[In the following essay, Hillers explores the reasons behind the lack of historical material in Lamentationsand explains that what little of it can be found owes more to literary and religious traditions than to history.]

While in Jerusalem several years ago I remarked to a friend, an historian at the Hebrew University, that I was working on a commentary on Lamentations. He expressed great interest, attracted by the possibility of extracting from the series of poems some historical data to flesh out the bare picture of the fall of Jerusalem given in Kings. Encouraged by his suggestion, I dived into the book again and came up almost completely empty. For though Lamentations was written soon after an overpowering historical event, it provides almost no historical information and is related to “history” in an indirect, mediated fashion.

These conclusions will be elaborated in more detail below, but are stated thus baldly here because they raise the question of how central “history” is in Old Testament religion. That “history” is the particular arena of divine action and divine revelation has been a prominent assertion of many recent theologians. “The Old Testament is a history book” (von Rad). “God reveals himself in historical events, and not in ageless myths or in a system of propositions” (Noth). “Israel is distinguished by the fact that it experienced the reality of God not in the shadows of a mythical primitive history but more and more decisively in historical change itself” (Pannenberg). Thus in these and many other thinkers about the Old Testament—also in America—history is considered significant and vital as contingent, concrete event, free and unexpected, as opposed to any timeless scheme, either the myths of the ancient world or the rigid dogmatics of the present time.

Such stress on history as a religious category is probably somewhat less popular now, but is perhaps still sufficiently alive that an examination of a biblical book in this connection may not be completely out-of-date. This critical review of history as a religious category is deliberately exegetical rather than philosophical, and is deliberately limited to Lamentations and some related compositions, with no claim to be more universal in scope.

One is struck, in reading Lamentations, by the dearth of specific dates and such details as personal names and placenames. The Kings account of the Fall of Jerusalem is rich in these respects: the conquerer is Nebuzaradan, and his specific title …, “Captain of the Guard,” is added; he enters the city in the fifth month, on the seventh day of the month, which was the 19th year of King Nebuchadnezzar. Lamentations does not even inform us that the conquerers were from Babylon, and far from telling us the name of Babylon's king or the name of the general, does not even supply us the name of Israel's king. Of foreign nations only Edom is mentioned, in a curse on her for her part in the spoiling of Israel. And there is a great reduction in contrast to the prose account. The cast of actors is reduced to two: Yahweh and Israel, and the latter is so passive that one can almost speak of Yahweh as the only actor. Of course one may observe that if, as is likely, Lamentations was written soon after the event, then the congregation of worshippers knew the details; they knew the dates, they knew the names, and did not need to be reminded. But this objection to the point made here seems rather irrelevant to me. The related passage in Kings was evidently also written soon after the events, and the author did think it important to give the details. We have to do with a question of the writer's intention, and his conception of what was important, and the poet, however much his hearers may have known or forgotten, did not think it important to give historical details in the same way that the prose writer did.

Some of what Lamentations does seem to tell us turns out to be shaped by the literary and religious tradition, not by observation. There is much material in the book that cannot conceivably be called historical information, long passages where the language is obviously metaphorical, or where Yahweh is presented as the destroyer of Israel in a series of poetic images. This does not at the moment concern us. But there are some passages where one might suppose historical evidence is being communicated, even if that was not the author's main purpose. On examination, however, these prove to reflect literary and religious tradition more than fact. Chapter 5:18 provides a simple, almost trivial example. “On Mount Zion, which lies desolate, foxes prowl about.” The historian Enno Janssen, writing of Judah in the Period of the Exile (Juda in der Exilszeit), quite understandably turns to Lamentations to support the meager amount that we know about this period, and he lights on this verse. The question concerning him is a typical historian's question: how many people were left in Jerusalem, if any? Evidently there were some, he answers, yet the city is badly enough ruined that wild animals live there, even right on the site of the temple: see Lam. 5:18. Beginning with Mesopotamian texts from the end of the 3rd Millennium b.c., we have many examples from outside the Bible of a rather stereotyped description of a ruined city, often including the idea that wild animals now roam in the streets of the ruin.

