SOURCE: An introduction to The Anchor Bible: “Lamentations,” Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972, pp. xv-xli.

[In the following essay, Hillers provides an overview of Lamentations and explores a number of topics including its place in the biblical canon; its alphabetic acrostics; its meter, parallelism, syntax, and strophic structure; and its liturgical use.]

THE MEANING AND PURPOSE OF LAMENTATIONS

“In the fifth month, on the seventh day of the month, in the nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, Nebuzaradan, captain of the guard, an official of the king of Babylon, entered Jerusalem. He burned down the house of Yahweh, and the king's house; and all the houses in Jerusalem, including every great man's house, he set on fire and burned. The whole army of the Chaldaeans tore down the walls of Jerusalem, all around. … The rest of the people who were left in the city, and those who had deserted to the king of Babylon, and the rest of the populace, Nebuzaradan, captain of the guard, took to Babylon as prisoners. The captain of the guard left only some of the poorest in the country to tend the vines and farm the land” (II Kings 25:8-12).

Thus the book of Kings states the facts about the fall of Jerusalem in 587 b.c. Lamentations supplies the meaning of the facts. It is first of all a recital of the horrors and atrocities that came during the long siege and its aftermath, but beyond the tale of physical sufferings it tells of the spiritual significance of the fall of the city. For the ancient people chosen by Yahweh it meant the destruction of every cherished symbol of their election by God. In line after line the poet recalls all the precious, sacred things which had been lost or shattered: the city itself, once “the perfection of beauty, the joy of the whole earth”; the city walls and towers, once the outward sign that “God is in the midst of her”; the king, “the anointed of Yahweh, the breath of our nostrils”; the priests, and with them all festive and solemn worship; the prophets, and with them all visions and the living word of God; the land itself, Israel's “inheritance” from Yahweh, now turned over to strangers; the people—dead, exiled, or slaves in their own land. Every sign that had once provided assurance and confidence in God was gone.

Thus Lamentations served the survivors of the catastrophe in the first place as an expression of the almost inexpressible horror and grief they felt. Men live on best after calamity, not by utterly repressing their grief and shock, but by facing it, by measuring its dimensions, by finding some form of words to order and articulate their experience. Lamentations is so complete and honest and eloquent an expression of grief that even centuries after the events which inspired it, it is still able to provide those in mute despair with words to speak.

The book is not only an expression of grief, however, but a confession. It is not a perplexed search for the meaning of the catastrophe, still less an attempt to evade responsibility for it. Israel's prophets had foretold with unmistakable clarity the destruction of the nation, and divine punishment for the iniquity of the fathers was the well-known, inescapable darker side of the covenant with God. Lamentations says “Amen” to the prophetic judgment on the sin of the people, and calls it greater than that of Sodom and Gomorrah. Worst of all had been the iniquity of the spiritual leaders. Hence it was Yahweh himself who had consumed Israel. What had come on them was nothing less than the day of the Lord, the day of his wrath.

Central to the book, however, is an expression of hope. It is the merit of Lamentations that it does not quickly or easily promise away the present agony. It does not encourage the remnant of Israel to take comfort in the fathers, or in the exodus, or in the land, or Zion, or the line of David, or any of the old symbols of her status with God. The series of “mighty acts of God” toward Israel had ended with an unmistakable act of judgment, so that the nation's history could be no source of hope. Nor does it at any point forecast a speedy turn in the fortunes of Israel. Instead the book offers, in its central chapter, the example of an unnamed man who has suffered under the hand of God. To sketch this typical sufferer, this “Everyman,” the language and ideas of the psalms of individual lament, a tradition quite separate from the national history, are drawn on. From near despair, this man wins through to confidence that God's mercy is not at an end, and that his final, inmost will for man is not suffering. From this beginning of hope the individual turns to call the nation to penitent waiting for God's mercy.

The medium through which these various meanings are expressed is a series of poems composed with deliberate artistry. As is the case with any work of poetic art, so with Lamentations, the meaning is not fully statable apart from the form in which the author clothed it. It cannot be reduced to a set of propositions without serious loss. The present writer offers the above merely as a rough restatement of some major themes in the poems, and prefers to take up more detailed discussion of the meaning of the book only in the Comments which accompany the poems.

THE NAME OF THE BOOK

In the Hebrew Bible Lamentations has the title 'ēkāh, “How,” the initial word of the book. In the Babylonian Talmud, however (Baba Bathra 14b), and in other early Jewish writings, the book is called qīnōt, that is, Lamentations. The title in the Greek Bible, threnoi, and in the Vulgate, threni, is a translation of this Hebrew name. Quite frequently manuscripts and printed editions of the versions will add: “of Jeremiah,” or “of Jeremiah the prophet.”

PLACE IN THE CANON

The canonicity of Lamentations has never been a matter of dispute. The position of Lamentations in the canon of the Hebrew scriptures, however, is of some importance for the question of authorship. It is never placed among the Prophets, where the book of Jeremiah stands, but is always somewhere in the third division of the Hebrew canon, the Writings (Ketubim). Its exact position among the Writings has varied in different ages and in different communities. The Babylonian Talmud (Baba Bathra 14b) records a very old tradition which lists the Writings “chronologically,” that is, according to their traditional date; the five Scrolls (Megillot) are not grouped together, and Lamentations, which refers to the Babylonian captivity, comes near the end of the list, just before Daniel and Esther. Hebrew bibles, however, reflect liturgical practice in that within the Writings they group the five short books (the “Scrolls,” Hebrew Megillot) which had come to be read in public worship on five important festivals. The edition commonly used in scholarly study today, Kittel's Biblia hebraica (BH³), is based on a manuscript of a.d. 1008 (Codex Leningradensis) which lists the Scrolls in “chronological” order: Ruth, Song of Songs (from when Solomon was young!), Ecclesiastes (from his old age), Lamentations, and Esther. In many manuscripts and printed bibles, however, especially those used by Ashkenazic Jews, the order is that in which the festivals come in the calendar: Song of Songs (Passover); Ruth (Weeks, Shabuot, Pentecost), Lamentations (the Ninth of Ab), Ecclesiastes (Tabernacles, Succoth), and Esther (Purim). The second major tradition puts Lamentations just after Jeremiah (Baruch comes between them in some cases). This is the order followed, for example, in the Septuagint (LXX), the ancient Greek translation of the Bible, in the Vulgate, Jerome's Latin translation, and in English Bibles commonly used among Christians. This order was anciently known to Josephus, as may be inferred from his account of the Hebrew canon (Contra Apionem I 8), and is also followed by Melito of Sardis (d. 190; see Eusebius Historia ecclesiastica IV xxvi 14) and by Origen (Eusebius VI xxv 2). As Jerome explains, this listing fits with an enumeration of the Old Testament books which makes their number agree with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet; “Jeremias cum Cinoth” counts as one book. Jerome, however, does mention the existence of a varying tradition which put Lamentations and Ruth with the Writings (“Prologus Galeatus,” Patrologia Latina 28, cols. 593-604).

THE DATE OF LAMENTATIONS

The view commonly held by modern scholars agrees closely with the traditional view, that is, that the book of Lamentations was written not long after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 b.c. The memory of the horrors of that event seems to be still fresh in the mind of the author or authors. Moreover, the book at no point testifies to a belief that things would soon change for the better; the kind of hope that appeared in later exilic times had not yet arisen.

