF LITERATURE

From the opening as a dirge, to the final, gripping lament of Zion, the first two chapters of Lamentations demonstrate in progressively stronger terms their status as literature of survival. As the elements of the dirge fall away in chapter 2, the drive for survival moves from the abstract to the concrete, culminating in the faces of the children of Zion. In this movement the poems also model the way in which the survivor attempts to recruit the detached observer, for there can be no doubt that Zion's scream, to use Des Pres's language, becomes the scream of the poet. Yet despite this increasingly stronger movement toward life, and despite the alignment of the poet with the experience of Zion and her lament for the lives of her children, the drive for survival is frustrated and the final verdict is one of death. Both Zion and the poet seem to have failed to affect the one who counts most, the one who is thought able to remove the suffering and save the children: God.

The book of Lamentations goes on of course, employing a number of rhetorical strategies to express the grief and anger—and, yes, the guilt and repentance—of the community and to elicit a response from God. Chapter 3 shifts to the persona of the “suffering man,” who presents a more submissive posture toward God. This male voice makes reference in 3:55-57 to a past in which the divine response was forthcoming:

I called on your name, O Lord,
                    from the depths of the pit.
You heard my plea; do not now cover your ear
          to my cry for help and relief.
You were near when I called you. You said, “Fear
                    not.”

There is never an indication, however, that such a “fear not” is on the present horizon. Even in chapter 3 the dominant tone is one of overwhelming pain and grief. Chapter 4 is closer in imagery and theme to chapters 1 and 2. It too begins with the exclamatory “Alas”, mixes elements of the dirge with the lament, describes the pitiful state of the ruined city, and mentions the threatened children of Zion (4:2-5). Yet the differences are striking. To begin with, while retaining the acrostic form only two lines are assigned to each letter of the alphabet, rather than the three assigned to each letter in chapters 1 and 2. More significantly, in chapter 4 there are no petitionary elements, no direct address to God, whatsoever. Nor does Zion ever emerge as a speaking subject in Lamentations 4, which consequently allows for no alternating of persona between Zion and the poet. In chapter 5, the final chapter, the acrostic form is missing altogether, though it seems to be reflected in the fact that there are twenty-two lines to the chapter. The chapter represents the purest instance of a communal lament in Lamentations, though the description of misery is unusually long (5:2-18). One finds in chapter 5, for just the briefest of moments, the theme of praise.

You, O Lord, will reign forever,
          enthroned from generation to generation.

(5:19)

But the flicker of praise is extinguished in the final three verses of the chapter. Here the community speaks in a first-person plural voice, addressing God directly. Lamentations ends with their plaintive appeal:

Why have you forgotten us utterly,
          forsaken us for so long?
Take us back, O Lord, to yourself, and we will come
          back.
          Renew our days as of old.
For if truly you have rejected us,
          bitterly raged against us …

(5:20-22)

The final phrase of verse 22 is a poignantly appropriate way to end the book, inscribing in its near undecidability the very lack of closure represented by God's nonresponse and the poetry's refusal to move beyond lament. As virtually all commentators note, it is difficult to know how to render the opening Hebrew phrase of 5:22, (kî’im), which may be literally translated as “for if.” Rudolph argues that it is possible to take the phrase as meaning “unless …,” implying that the possibility of what follows has been excluded.⁴⁸ But such a use of kî’im occurs elsewhere only when preceded by a clause containing a negative statement. It has also been suggested that the line be read as a question: “Or have you totally rejected us? Are you indeed so angry with us?”⁴⁹ But there is no evidence in the Bible of kî’im being used to introduce a question, nor is there any support for taking it to mean “or.” Another option, and apparently that chosen by the Septuagint and the Peshitta (ancient translations into Greek and Syriac, respectively), is to simply ignore or delete the particle ’im, thus rendering line as “for you have truly rejected us, bitterly raged against us.”

I want to propose here an alternative solution to the problem represented by this verse. It has often been noted that one might expect the phrase kî’im to introduce a conditional statement, but that the second colon of 5:22 does not seem to state the consequence of the first as would be expected in a true conditional statement.⁵⁰ While this is true, it does not rule out the conditional nature of kî’im. Thus, I have chosen to translate the line as a conditional statement that is left trailing off, leaving a protasis without an apodasis, or an “if” without a “then.” The book is left opening out into the emptiness of God's nonresponse. By leaving a conditional statement dangling, the final verse leaves open the future of the ones lamenting. It is hardly a hopeful ending, for the missing but implied apodasis is surely negative, yet it does nevertheless defer that apodasis. And by arresting the movement from an “if” to a “then” the incomplete clause allows the reader, for a moment, to imagine the possibility of a different “then,” and therefore a different future.