This turns up in the Bible also, in Isa. 34 and 13, and in Zeph. 3. Thus for example Isa. 34:11f speaks of Edom: “The hawk and the porcupine shall inherit it, and the owl and the raven shall dwell in it. It shall become a dwelling of jackals, an abode for ostriches; and desert animals shall meet with jackals, the satyr shall meet with his fellow.” This is not only literary convention, but reflects a religious conviction as well. One of the curses attached to the first Sefire treaty (Sef I A 32-33) says: “And may Arpad become a mound to (house the desert animal) and the gazelle and the fox and the hare and the wildcat and the owl and the (?) and the magpie.” Israel conceived of her relation to Yahweh under the form of a treaty, from very early times, I believe, but certainly by the time of Jeremiah, and part of this treaty with God was the conception that if Israel broke it, the curses of the covenant would come upon her. The author of Lamentations is at this point making a religious point, that Jerusalem has suffered the typical fate of a rebellious city, and he is following a literary commonplace—Jerusalem is described the way ruined cities have been described for a very long time.

As a further example of how the literary tradition shapes a poet's description of historical events, we take a more problematic case: the description of famine and specifically of cannibalism found in Lamentations. There is no doubt that the people of Jerusalem suffered famine. According to Kings “On the ninth day of the fourth month the famine was so severe in the city that there was no food for the people of the land.” As a result the king and a party of others fled. This episode came after the city had been under siege for a year and a half; even though the siege was lifted at one point when the Egyptians diverted the Babylonian army, which probably happened in summer of 588, we still must reckon that the people had lived for a solid year on what was stored within the town.

Thus it is not problematic that Lamentations makes repeated reference to hunger. “As the children and babies fainted in the streets of the city they said to their mothers. ‘Where is there grain and wine?’” (2:11-12) Commentators have wondered whether the little children would have called out for wine along with their bread, but that is probably being hyper-critical. There is no difficulty with the main point: “My priests and elders expired in the city while seeking food to keep alive.” The problem is with the references to cannibalism: “Look, Yahweh, and consider who it was you treated so—Should women eat what they bore, the children they have raised?” (2:20) “The very women, the kindly women, cooked their own children. That was the food they had when my people was ruined.” (4:10) There is no mention of this in the prose accounts of the fall of Jerusalem. Does Lamentations thus provide us with a grisly detail to add to our histories?

One can raise this question if only because cannibalism as a result of prolonged starvation is an extreme of human behavior which is not so terribly common. People can starve to death without sinking to this. Yet these passages in Lamentations are not completely isolated in the Bible. In a well-known passage from the cycle of Elisha stories set in the time of the siege of Samaria (2 Kings 6:28-30), a woman complains to the king: “This woman said to me, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.’ So we boiled my son and ate him.” The other woman does not keep her part of the bargain, as it turns out. One would be more certain about this reference to cannibalism if it were in a source with higher historical reliability; the Elisha stories, as is well-known, contain many touches of legend and folk-lore. Josephus does tell of cannibalism on the occasion of the great siege of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70a.d. (Jewish War VI 3, 4.) His account is highly circumstantial, with the name of the guilty woman and many details, and so is perhaps not to be questioned, though it also contains calculated literacy devices, such as dramatic speeches which Josephus made up. Oppenheim has gathered references to cannibalism in Akkadian literature. In historical writing we have such references to two version of Ashurbanipal 's campaign against the Arabs who were on the side of Shamashshumukin: “The remainders (of the Arab troops) who succeeded to enter Babylon ate (there) each other's flesh in their ravenous hunger.” In another version: “Irra, the Warrior (i.e., pestilence) struck down Uate’, as well as his army, who had not kept the oaths sworn to me and had fled before the onslaught of Ashur, my lord—had run away from them Famine broke out among them and they ate the flesh of their children against their hunger.” Provisionally we may say that cannibalism is mentioned in Assyrian historical records, but we will later want to reexamine these passages.