Considerable scholarly effort has been expended on determining the order in which the five separate poems were written, but no consensus exists. Wilhelm Rudolph has argued that chapter 1 must date from the first capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, that is, from shortly after 597, not from after 587 b.c. His main reason for this view, which has won some adherents, is that chapter 1 does not speak of the destruction of the city and temple as do the other chapters, but only of its capture.¹ This is essentially an argument from silence, and is not a secure basis for separating the chapter from the others chronologically. Before Rudolph, other scholars argued for putting chapter 1 somewhat later than 2 and 4. Furthermore, the evidence of the new Babylonian Chronicle shows that the first siege must have been quite short,² which does not fit with the references in the chapter to severe famine (1:11, 19; see commentary on 11). Others have wanted to put chapter 3 later than the others because it has a less vivid description of events in the siege than 2 and 4. The truth is that there is insufficient evidence for a precise chronological ordering of the separate laments.³

THE AUTHORSHIP OF LAMENTATIONS

That the prophet Jeremiah wrote Lamentations is so firmly rooted in traditions about the Bible, in western literature, and even in art, that even after the ascription to Jeremiah was challenged (first in 1712, by H. von der Hardt⁴), discussion of the book's authorship has tended to take the form of listing reasons why Jeremiah could not have written the book, or why he must have, as though the tradition was unanimous. Ancient tradition on this point is not in fact unanimous, however, and it may clarify the question best if the separate traditions are first listed. Then, as though it were a problem of deciding between textual variants, we may ask: which tradition can best account for the origin of the other?

The first tradition does not name any author for the book, and implies that it was not Jeremiah. This is the tradition represented by the Masoretic Text (MT), which says nothing whatever about the authorship of the book, and in which Lamentations is separated from Jeremiah and put among the Writings (Ketubim); for details see “Place in the Canon,” above.

The second tradition is that Jeremiah wrote the book. The Septuagint prefixes these words to the first chapter: “And it came to pass after Israel had gone into captivity, and Jerusalem was laid waste, that Jeremiah sat weeping and composed this lament over Jerusalem and said—.” This heading found in the Greek translation may possibly go back to a Hebrew original, for it is Semitic rather than Greek in style. In the Septuagint Lamentations is placed with other works by Jeremiah. The Vulgate follows the Greek closely, both in the ordering of the book, and in the heading. The Targum (Aramaic translation) ascribes the book to Jeremiah, but in different words and more briefly. It is in accord with other Jewish tradition as recorded, for example, in the Babylonian Talmud (Baba Bathra 15a). In rabbinic writings passages from Lamentations are often introduced by “Jeremiah said.” The heading in the Syriac version (Peshitta) titles the work: “The book of Lamentations of Jeremiah the prophet.” The oldest of these ancient authorities is the Septuagint.

In spite of the great antiquity of this tradition, it is relatively easy to account for it as secondary to the other. In the first place, there was a very natural desire in the early days of biblical interpretation to determine the authorship of anonymous biblical books. As the one major prophetic figure active in Judah just before and after the fall of Jerusalem, Jeremiah was a candidate sufficiently qualified to meet the demands of a none-too-critical age, especially since certain of his words seemed to fit the theme of Lamentations: “O that my head were waters, and my eyes a fount of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of my people” (9:1[8:23H]). Secondly, there was an explicit statement in the Bible that Jeremiah wrote laments, II Chron 35:25, which is translated here as literally as possible so that some of the difficulties of the verse may stand out: “And Jeremiah sang a lament [or laments] over Josiah. And all the male and female singers spoke of Josiah in their laments, unto this day. And they made them a fixed observance for Israel. And behold they are written in the [book of] Laments.” Actually nothing in the extant book of Lamentations can be taken as referring to the death of Josiah in 609 b.c. The reference to the king in 4:20 must be to Zedekiah, who was king at the fall of Jerusalem. It is difficult to suppose that the Chronicler is simply mistaken, that he actually intended to ascribe authorship of the canonical book to Jeremiah. It is easier to suppose that he gives correct information: Jeremiah, and others as well, composed laments over Josiah, and these were gathered in a book called Lamentations, but this has nothing to do with the extant biblical book. Nevertheless, the Chronicler's statement that Jeremiah wrote Laments would have encouraged the idea that he was the author of Lamentations, especially since very early on some passages in the biblical book were taken to refer to Josiah (see the Targum on 1:18; 4:20).⁵ To sum up, given the anonymous book of Lamentations, it is possible to give a plausible account of how it could have come to be ascribed to Jeremiah, and eventually to be placed after the book of Jeremiah.

If one assumes the opposite, that the book was understood as Jeremiah's from the beginning, it is difficult to suggest any good reason why it was ever separated from his other writings, or circulated without his name. Wiesmann's argument that this was done for liturgical reasons, in order to group Lamentations with the other Scrolls (Megillot), is without force, for the oldest listing of the Writings does not group the Scrolls together, and yet includes Lamentations (see above, on “Place in the Canon”).

In addition, there is evidence within the book which makes it difficult to suppose that Jeremiah wrote it. Certain statements would be, if not impossible, then at least out of character in the mouth of Jeremiah. For example, 4:17, with its pathetic description of how “we” looked in vain for help from “a nation that does not save,” is at variance with Jeremiah's outspoken hostility to reliance on help from other nations (Jer 2:18), and the fact that he did not expect help from Egypt (37:5-10). Would Jeremiah, who prophesied the destruction of the temple, have written 1:10? The high hopes set on Zedekiah in 4:20 (“the breath of our nostrils … of whom we said, ‘In his shadow we will live among the nations’”) are not easy to square with Jeremiah's blunt words to the same king: “You will be given into the hand of the king of Babylon” (37:17). “Her prophets find no vision from Yahweh” (2:9) is in the last analysis a rather odd statement from one who prophesied before, during, and after the catastrophe. If 4:19 refers to the flight of Zedekiah (see II Kings 25:4-5) and implies that the author took part, as many suppose (see Comment on the passage), then the author was not Jeremiah, who was in prison at the time (Jer 38:28). It may be granted that any of the above-mentioned details has seemed to some scholars compatible with authorship by Jeremiah, and that those who oppose it do not fully agree on which set of arguments proves the case! Even so, these and other details in the book suggest an author or authors more closely identified with the common hopes and fears of the people than it was possible for Jeremiah to be.

Arguments from the language of the book, especially from the vocabulary employed,⁶ and from the acrostic form have been used to argue against Jeremianic authorship. These seem indecisive. The lexical evidence seems to suggest that the book has ties with Ezekiel, Second Isaiah, the Psalms, and Jeremiah—that is, its vocabulary not surprisingly resembles that of roughly contemporary writers in some respects.