The appeal in 2:20-22, like the appeals made by Zion and the poet in chapters 1 and 2, remains unanswered. The voice of Yhwh never sounds in the book of Lamentations; and as Westermann assures, before the move from lament to praise could be made, “first the most important thing had to occur: God's answer.”⁵¹ Without such an answer, or perhaps some indication of a salvation oracle, the book of Lamentations remains incomplete. It evidences what Derrida has called a “structural unfinishedness.” Nor is this incompletion easily imagined as one that is “carried to term,” to return to the epigraph by Edmond Jabès with which I began this [essay]. That is, it is not an incompletion that sits well with readers. It is not an incompletion that evokes assent and allows one to move on, as the history of interpretation shows, but is rather “a work that has come only halfway toward its always deferred completion.” Though the completion is deferred, its demand is not lessened; Zion's rhetoric of survival remains strong, even if unmet. So reader after reader has attempted to complete the incompletion by filling the void that exists in the place of Yhwh's response and by addressing Zion's anguished concern over the fate of her children. Within the borders of Lamentations Zion's children do not survive, but in moving beyond those borders, to the afterlife of this biblical text in other texts, survival becomes possible. And in moving beyond the borders of the book, one moves also from literature of survival to the survival of literature.

Notes

1. Hermann Gunkel and Joachim Begrich, Einleitung in die Psalmen: Die Gattungen der religiösen Lyrik Israels (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1933), 136.

2. The two examples of dirges over the death of individuals most often cited are David's elegies for Saul and Jonathan (2 Sam. 1:19-27) and for Abner (2 Sam. 3:33-34). Examples of the dirge form being used as an anticipatory oracle of the fate of a nation are found in the prophets (e.g., Amos 5:2; Ezek. 27:2-11; Isa. 14:4-21). On the “genre” (Gattung) of the dirge, see esp. Hedwig Jahnow, Das hebräische Leichenlied, 124-62; Otto Eissfeldt, The Old Testament: An Introduction, trans. Peter Ackroyd (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 94-98; and Westermann, Lamentations, 1-9.

3. Jahnow, Das hebräische Leichenlied, 170-71.

4. Ibid., 170.

5. Gunkel and Begrich, Einleitung in die Psalmen, 397-403.

6. Eissfeldt, The Old Testament, 501-2.

7. Westermann, Lamentations, 118.

8. Ibid., 148.

9. See Provan, Lamentations, 34; Robin B. Salters, Jonah and Lamentations (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994), 102-3.

10. Gottwald, Studies, 37.

11. See Eissfeldt, The Old Testament, 501-2; Westermann, Lamentations, 117; Salters, Jonah and Lamentations, 102-3.

12. While I speak of the interchange between the voice of Zion and the voice of the “poet,” I am aware that these are alternating literary personae within the poetry, both of which are obviously attributable to the poet-as-author. See W. Lanahan, “The Speaking Voice in the Book of Lamentations,” Journal of Biblical Literature 93 (1974): 41-49, for an insistence on maintaining this distinction. It is conventional for scholars to refer to the narrative voice as that of the poet, however, a convention that I find useful to retain, especially given the fact that this persona calls attention in 2:13 to the poetic task in which it is involved.

13. Claus Westermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1981), 266.

14. The scribes who preserved the Hebrew texts of the Bible, in order to discourage the pronouncing of the holy proper name of Israel's God, preserved only the consonants y-h-w-h (known as the tetragrammaton), without the vowels necessary to pronounce the name. Following the convention of English translations, I will often render this proper name as “the Lord,” though sometimes I will also simply transliterate the four letters as “Yhwh.”

15. Hillers (Lamentations, 88), citing a number of parallels in other ancient Near Eastern literature, writes that “this sale of members of the family is a stage preceding the final horror, cannibalism.” This judgment is correct, but I think it misses the deeper layer of foreshadowing in 1:11, that there is already a hint of cannibalism in the giving of the children for/as food.

16. On the form-critical designation “accusation against God” (Anklage Gottes), see Westermann, Praise and Lament, 176-77; Westermann, Lamentations, 91-93.

17. See Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 14, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1954); Jacques Derrida, “By Force of Mourning,” Critical Inquiry 22 (1996): 171-92. …

18. I will consider more closely the content of 1:12-16 below. In the present section I am primarily concerned with the generic slippage it represents.

19. For example, the statement that Jerusalem has become “unclean” may indicate the impurity associated with a corpse (cf. Numbers 19:11-20 for such a usage).