Cannibalism is also a feature of the literary tradition, and this is where the doubt arises. In Mesopotamia, we have mention of it in the Atrahasis epic, an Old Babylonian composition of greatest interest to Bible students because of its flood account, which supplements that in the Gilgamesh epic and is in some respects closer to the Noah story. According to this epic, before Enlil hit on the idea of using the flood against the bothersome race of mankind, he tried to wipe them out by hunger. (Assyrian recension “S” rev. vi 1-15) “When the second year arrived they suffered the itch. When the third year arrived the people's features were distorted by hunger. When the fourth year arrived their long legs became short, their broad shoulders became narrow, they walked hunched in the street. When the fifth year arrived daughter watched the mother's going in, But the mother would not open her door to the daughter. The daughter watched the scales at the sale of the mother, The mother watched the scales at the sale of the daughter. When the sixth year arrived they served up the daughter for dinner, they served up the son for food … One house consumed another. Their faces were overlaid like dead malt. The people were living on the edge of death.” This is the end of the description. Note that cannibalism is the limit, the extreme stage. The earliest reference to cannibalism known to me is in the Curse of Agade, a text I mentioned above, from about 2000 b.c. “May the oxen-slaughterer, slaughter (his) wife (instead), May your sheep-butcher butcher his child (instead).”

The curses attached to Mesopotamian treaties from the eighth and seventh centuries b.c. repeatedly threaten treatybreakers with cannibalism, and this is done in terms at times very close to the literary tradition. To quote just one specimen, note Esarhaddon's treaty: “A mother [will close her door] against her own daughter. In your hunger eat the flesh of your sons. Let one eat the flesh of another.” Here two stages are cited in the same order as in the Epic: first the mother refuses her daughter access to food by barring the door in her face; then the climactic stage, namely cannibalism. It is this very frequent occurrence of cannibalism among the treaty-curses which leads me to question the historical value of such references in Ashurbanipal's annals. Let me cite again the passage on the sufferings of the Arabians for an example of how it is possible that the treaty pattern, or covenant theology if you prefer, may have shaped Assyrian “history”: “Famine broke out among them and they ate the flesh of their children against their hunger. (The gods) inflicted quickly upon them (all) the curses written down in their sworn agreements.” The writer goes on to quote almost verbatim another curse attested in the treaties.

Israelite covenants also had such a curse—one mentioning cannibalism—attached, to judge from the conclusion to covenant legislation in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Thus Lev. 26:29 “You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters.” The version in Deuteronomy is much expanded, and is too gruesome to quote. I will mention only that the author of Deuteronomy heightens the effect of his curse by saying this will be done by “the most tender and delicately bred” man or woman. As you may recall, Lam. 4:10 makes the same point: The women themselves, “the kindly women” committed the awful crime. Jeremiah threatens Israel with doom in similar words: “And I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters. Each shall eat another's flesh.” Isaiah (9:19-20) and Ezekiel (5:10) say much the same thing.

This may suffice to make clear the problem with history as depicted in the poetry of Lamentations. The events are not given to us direct, but as refracted through an age-old tradition, a tradition both literary and religious. In literature this was how one stated that the utmost starvation had taken place. This we may propose is one of the traditional limits in Israelite literary style. The sky is the traditional limit for height, the earth for depths, stars and locusts for great number, the sea for breadth, Sodom and Gomorrah for wickedness, and cannibalism for the limit, the extreme of famine. If the author of Lamentations says “For your ruin is as vast as the sea” using a simile as old as Ugaritic literature, or can say that the iniquity of his people was greater than that of Sodom and Gomorrah, then we may suppose him capable of saying that the people turned cannibals, as a traditional and expressive way of depicting the severity of the suffering. From the religious side, this was a way of asserting that Yahweh had done what he threatened. The author of Lamentations quotes one curse from (or at any rate a traditional curse) Deuteronomy at 1:5 when he says “Her enemies have become the head.” Compare Deut. 28:44 “He shall be the head, and you will be the tail.” So it is not inconceivable that also in referring to cannibalism his main interest was in asserting that covenantbreach had brought its inevitable consequences. One of the apocrypha, Baruch, makes this connection explicit: (2:1-2) “Nowhere under heaven have such deeds been done as were done in Jerusalem, thus fulfilling what was foretold in the law of Moses, that we should eat the flesh of our children …”

Thus such “history” as we have in Lamentations is not told with an eye to the unique, particular unrepeatable, contingent circumstances; it is experienced and narrated in conformity to certain pre-existing literary and religious patterns.