There is no conclusive evidence as to whether the book is the work of one author, or of several, and both views have been defended in modern times. The unity of form, that is, the fact that all the poems are alphabetic in one way or another, and that the first four have metrical features in common, does suggest that all are the work of one author. One may also point to the fundamental unity in point of view through the whole book, and to resemblances in linguistic detail between one chapter and another. It is possible to read the sequence of chapters as meaningful, which suggests unified authorship or at least intelligent editing. Other scholars, however, find differences in point of view from chapter to chapter (thus 2 and 4 are said to have more of an “eye-witness” character than 1 and 3). The present writer has attempted to interpret the poems as an intelligible unity, whether or not this unity results from one author or from an editor who ordered originally separate works. So as not always to be saying “author or authors,” the singular form is regularly used in the Notes and Comments.

Some modern commentators, notably Gottwald, Albrektson, and Kraus, have devoted much effort to delineating the theological traditions on which the author drew, and on this basis have offered conjectures as to the circles from which the book must have come. In Kraus's opinion the author was apparently from among the cult-prophets or the priesthood of Jerusalem, while according to Gottwald he unites the spirit of both priest and prophet, so that the book may offer evidence that there were indeed cult-prophets in ancient Israel.⁷ In spite of the value of these minute examinations of the book's theological content, they come close to overemphasizing the individuality of the writer's theology. In actuality the book betrays little one-sidedness, and if it contains themes from various carlier traditions, it seems possible that the author was a layman, and perhaps, as has often been supposed on the basis of 4:19-20, someone connected with the royal court.

PLACE OF COMPOSITION

The events and conditions with which the book of Lamentations deals are without exception located in Judah. Conversely, the book evinces no acquaintance with or special interest in the plight of exiles in Babylon or Egypt. In the absence of any strong evidence to the contrary, then, it seems best to suppose that the book was written in Palestine. Scholars have proposed that the whole book, or parts of it, were composed elsewhere, and it must be conceded that Jews in exile—Ezekiel is a notable example—could be very well informed about conditions back home, but nothing in the book furnishes positive evidence that it was written by an exile.

ALPHABETIC ACROSTICS

All five poems in Lamentations are in one way or another shaped according to the Hebrew alphabet. This is most noticeable in the first four poems, which are alphabetic acrostics. Chapters 1 and 2 are of a relatively simple type, in which each stanza has three lines, and only the first word of the first line of each is made to conform to the alphabet, so that stanza one begins with aleph, stanza two with beth, and so on through the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Chapter 4 is of the same type, but here each stanza has only two lines. Chapter 3 is more elaborate: each stanza has three lines, and all three lines are made to begin with the proper letter, so that there are three lines starting with aleph, three with beth, and so on. No attempt has been made to reproduce this acrostic feature in the translation given below, for obvious reasons, though the Hebrew letters listed beside the stanzas are intended to call the reader's attention to this phenomenon in the original. Monsignor Ronald Knox did carry through the tour de force of reproducing the acrostic in his translation of the Bible, and a sample is quoted here (Lam 3:1-7) to give readers an idea of its effect, though it must be said that Knox strains the English language more than the author of Lamentations did the Hebrew.⁸

Ah, what straits have I not known, under the
                                        avenging rod!
Asked I for light, into deeper shadow the Lord's
                                        guidance led me;
Always upon me, none other, falls endlessly the
                                        blow.
Broken this frame, under the wrinkled skin, the
                                        sunk flesh.
Bitterness of despair fills my prospect,
                                        walled in on every side;
Buried in darkness, and, like the dead,
                                        interminably.
Closely he fences me in, etc.

Chapter 5 is not an acrostic, but has exactly twenty-two lines and thus conforms to the alphabet to a lesser degree. Other biblical poems with twenty-two lines exist—Pss 33, 38, 103—and it is reasonable to suppose that in all these cases the number of lines is chosen intentionally, though none are acrostics.

There are many acrostic poems in the Bible and in other literature, and this commentary is not the place for a full discussion of the form, about which a good deal has been written.⁹ Yet it is so prominent a characteristic of Lamentations that some explanation of its purpose and effect must be given. There are really two separate questions involved: the history and purpose of the acrostic form as a whole, and the purpose of the author of Lamentations in using it.

Acrostic compositions were written in both ancient Egypt¹⁰ and ancient Mesopotamia.¹¹ As is well known, the writing systems of these civilizations were not alphabetic, and therefore their acrostics are not alphabetic either. The most elaborate Mesopotamian acrostic is syllabic. The poem has twenty-seven stanzas of eleven lines each. Each line within an individual stanza begins with the same syllable, and taken together the initial syllables of the stanzas spell out a pious sentence: “I, Saggil-kinam-ubbib, the incantation priest, am adorant of the god and the king.”¹² The date of this composition is uncertain, but is probably about 1000 b.c., earlier by far than any datable biblical acrostic. It has been common for scholars to minimize the possibility of a connection between biblical use of acrostics and these extra-biblical works, on the ground that these are syllable or word acrostics as opposed to the alphabetic acrostics inside the Bible, and that they are meaningfully connected with the sense of the poem, as opposed to the meaningless sequence of the letters in the alphabetic type. In spite of these differences, it seems likely that the basic idea of an acrostic, the idea of weaving a pattern of syllables or letters separate from its content into a composition at the beginning or end of the lines, came into Hebrew literature from outside. The major implication is that in discussing biblical acrostics we are apt to be dealing with a phenomenon that is quite ancient and far from its source.

Many explanations for the purpose of acrostics have been suggested, and it is likely that more than one motive was involved. Especially in later times, in medieval magical and speculative works, ideas about the mystical power of the letters of the alphabet seem to have occasioned use of the acrostic form. A more prosaic purpose of acrostics was to aid the memory. Verse is easier to get by heart than prose, and still easier when the sequence of lines follows a set pattern. Finally, acrostics were written for what may be called artistic purposes, to display the author's skill and to make his work a more skillfully wrought offering to his god and to contribute to the structure of the poem. Several writers have proposed that alphabetic acrostics convey the idea of completeness, that is, that “everything from A to Z” has been expressed.¹³

Against this background we may inquire what led the author of Lamentations to use the acrostic form. There is no reason to believe that he or his contemporaries associated magical powers with the alphabet, as was done later. On the other hand, though it is true that acrostic form makes the poems easier to memorize, we have no way of knowing whether this was the author's conscious purpose, or simply an incidental effect. The suggestion that the book was deliberately written as a school exercise (so Munch) is extremely improbable. If the author had any dominating conscious purpose in mind in choosing the acrostic form, it was perhaps to contribute to the artistry of his poems; he thought it made his poems more beautiful. In addition, the acrostic has the effect of controlling and giving form to the poems. It limits and shapes material which is somewhat monotonous and at some points lacking any clear progression of action or thought. Again, it is impossible to be sure that the author consciously intended such an effect.

Those who have expressed an opinion on the artistic worth of these and other acrostic poems in the Bible have generally rated them rather low. Gunkel, for instance, speaks of their composition as “the pious practice of a modest art.”¹⁴ Skehan probably speaks for many in confessing to “being immensely and overwhelmingly bored by Ps. 119,”¹⁵ and others may feel similar ennui at Lamentations. Certainly there is no great intrinsic merit in being able to compose acrostics; as a technical task it cannot have been very difficult. But not all acrostics are of the same merit. In Ps 119 one has the impression that the writer has chosen a large and difficult form which he labors mightily to fill up, like a tax-blank. In Lamentations, the impression is rather of a boundless grief, an overflowing emotion, whose expression benefits from the limits imposed by a confining acrostic form, as from the rather tightly fixed metrical pattern.