20. I am taking the Hebrew term as an example of the asseverative kaph, which as Gordis (The Song of Songs and Lamentations, 159) points out was recognized by medieval Jewish commentators but largely ignored by moderns. On this reading the sense of is not “like death,” but “there is death.”

21. For a discussion of these form-critical elements in laments, see esp. Westermann, Lamentations, 136-37; Ferris, Genre of Communal Lament, 136-47.

22. Jorge Semprun, The Long Voyage, trans. R. Seaver (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1963), 71.

23. Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limit, 68, 71 (emphasis in original).

24. Westermann; Lamentations, 148.

25. This mixture of life and death, of dirge and lament, is also present in the Mesopotamian city laments, in which the city is presented as destroyed and is the subject of a dirge, but in which the goddess of the city is presented as alive and the speaking subject of a lament in the hope of getting a response from the divine assembly. In the biblical Book of Lamentations, however, the destroyed city and the lamenting goddess have been combined into one figure, thus more pointedly introducing the paradox of survival. On the Mesopotamian city laments and their relationship to Lamentations, see esp. Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep, O Daughter of Zion.

26. Des Pres, The Survivor, 42.

27. I leave out the initial Hebrew phrase of the verse, though I admit this is not a completely satisfactory solution to the perennial problem it has presented translators. Nevertheless, the words do represent an anacrusis, falling outside the 3:2 meter of the rest of the verse. Obviously they are an interjection, though whether originally directed by Zion to the passersby (and thus original to the text) or by an editor to the reader (and thus a gloss that has made its way into the text) seems finally undecidable.

28. The Masoretic text's (niśqad ‘ōl p^ešā‘ay) has proven very perplexing for commentators throughout the centuries. Hillers, Lamentations, 73, proposes emending the phrase slightly to read (nišqad ‘al p^eśā‘ay), resulting in the statement that “watch is kept over my steps.” The emendation makes good sense in the context of 1:14, though the evidence he marshals for it is by no means definitive. It nevertheless points to the difficulty of reading the Masoretic text as it stands.

29. The figure of Zion refers to her children as, the sense of which is difficult to capture when applied to people (cf. 2 Sam. 13:20 and Isa. 54:1) rather than to land or cities (cf. Jer. 18:16 and Isa. 54:3). When applied to cities the term implies “desertion,” and perhaps the connotation here is something like “my children are as if deserted” (i.e., because taken into exile away from their mother). That is probably narrowing the sense too much, however, and I have settled on “ravage,” which carries a broader meaning and retains the terror of violence demanded by the context.

30. Hillers, Lamentations, 75.

31. Compare, e.g., 2 Kings 4:19, “my head, my head!”, and Jer. 4:19, “my anguish, my anguish!”. On the basis of these examples, it seems that Westermann (Lamentations, 113) is mistaken in his assertion that such doubling indicates emphasis “only in the case of verbal forms.”

32. Des Pres, The Survivor, 44.

33. Westermann, Lamentations, 135-36 (emphasis in original).

34. Des Pres, The Survivor, 49.

35. On this aspect of the lament, see esp. Westermann, The Psalms: Structure, Content, and Message (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1980), 35-43; Westermann, Praise and Lament, 265-80; Patrick D. Miller, They Cried to the Lord: The Form and Theology of Biblical Prayer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 135-77.

36. Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? ed. E. Fleischner (New York: Ktav, 1977), 23.

37. Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today (New York: Random House, 1978), 235.

38. Ibid.

39. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. S. Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 30.

40. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362-63.

41. I take the mem of … as functioning adverbially, yielding the sense of “from the heart.” So also Thomas F. McDaniel, “Philological Studies in Lamentations, II,” Biblica 49 (1968): 203-4; Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep, O Daughter of Zion, 34.

42. The phrase is Westermann's, used repeatedly in his Lamentations, 127, 130, 140.

43. For summaries of this position, see Samuel Balentine, Prayer in the Hebrew Bible: The Drama of Divine-Human Dialogue (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 148-50; Miller, They Cried to the Lord, 55-57.

44. Westermann, The Psalms, 29-51; Westermann, Praise and Lament, 52-64.

45. Westermann, Lamentations, 156.

46. Ibid., 157.

47. So, for example, in the standard Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon.

48. Wilhelm Rudolph, Die Klagelieder (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1962), 258.

49. So Westermann, Lamentations, 210; following Max Löhr, Der Klagelieder des Jeremias (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1906), 31-32; and others.

50. So Hillers, Lamentations, 160; Provan, Lamentations, 133; and others.

51. Westermann, The Psalms, 42.