Turning to the more strictly theological question with which we began, is God represented in Lamentations as revealing himself in history? In one sense, the answer is obviously in the affirmative. Long passages in the book speak of what happened to Judah in 587 b.c. as the action of Yahweh. “You who pass by on the road, consider and see: Is there any pain like my pain—that which he caused me, Which Yahweh inflicted on me the day of his burning anger? From on high he sent fire and sank it into my bones. He stretched a net for my feet; he turned me back. … The Lord heaped up in my midst all my strong men, then summoned an assembly against me to crush my young warriors.” There is no question that Yahweh is active in human history; he so dominates the book as to make it more appropriate to question whether Babylon had anything to do with the fall of Jerusalem! Yahweh's sphere is obviously not a remote divine world, where he confronts other gods in myth, but the world of human beings, and conversely, the world of mankind is not sealed off from divine action, but open to it at every point.

But in another sense the book provides a basis for questioning the point of view of the theologians cited above. Historical events are not presented as though by themselves they are revelatory. Instead there always seems to be present the idea that an event must be expected or predicted in some way to be meaningful. It must conform to an existing conception of what divine action is. “Yahweh has done what he planned; he has carried out what he said he would, What he commanded from olden times.” To say, as Pannenberg does, that he is revealed “in historical change itself” does not seem to apply to this book. I wonder if it applies even to the prose narrative in Kings? One can raise a similar objection to the rather more extreme statements by Hans Walter Wolff, who asserts that the Old Testament person was interested neither in the thought forms of myth, with its idea of return and recurrence, nor in a world-order of action and consequences—“Rather now it is the unforeseen fact which attracts interest, the change in history, the new in the irreversible progress of events.” The fall of Jerusalem was scarcely an unforeseen fact, yet it is the only one our author is really interested in. He presents it in a style which emphasizes, not the new and particular in the situation, but its conformity to old pattern; he presents the catastrophe as the fulfillment and confirmation of a preexisting religious conception. If so, this reduces the contrast between “history” and myth or propositional theology.

Was an Israelite's self-understanding, his hope, grounded in a set of events in history as some theologians have affirmed?

When we turn to Lamentations, it is to discover that Israel's history plays practically no role in this book, intended to help a despairing community, whatever. The only meager references to anything in the national past other than the recent destruction of the city are the statement “Our fathers have sinned,” the allusions to the sin of prophets and priests, and to the sinful policy of foreign alliances. But there is no reference to the mighty acts of God, for very good and obvious reasons! The last mighty act of God had been an act of judgment. Yahweh had brought about his “day”—judgment day, we might say, and our author is sufficiently imbued with the spirit of the prophets to know that there can be no appeal now to the ancient acts by which God had given Israel assurance of her election.

Instead of turning to history, he turns to another area of religious experience to be able to interpret the catastrophe. That is the area of individual experience, what the individual faithful Israelite had found to be true of God in his private life, not in the national life. The individual is not here called on to interpret his destiny in light of the national history, but the nation is called on to learn from individual experience. At a time when it was pointless for them to say, “We have Abraham as our father,” they are directed to a separate resource of assurance: the typical experiences of the hard-pressed believer (e.g., Lam. 3:22-36). Lamentations is demonstratably not unique in this respect. The Psalms of complaint by the individual are the most common type in the psalter, and in all of them there is not one reference to the national history. I am not suggesting that history, the particular events which Israel identified as acts of God, did not ever provide assurance and self-understanding to the Israelite. But Lamentations and the psalms of Lament (not to mention the wisdom literature) suggest that Israel's religion was complex enough to encompass a wider range of ideas.