A minor peculiarity of the acrostics in chapters 2, 3, and 4 is that two of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet stand in the reverse of their normal order. Usually it is ayin before pe, and this is the order in chapter 1, but in the other acrostics the sequence is first pe, then ayin. This peculiarity is found also in the Greek version of Prov 31, and in the opinion of many scholars should be restored in Ps 34, where the conventional order of the alphabet seems to violate the sense. A common explanation, going back to Grotius, is that the order of these letters of the alphabet was not yet fixed at this time. This is sheerly hypothetical, and rather improbable in view of the consistent sequence ayin-pe in Ugaritic abecedaries almost a millennium older than Lamentations, and in view of the order of the Greek alphabet, but no more reasonable hypothesis has been advanced. In any case, this variation need not point to different authors for chapter 1 and chapters 2-4.

LITERARY TYPES

Hermann Gunkel carried out an analysis of the five poems in Lamentations which has been very widely followed since. Chapter 5, he wrote, is a communal lament. Chapter 3 is an individual lament in the main, and chapters 1, 2, and 4 are funeral songs—not for individuals, of course, but political or national funeral songs.¹⁶ As Gunkel himself stated, however, all but chapter 5 are mixed, impure specimens of the categories to which they belong: the individual lament in 3 is interrupted by a communal lament (vss. 40-51). The funeral songs contain elements which do not properly belong there, such as the short prayers for help and the invocation of the name of Yahweh. In Gunkel's view, this admixture of alien elements is due to the relatively late date of Lamentations; the book comes from a time when the literary types are no longer kept separate, but are intermingled so thoroughly that even the dominant motif of a particular type may be lost.

Whether this generalization concerning the course of Israel's literary history is valid or not lies outside the scope of this commentary, but it is important to note that we derive relatively little help from from-criticism of the book. If one agrees, for example, that 1, 2, and 4 are funeral songs, one must immediately go on to note the fundamental differences from what is assumed to have been the classic form. Who is supposed to be dead?—the question makes the difficulty evident at once, for the basic situation to which every genuine funeral song is directed is not dominant in these poems. Similarly, in its earlier portion especially chapter 3 may be linked to the psalms of individual lament, but the poem as a whole bursts the confines of this form. Only chapter 5 stays relatively close to the pattern of a traditional literary type. Otherwise, it seems that the writer had no liturgical or literary models which he followed slavishly. On the other hand, in language and imagery he follows tradition rather closely.

SUMERIAN INFLUENCE

The question of Sumerian influence on Lamentations is a separate one. S. N. Kramer, who has edited and translated the principal Sumerian laments over ruined cities, has repeatedly stated that the biblical book of Lamentations is under the direct influence of Sumerian laments. The latest statement of his opinion is as follows: “Just how deeply this mournful literary genre affected the neighboring lands is unknown, no lamentations have as yet been recovered from Hittite, Canaanite and Hurrian sources. But there is little doubt that the biblical Book of Lamentations owes no little of its form and content to its Mesopotamian forerunners, and, that the modern orthodox Jew who utters his mournful lament at the ‘western wall’ of ‘Solomon's’ long-destroyed Temple, is carrying on a tradition begun in Sumer some 4,000 years ago. …”¹⁷ The Assyriologist Gadd is of the same opinion¹⁸ and such a view has won the adherence of a distinguished commentator on Lamentations, H.-J. Kraus, who writes that the parallels are astounding.¹⁹

On the opposite side of the question is T. F. McDaniel. Having examined and compared the Sumerian and Akkadian lamentations translated so far, McDaniel concludes that the parallels are not such as to compel one to assume that there was any connection.²⁰ Such resemblances as do exist can be explained as the result of a common subject matter. Weiser also in his commentary, finds the resemblances to Sumerian laments very general and unconvincing, and the differences in thought and style much more impressive. He rejects emphatically Kraus's idea that before the fall of Jerusalem there was in Israel a liturgical “Lament over the Ruined Sanctuary.”

In the opinion of the present writer, it is difficult to see how the Sumerian texts can have had direct influence on the biblical Lamentations. How could an Israelite writer or writers in the sixth century b.c. have had firsthand acquaintance with these Mesopotamian compositions? One must agree that there are genuine, and occasionally close parallels in wording but these are to be explained in a wider context. In some cases at least, the literary motifs in the Sumerian laments are paralleled elsewhere in Mesopotamian literature, and where there is a parallel in Lamentations there are parallels elsewhere in the Bible. When we find resemblance between these laments from the early second millennium b.c. and Lamentations, it is most likely evidence of the general truth that in many respects Israel's literature is dependent on an older tradition, and that Mesopotamian literature made a rich contribution to the tradition.

To illustrate the point made above, note the following examples; the Sumerian texts are quoted in Kramer's translation:²¹ “Ur … inside it we die of famine // Outside we are killed by the weapons of the Elamites.”²² This is a genuine parallel to Lam 1:20c and the resemblance is rather striking: “Outside the sword killed my children; inside, it was famine” (on the last word, see Note). But it is also parallel to Ezek 7:15: “The sword outside, and pestilence and famine inside,” and also to Jer 14:18 and Deut 32:25. From a Sumerian text related to the lament genre, the “Curse of Agade” comes a close parallel: “Over your usga-place,²³ established for lustrations, // May the ‘fox of the ruined mounds,’ glide his tail.”²⁴ Compare Lam 5:18 “On mount Zion, which lies desolate, foxes prowl about.” But the idea that a ruined city should be the haunt of wild animals is found also in Assyrian royal inscriptions, in an Aramaic treaty (Sefîre I A 32-33) and repeatedly in the Bible. Hence the true situation is that we have to do with a literary convention common to Mesopotamian and biblical literature, and not restricted to the lament genre. A few other Sumerian parallels are quoted in the Notes below; they are meant to illustrate the persistence of ancient literary motifs into late biblical literature, and not to prove a specific connection of Lamentations to Sumerian laments.

METER, PARALLELISM, SYNTAX, AND STROPHIC STRUCTURE

The acrostic form of the first four chapters permits us in most cases to divide the poems into lines as the author intended. It is partly due to this fortunate circumstance that Lamentations has occupied so prominent a place in the study of Hebrew meter. A more important factor, however, has been the recognition that these lines follow a rhythmic pattern that seems relatively easy to detect and distinguish from other varieties of Hebrew verse. The classic essay on the meter of Lamentations is Karl Budde's “Das hebräische Klagelied” (The Hebrew Song of Lament), which appeared in 1882 (ZAW 2, pp. 1-52). Although Budde's views still merit restatement, subsequent studies have made important modifications necessary, and in general the unsatisfactory state of our knowledge of Hebrew metrics, a field in which no theory can claim general acceptance, makes it necessary at present to be very cautious in describing the meter of Lamentations.

A brief survey of some competing views may make clear the nature of the difficulty. One major school of thought, the chief representatives being Hölscher,²⁵ Mowinckel,²⁶ Horst,²⁷ and Segert,²⁸ holds that the decisive characteristic of Hebrew meter (at least in the period we are concerned with) is alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables of the same length, much as in Syriac meter. A more widely followed system has been that of Ley²⁹ as modified by Sievers³⁰ and subsequent students. In this system, the basis of Hebrew meter is not syllables, but accents. The various types of lines are distinguished by various numbers and patterns of accents. It is characteristic of followers of this school that rhythmic patterns are symbolized by numbers, thus a line made up of two parts (bicolon), each containing three accents, will be described as 3+3.³¹ In recent years a different view has been advocated by David Noel Freedman who describes lines of Hebrew verse according to the number of syllables per colon (part of a line) or bicolon, and the rhythmic pattern of syllables within the line, or the number of accents, are not treated as relevant.³² No full statement of this last theory is yet available, yet it is bound to attract notice if only because older theories encounter great difficulties and have failed to win general acceptance.

With this present uncertainty over the most basic questions in mind, we may turn back to Budde's views about Lamentations. According to Budde, the formal unit in Lamentations is a line divided into two parts by a break in sense. The first part of each line is a normal half-line (colon) of Hebrew poetry, while the second part is shorter than the normal colon. This second half-line cannot be only a single word, however, but must be a group of two or more words. Since the first half-line must be at least one word longer, the lines are of the pattern 3+2, 4+3, 4+2, and so on.

Budde found this meter most readily evident in chapter 3, where apparent exceptions are, in his opinion, either indications of textual corruption, or examples of some permissible variants to the normal pattern. For example, occasionally the first colon is shorter than the second, producing a 2+3 line; in such cases one must assume a tension between the artificial poetic rhythm and the actual, natural sentence rhythm. At the cost of somewhat greater effort he goes on to discover the same sort of unbalanced verse in all the lines of chapters 4, 1, and 2, without exception.

Budde went on to assert that this type of verse is found elsewhere in the Bible also, and the evidence suggested that it was the specific meter traditionally used for singing laments over the dead. He therefore titled it “Qinah” meter from the Hebrew word for a lament. The potential significance of this theory for the interpretation of Lamentations is obvious, for if it is correct the student of the book is given a very useful tool for reconstructing the text of difficult passages, and also possesses clear evidence connecting Lamentations to the tradition of funeral songs. (There is very general agreement that chapter 5 is in a different rhythm, being divided into cola of equal length, a pattern extremely common in the Old Testament.)

Since Budde wrote, Sievers especially has shown that in Lamentations a sizable proportion of the lines are not in Budde's unbalanced “Qinah” meter, but consist of evenly balanced cola.³³ Though scholars would disagree with details of Sievers' own analysis, as he himself anticipated, many would now agree that Budde overstated his case. Some lines are better described as 2+2 (e.g., 4:13a, b) and some are probably 3+3, though there is greater reluctance to recognize the latter type as legitimate, many scholars preferring to emend lines of this sort. Possible examples of 3+3 are 1:1a, 8a, 16a, 21b; 2:9a, 17c, 20a; 3:64, 66; 4:1a, 8b. Thus Budde's view must be modified by saying that the “Qinah” line is at best the dominant line in Lamentations; other metric patterns occur more or less at random throughout the first four chapters. Atypical verses are especially common in chapter 1, and less so in chapter 3. The result of this mixture is that the meter is not nearly as useful in text-criticism as it might be.

A second major modification of Budde's theory is equally important: the dominant verse-type cannot properly be called “Qinah” (Lament) meter, because it is used in various classes of Hebrew poems having nothing to do with laments for the dead. Sievers, one of the first to raise this objection, cites as other passages in this meter Isa 1:10-12 (a prophetic oracle of judgment); Isa 40:9 ff. (an oracle of hope); Jonah 2:2-9[3-10H] (psalm of lament by an individual); Song of Songs 1:9-11 (part of a love song), as well as others.³⁴ Moreover, certain funeral songs are not in “Qinah” meter, notably David's lament over Saul and Jonathan (II Sam 1: 17-27). Though scholars have been willing to concede that this “rhythm that always dies away,” as Budde called it, seems very appropriate for poetry of a somber character, we cannot use the meter of Lamentations to connect it to a tradition of funeral songs. On the other hand, it is convenient to keep the name “Qinah” meter as a handy way of referring to the type.

No attempt has been made in the present translation to reproduce or imitate the meter of the original.³⁵ Occasionally a line, literally translated, falls into something like the typical “Qinah” verse, for example, 3:4:

He wore out my flesh and skin;
                                                  he broke my bones.

Characterization of the poetic style of Lamentations is not complete without some account of the parallelism found in the poems, and as it turns out this raises further questions concerning the meter. Poetic parallelism may be illustrated by almost any verse from chapter 5 of Lamentations, for example, 5:2:

Our land is turned over to strangers;
                                        Our houses, to foreigners.

The second colon corresponds to and resembles the first, that is, there is a semantic association between “land” and “houses” and between “strangers” and “foreigners,” and in this case the verb of the first colon is to be understood also with the second though it is not repeated. Such resemblance between poetic units is, as is well known, a pervasive feature of Hebrew poetry, and is found to some extent throughout Lamentations. But parallelism is not present in all the lines of Lamentations. (By line I mean a line of Hebrew text as printed in Kittel's Biblia hebraica,³⁶ which is a satisfactory working definition.) Disregarding what has traditionally been called “synthetic” parallelism, that is, cases where a line may be separated into two parts but where there is no clear semantic or grammatical resemblance between the two.³⁷ 104 out of the 266 lines in the book do not exhibit parallelism (39 per cent). More significant is the contrast between chapter 5 and the first four chapters. There is a much higher proportion of parallelism in 5, where only three lines out of twenty-two (14 per cent) do not have parallelism. One may note that two of these lines, 5:9 and 10, while without internal parallelism, might be regarded as parallel to each other (external parallelism). By contrast, in the first four chapters 101 of 244 lines (41 per cent) do not contain parallelism. This contrast amplifies our notion of the different poetic style employed in chapters 1-4 as over against 5, which is not solely a metrical difference.

Even though others would undoubtedly disagree with the present writer concerning the presence or absence of parallelism in individual verses, the general pattern sketched above may probably be regarded as correct. If so, our description of the meter is affected. We have described it above as consisting of “Qinah” verse for the most part, that is lines having a longer first colon, followed by a shorter second colon. Interspersed, it was said, are lines consisting of equal parts. When parallelism is obviously present, there is no difficulty with this description; for example, in 2:7: “Yahweh rejected his own altar; he spurned his sanctuary,” there is no problem in deciding what are the cola, and where the division between them lies. But when parallelism is not present, the question of where to divide the verse becomes acute. Or is it correct to assume that the verse is divided at all? Budde, and others after him, speak of a division produced by a “break in sense,” but this is vague, and in practice it seems that Budde and others have followed a kind of intuition as to where the caesura comes, rather than any rigorously defined principle. Lines without parallelism consist for the most part of a single sentence, thus, for example, 1:2b: 'ēn lāh m^enahām mikkol 'ōh^abehā (word for word: “There-is-not to-her a-comforter out-of-all her-lovers”). To make two parts out of these lines with only one sentence, it is necessary to divide at a great variety of places with respect to syntax: between nominal subject and verb in 1:1c; between a prepositional phrase modifying a verb and a following nominal subject, in 1:1b; between a nominal subject and a prepositional phrase modifying it, in 1:2b; between verb and prepositional phrase modifying it, in 1:3c—and so on through almost every combination of sentence elements. To put it in another way, it seems impossible to define syntactically where the division between cola (caesura) is to be made in these lines. At least no one has yet offered a satisfactory definition.³⁸ If one is to continue to describe these lines as made up of two cola, then probably it will be necessary to argue that the dominant pattern set up by the lines with parallelism shapes our reading of these lines. Otherwise one may prefer to describe the lines without parallelism as undivided.

Several further observations concerning the poetic style of Lamentations arise from studying the syntax of the verbal sentences in the book. In a study so far published only in part,³⁹ Francis I. Andersen has analyzed all the verbal sentences in Genesis which have more than one modifier following the verb. By modifier is meant any element such as direct object, indirect object, adverb, prepositional phrase functioning as an adverb, etc. The subject of the verb is also classified as a modifier, and studied in relation to the other post-verbal elements. On the basis of over a thousand sentences of this sort, Andersen is able to present an abstract theoretical model of the verbal sentence, showing the relative order of the modifiers with respect to each other. As it turns out, there is a great regularity in this respect, and only about 4 per cent of the examples diverge from the normal order. This study of prose usage provides an extremely useful basis for comparison with Lamentations. The results obtained by applying the same methods of analysis to the verbal sentences in Lamentations show that a much higher proportion of sentences with two post-verbal modifiers display abnormal order, about 26 per cent (32 of 122 sentences). Most of the abnormal examples in Lamentations involve the position of a nominal subject or a nominal direct object with respect to a prepositional phrase. In this sort of sentence the “abnormal” order is nearly as common as the “normal.” In sentences with three post-verbal modifiers the contrast is still more marked. According to Andersen's study 64, or about 15 per cent of the 409 examples in Genesis, were aberrant, differing from the normal pattern. Of twenty-seven such sentences in Lamentations, nineteen, or 70 per cent, do not follow the pattern most common in Genesis.

It is reasonable to propose as a hypothesis that metrical or rhythmic considerations have dictated this divergence from normal prose order where it takes place. Somewhat surprisingly, this is not obviously true, at least not from the point of view of an accentual system of meter, or as far as “Qinah” meter is concerned. In 2:20c, for example, ‘im yēhārēg b^emiqdaš’^adōnāy kōhēn w^enābī’ (word-for-word: Are-slain in-the-sanctuary of-the-Lord priest and-prophet?), the order is prepositional phrase=subject, abnormal as compared to what is most common in Genesis. Yet the opposite order would seem to be possible here from the point of view of meter. Variant orders appear within the space of a single colon; compare 1:20b nehpak libbī b^eqirbī (word-for-word: Is-turned-over my-heart inside-me) to 2:9a tab^e‘ū bā'āre—š^e‘ārehˆ (“have-sunk into-the-earth her-gates”). Until further refinement of our metrical conceptions or of our knowledge of Hebrew syntax is achieved, the proper conclusion seems to be that in the ordering of these sentence-elements the poet of Lamentations was freer than the writers of Genesis, and his choice of a particular order was dictated by what may vaguely be called “stylistic” considerations, rather than meter. Whether this is a characteristic of other Hebrew poetry is as yet undetermined.

One rhythmic consideration does seem to have played a part, however. In sentences with three post-verbal modifiers, the poet shows a marked tendency to put the longest element last, regardless of its normal relative order. For example, in 2:6b it is syntactically unusual for the prepositional phrase to precede the nominal direct object: …

(“has-made-forgotten Yahweh in-Zion festival and-sabbath”).

But the compound direct object is very long as compared to the other modifiers in the sentence. Andersen noticed a similar tendency in sentences in Genesis where word order was unusual, so that this may be a rather widespread characteristic of Hebrew sentence rhythm. On the other hand, it is present in such a high proportion of sentences in Lamentations that it may deserve notice as a feature of poetic style.

The acrostic pattern in chapters 1-4 quite obviously divides these poems into units which may for convenience be called strophes, or stanzas. In some cases these strophes correspond to units of thought. Thus, for example, 1:2 presents a unified picture—Zion weeps by night, forsaken by all her friends—quite clearly separated from what goes before and follows after. In other cases, however, the pattern marked off by the acrostic does not coincide with the pattern of thought. Ideas and images may be run-on from one acrostic unit to the next. The last line of the Daleth strophe is 3:12, but the image of God as an archer is continued into the first line of the He strophe, 3:13. This syncopation seems particularly common in chapter 3; see Comment there.

NOTE ON A FEATURE OF POETIC DICTION

Phrases of the pattern “daughter (Heb. bat) X,” or “virgin daughter (b^etūlat bat) X” occur twenty times in Lamentations, a remarkable number in so short a book, since such phrases occur only about forty-five times in all the rest of the Old Testament. Jeremiah has sixteen of these other occurrences, including eight occurrences of bat ‘ammī (lit., “daughter of my people”), practically the only occurrence of the term outside Lamentations (the exception is Isa 22:4). It is reasonable to conclude that this poetic device was especially popular in the seventh and sixth centuries b.c., although it was no doubt very ancient, since Micah and Isaiah use it.

Lamentations uses bat Siyyōn, “Zion,” seven times; b^etūlat bat Siyyōn, once; bat ‘ammī, “my people,” five times; bat y^ehūdāh, “Judah,” twice; b^etūlat bat y^ehūdāh, once (these last two are not used elsewhere in the Bible); bat y^erūšālaim, “Jerusalem,” twice, and bat '^edōm, “Edom,” once.

These phrases serve a poetic purpose in two ways. First, they help make explicit the personification of the people or city as a woman. Secondly, they seem to serve metrical purposes. The longer forms, the ones with three elements such as “virgin daughter Zion” are used to stretch out a name so as to make a whole poetic unit (colon) out of it. The shorter, two-part, phrases such as “daughter Zion” seem also to serve metrical purposes, though these are not clearly definable given the present state of understanding of Hebrew metrics. The most easily observable pattern is that phrases of the type “daughter X” tend to stand last in the unit of parallelism (colon). This is true of all occurrences in the Bible with a few exceptions (Jer 4:31; 6:26; 8:21; 51:33; Ps 137:8). There are practically no exceptions to this rule in Lamentations, the only possible case (4:3) being open to question textually (see Note).

As has been observed by others, the renderings familiar from older English translations, and the Revised Standard Version (RSV), “Daughter of Zion,” “virgin daughter of Zion,” etc., are potentially misleading, since the Hebrew phrases refer to the people or city as a whole, and not to a part of it. To put it another way, the relation between the two nouns in such a phrase is one of apposition; the second is not the possessor of the first. Since the main purpose of “daughter” and “virgin daughter” seems to be metrical, they have in most cases been omitted in the present translation. Where this has been done it is mentioned in the NOTES. This omission seemed advisable especially since no thoroughly idiomatic English is available. The new Jewish Publication Society (JPS) version uses “Fair Zion,” “Fair Maiden Judah,” “my poor people,” and the like, which seem fairly close to the effect of the Hebrew.

THE TEXT

The Hebrew text of Lamentations is in a relatively good state of preservation, compared to the text of some other biblical books. This advantage in the commentator's favor is to some extent balanced by a corresponding disadvantage: the ancient translations offer relatively little help at those places where the Masoretic text, that is, the received Hebrew text, may be suspected of being corrupt. At the end of a recent thorough study of the text, Bertil Albrektson concludes that the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation, was based on a text in all essentials identical with the Masoretic text, and the same verdict is offered for the Syriac version.⁴⁰ It is now believed that the Greek text of Lamentations belongs to the recently identified kaige recension,⁴¹ that is to say, the Greek text in our possession is the outcome of a deliberate attempt to accommodate the original Greek translation as closely as possible to a near forerunner of the Masoretic text. Thus the Greek also gives us for the most part a text that already contained the errors and difficulties that are in the standard Hebrew text. Under these circumstances, commentators are compelled to rely to a greater degree on conjectural emendation of corrupt passages than might otherwise be necessary.

Among the Dead Sea scrolls published so far, in addition to small portions of the canonical book Lamentations, are several fragments of a poetical composition which incorporates many quotations from Lamentations, often in paraphrased form (4Q179).⁴² This composition is occasionally cited in the Notesas an early interpretation of the sense of the text.

LITURGICAL USE

The poems in Lamentations may have been used in public mourning over the destruction of Jerusalem immediately after they were written, though the evidence is inconclusive. Nothing in the poems precludes such a use. Formal characteristics, such as the use of “I” in many passages, do not rule out the use in corporate worship, nor does the use of acrostic form compel us to think that chapters 1-4 were intended only for private study and devotion (so Segert). On the other hand, the alternation among various speakers in some of the poems does not justify the conclusion that they were acted out publicly as a ritual drama. Nor is there evidence for the existence of a fixed liturgical practice of “Lament over the Ruined Sanctuary” already in pre-exilic times (against Kraus; see above under Literary Types). Direct evidence for liturgical use of Lamentations is not available until the Christian era.

Public mourning over the destroyed city was carried on from earliest times. Jer 41:5, narrating an event just after the death of Gedaliah, the governor installed over Judah by the Chaldaeans, tells of “eighty men from Shechem, Shiloh, and Samaria who had shaved off their beards, torn their garments, and lacerated their skin,” coming to make offering at the house of Yahweh in Jerusalem. Zech 7:3-5, dated to 518 b.c., hence shortly after the return from exile, makes it clear that mourning and fasting in the fifth month (Ab) had been going on ever since the city fell. Zech 8:19 also refers to a fast in the fifth month. It is, therefore, reasonable to suppose that the Lamentations were used in connection with this regular public mourning already in the exilic period.

Presumably continuing this ancient practice, later Jewish usage assigns Lamentations a place in the public mourning on the 9th of Ab, the fifth month, which falls in July or August according to the modern calendar. The 9th is chosen in preference to strict adherence to either of the two biblical dates (II Kings 25:8-9 gives the 7th of Ab; Jer 52:12 gives the 10th) because of the tradition that the second temple fell to Titus on the 9th of Ab, and that Bar Kokhba's fortress Betar fell on that date in a.d. 135.

In various Christian liturgies portions of Lamentations are used in services on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, a custom which has resulted in the composition of eloquent musical settings of the text.

In modern times, Leonard Bernstein has used texts from Lamentations in his “Jeremiah” Symphony (1942), for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, as did Igor Stravinsky, in his “Threni” (1958), for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra.

Notes

1. See Rudolph's commentary on chapter 1 for details.

2. See Abraham Malamat, “The Last Kings of Judah and the Fall of Jerusalem,” Israel Exploration Journal 18 (1968), 144-45, for a discussion of the chronology of the events.

3. The idea that one or more chapters of Lamentations come from the Maccabean period was advanced by S. A. Fries, “Parallele zwischen den Klageliedern Cap. IV, V und der Maccabäerzeit,” ZAW 13 (1893), 110-24, but found few adherents. S. T. Lachs, “The Date of Lamentations V,” JQR, N.S. 57 (1966-67), 46-56, has revived the idea, but his arguments are equally unconvincing.

4. Hardt proposed that the five chapters were written respectively by Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and King Jehoiachin! See Giuseppe Ricciotti, Le lamentazione di Geremia (Turin, Rome, 1924), p. 35. To say that modern critical opinion in this matter was anticipated by Ibn Ezra, as does Lachs, JQR, N.S. 57 (1966-67), 46-47, is erroneous. Ibn Ezra rejects only the rabbinic tradition that Lamentations was the scroll burned by Jeremiah, but not Jeremiah's authorship of the book.

5. The idea that Jopsiah is spoken of in 4:20 was picked up by Saint Jerome and from him by the Glossa interlinearis, and thence by later medieval commentators; see Ricciotti, pp. 32-34.

6. The lexical evidence is exhaustively presented in Max Löhr, “Der Sprachgebrauch des Buches der Klagelieder,” ZAW 14 (1894), 31-50; cf. “Threni III. und die jeremianische Autorschaft des Buches der Klagelieder,” ZAW 24 (1904), 1-16, and “Alphabetische und alphabetisierende Lieder im Alten Testament,” ZAW 25 (1905), 173-98, also by Löhr.

7. Gilbert Brunet, in his Les lamentations contre Jérémie (Paris, 1968) has recently argued at length that the first four Lamentations were written by a (half-repentant) representative of the nationalist party, probably the high-priest Seraiah, against the unpatriotic prophetic party of Jeremiah. The conclusions reached do not agree well with the relatively untendentious character of the book, and are achieved only by a very strained exegesis, a main prop of the argument being that one must distinguish sharply between “enemy,” and … “foe,” throughout the book. Giorgio Buccellati, “Gli Israeliti di Palestina al tempo dell'esilio,” Bibbia e Oriente 2 (1960), 199-209, argues from passages in Lamentations that the book comes from a party hostile to Gedaliah: a group of Jerusalemites who opposed his governing from Mizpah, of patriots who hated collaborators. The evidence cited is insufficient to render any of these conclusions probable.

8. The Holy Bible, trans. Ronald Knox, London, 1955.

9. Extensive discussions, with bibliography, are offered by P. A. Munch, “Die alphabetische Akrostichie in der jüdischen Psalmendichtung,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 90 (1936), 703-10; Ralph Marcus, “Alphabetic Acrostics in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods,” JNES 6 (1947), 109-15; Norman K. Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations, Studies in Biblical Theology, 14 (London, 1962), pp. 23-32.

10. Adolf Erman, The Ancient Egyptians, trans. A. M. Blackman (New York, 1943), pp. lviii-lix, describes several compositions which, while not acrostic in the strictest sense, have the peculiarity that all the stanzas have the same opening word.

11. W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford, 1960), p. 67.

12. Lambert, pp. 63-68.

13. Enno Janssen, Juda in der Exilszeit. Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten and Neuen Testaments 69 (Göttingen, 1956), p. 97; Gottwald, loc. cit.

14. Hermann Gunkel, Die Psalmen, Handkommentar zum Alten Testament, Göttingen, 1926, on Ps 111.

15. Patrick Skehan, “Wisdom's House,” CBQ 29 (1967), 468, note.

16. “Klagelieder Jeremiae,” in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2d ed. (Tübingen, 1929), III, cols. 1049-52. In his discussion of the funeral song, Gunkel draws on the study by Hedwig Jahnow, Das hebräische Leichenlied im Rahmen der Völkerdichtung, BZAW 36, Giessen, 1923.

17. S. N. Kramer, “Lamentation over the Destruction of Nippur,” Eretz-Israel 9 (W. F. Albright Volume, Jerusalem, 1969), 89. Cf. his “Sumerian Literature and the Bible,” in Studia Biblica et Orientalia, III: Oriens Antiquus, Analecta Biblica, 12 (Rome, 1959), p. 201.

18. C. J. Gadd, “The Second Lamentation for Ur,” in Hebrew and Semitic Studies presented to G. R. Driver (Oxford, 1963), p. 61.

19. In the introduction to his commentary, pp. 9-11.

20. T. F. McDaniel, “The Alleged Sumerian Influence upon Lamentations,” VT 18 (1968), 198-209.

21. The principal extant Sumerian laments over destroyed cities may be conveniently read in ANET: “The Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur,” pp. 455-63; “Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur,” pp. 611-19; the related “The Curse of Agade,” pp. 646-51.

22. ANET, p. 618, lines 403-4.

23. The word usga, whose proper translation is uncertain, refers to a part of the temple used for lustrations, according to Kramer, ANET, p. 651, n. 70.

24. ANET, p. 651, lines 254-55.

25. Gustav Hölscher, “Elemente arabischer, syrischer und hebräischer Metrik,” BZAW 34 (1920), 93-101.

26. Sigmund Mowinckel, “Zum Problem der hebräischen Metrik,” in Festschrift für Alfred Bertholet (Tübingen, 1950), pp. 379-94.

27. Friedrich Horst, “Die Kennzeichen der hebräischen Poesie,” ThR 21 (1953), 97-121.

28. Stanislav Segert, “Versbau und Sprachbau in der althebräischen Poesie,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Orientforschung 15 (1969), 312-21, with references (n. 7) to his earlier studies.

29. Julius Ley, Grundzüge des Rhythmus, des Vers- und Strophenbaues in der hebräischen Poesie, Halle, 1887.

30. Eduard Sievers, Metrische Studien, I-III, Leipzig, 1901, 1904-5, 1907.

31. Occasionally the same practice is followed in the Notes and Comments below, without the intention of indicating adherence to the accentual theory.

32. Archaic Forms in Early Hebrew Poetry,” ZAW 72 (1960), 101-7; “The Structure of Job 3,” Biblica 49 (1968), 503-8.

33. Metrische Studien, I, Erster Teil, 120-23; Zweiter Teil, 550-63.

34. Metrische Studien, I, Erster Teil, 116.

35. Such an undertaking lies beyond my powers; when I attempt metrical translation I achieve something like the following by Vavasour Powell, Sippor Ba-Pach, or The Bird in the Cage (London, 1662), p. 143:

    How doth the city sit alone
                                  that full of people was?
    How is she become a widow?
                                  she that was great alas!

    Quoted in Rolf P. Lessenich, Dichtungsgeschmack und althebräische Bibelpoesie im 18. Jahrhundert, Anglistische Studien, 4 (Cologne, Graz, 1967), p. 11.

36. Otto Procksch, Theologie des Alten Testaments (Gütersloh, 1950), pp. 642 f, points out that the anger of Yahweh illustrates the peculiar vitality of the Hebrew view of God. It is in marked contrast to the emphasis of the best Greek minds upon the imperturbable, the ‘apathetic’ character of God. … But in the nature of the Hebrew-Jewish God there was something unresting, dynamic, irrational, passionate—all of which is best summarized in the category of the Holy.

37. If it were desired, one could restate the results in terms of the proportion of synonymous to synthetic parallelism, without change.

38. J. Begrich asserts that the caesura cannot interrupt a construct chain, or fall between the two accented syllables in a word with two accents; obviously these restrictions still leave a great deal of room open. See his “Der Satzstil im Fünfer,” ZS 9 (1933-34), 173.

39. The writer regrets the necessity of referring to the conclusions of a work not easily available to readers, and which Professor Andersen would doubtless revise and amplify in some respects before publication. There is, however, no similar work available for comparison. I have taken the liberty of altering Andersen's technical terminology in some respects in favor of terms which, while less precise, are more traditional and hence apt to be more readily intelligible without lengthy explanation. For verbless clauses, the reader is referred to Andersen's monograph The Hebrew Verbless Clause in the Pentateuch, New York, Nashville, 1970. For a fuller discussion, see the writer's contribution to the forthcoming Festschrift for J. M. Myers.

40. Bertil Albrektson, Studies in the Text and Theology of the Book of Lamentations, Studia Theologica Lundensia, 21 (Lund, 1963), pp. 208-13. The other most important recent treatment of the text is Wilhelm Rudolph, “Der Text der Klagelieder,” ZAW 56 (1938), 101-22.

41. Jean-Dominique Barthélemy, Les devanciers d'Aquila, Vetus Testamentum Supplements 10 (Leiden, 1963), pp. 33, 138-60, is quite positive about the identification of the Greek text of Ruth, the Song of Songs, and Lamentations as belonging to the kaige group, and bases a theory about the beginning of liturgical use of these books on the identification. Frank M. Cross, Jr., “The History of the Biblical Text in the Light of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert,” Harvard Theological Review 57 (1964), 283, is somewhat more reserved: “Ruth and Lamentations are good candidates” (to be representatives of the recension). See also J. M. Grindel, “Another Characteristic of the Kaige Recension: nsh/nikos,” CBQ 31 (1969), 499-513; note that LXX has nikos for nsh at Lam 3:18 and 5:20.

42. J. M. Allegro, with Arnold A. Anderson, Qumrân Cave 4, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan, V (Oxford, 1968), pp. 75-77; cf. J. Strugnell, “Notes en marge du volume V des ‘Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan,’” Revue de Qumrân 7, No. 26 (1970), 250-52.

Abbreviations

ANET	Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, ed. J. B. Pritchard, 3d ed., Princeton, 1969
BDB	F. Brown, S. R. Driver, C.A. Briggs, eds. of Wilhelm Gesenius’ Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, 2d ed., Oxford, 1952
BH3	Biblia hebreica, ed. Rudolf Kittel, 3d ed., Stuttgart, 1937
BZAW	Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
CAD	Chicago Assyrian Dictionary
CBQ	Catholic Biblical Quarterly
CTA	Corpus des tablettes et cunéiformes alphabétiques, by Andrée Herdner, Paris, 1963
GKC	Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, ed. E. Kautzsch, revised by A. E. Cowley, 2d Eng. ed., Oxford, 1910
JNES	Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JQR	Jewish Quarterly Review
KB3	Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, Lexikon in Veteris Testamenti Libros, 3d ed., Leiden, 1967
ThR	Theologische Rundschau
UT	Ugaritic Textbook, by Cyrus H. Gordon, Rome, 1965
VT	Vetus Testamentum
ZAW	Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
ZS	Zeitschrift für Semitistik und verwandte Gebiete