The Theology of Doom and The Theology of Hope
[In the following excerpt, Gottwald argues that Lamentations stresses the unique nature of the fall of Jerusalem and Israel's sins in order to convince its audience that the destruction must have been the will of God and that, in the face of discouraging external conditions, hope of renewal can nevertheless be found.]
The fall of Jerusalem was a clarion call to the entire re-thinking of Hebrew religion. In the truest sense this historic crisis was unparalleled in all Israel's history. At no time in the four hundred years of the monarchy, with the exception of the campaign of Shishak (c. 935), had the sacred city of Jerusalem been captured, much less destroyed, nor had the theocracy been interrupted. Now the sombre announcements of the prophets had come to pass. To the exile of king and leaders and the destruction of the city were added famine and slaughter. To an historical faith this catastrophe could well have been fatal. A survey of exilic literature, wherein is embodied the responses of Israel to the crucible of national calamity, makes it abundantly clear that Lamentations is far from being a case of literary exaggeration or warped hypochondria.1
One of the first to observe the grand scale of the tragedy lamented in our book was Bishop Lowth who said:
Grief is generally abject and humble, less apt to assimilate with the sublime; but when it becomes excessive, and predominates in the mind, it rises to a bolder tone, and becomes heated to fury and madness. We have a fine example of this from the hand of Jeremiah when he exaggerates the miseries of Zion.2
Wiesmann, noting the same fact, remarked: ‘The sensual nature comes into its own, indeed appears in its complete weakness: the travails of suffering find full expression, according to Oriental manner, with a certain extravagance.’3 This ‘fury and madness’, this ‘extravagance’ of emotion is noticeable to any alert reader. It need not be contested that this is the customary temper of the Semite, but the grief of Lamentations had the deeper significance that from the Hebrew point of view it laments a supreme historical and, therefore, religious catastrophe.
Nearly every strophe of the Book of Lamentations could be cited in proof of the magnitude and severity of the misfortune. In particular the cumulative effect of the strophes in which Yahweh is pictured as chastening his people is overwhelming (1.13-15; 2.1-8; 3.1-19). The purpose of this unrelenting heaping up of misery is to stress the unique nature of the catastrophe, the worst feature being Israel's apparent alienation from God (2.1, 6-7; 3.17, 18, 31, 33, 49, 50; 5.20, 22).
In several passages the uniqueness of the suffering inflicted is actually stated and underlined. To the passers-by the daughter of Zion importunately appeals:
Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Behold and consider
If there is any pain like my pain, which was dealt to me,
Which Yahweh inflicted in the day of his fierce anger.
(1.12)
This outcry is intended as more than dramatics, although its rhetorical form cannot be denied. Here is a plea for the casual traveller to pause and consider if he has ever beheld such suffering. Perhaps on the grounds of dispassionate reflection alone, forgetting for the moment that it is the despised Zion that suffers, he may have mercy. It is easy to see why Christians have applied this awesome exclamation to the crucifixion of Jesus, for it has a solitariness and anguish akin to that devastating question, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ There is the same piercing quality of irremediable desolation expressed in it.
In the second poem the pivotal strophe is that which follows the withering catalogue of Yahweh's destructive acts:
How shall I uphold you, with what shall I compare you, O
daughter of Jerusalem?
To what shall I liken you, and how comfort you, virgin
daughter of Zion?
For great as the sea is your ruin; who can heal you?
(2.13)
Here the setting has become almost cosmic. Neither heaven nor earth can adduce an analogy to the magnitude of Zion's ruin. It is plainly incalculable. Only the vast, mysterious, and chaotic depths of the sea offer any point of comparison with the extent of Jerusalem's destruction. In the wake of this sweeping pronouncement we are appropriately introduced to the various groups who are inadequate for the comfort and healing of Judah. Neither prophets (2.14), nor the passers-by (2.15), nor the enemy (2.16) are capable of assuaging her wounds. As a matter of fact, like salt rubbed in an open sore, they only intensify the suffering. Failing all human help, the poet urgently summons Zion:
Cry aloud to the Lord! …
Arise, cry out in the night! …
Lift up your hands to him! …
(2.18a, 19ae)
The nadir of Jerusalem's despair has been reached, and the sun of faith begins its circle toward the zenith. Disabused of all illusions, Zion knows that all her trust in earthly deliverance, whether in prophet or king or foreign aid, is ineffectual. The picture of inconsolability in 2.13 is indeed one of the most moving expressions of grief and ruin in all literature and yet it only serves to intensify the need for turning to the Lord. Precisely as in Job, Lamentations gives not the slightest trace of a leaning toward atheism or agnosticism.
Our final example leads logically to the theme of sin but deserves to be discussed in the present context because it boldly links unparalleled suffering with unparalleled sin.
The iniquity of the daughter of my people is greater than the
sin of Sodom;
She was overthrown in a moment and no hands were laid upon
her.
(4.6)
The shock of this sort of comparison is apparent. Our poet says in effect: ‘Yes, there was one cataclysm which can be compared to Jerusalem's ruin, but, terrible as it was, the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah pales beside the present disaster!’
From the eighth-century prophets onwards, the celebrated Cities of the Plain, Sodom and Gomorrah (cf. Admah and Zeboiim, Gen. 10.19; 14.28), made famous by the vivid J story of Gen. 19, became proverbial for the divine judgment, particularly with respect to its suddenness, its violence and its finality.4 It is noteworthy that in all the pre-exilic passages Sodom and its sister cities are the stock terms for divine judgment on sin. They serve as the norm for punishment, inasmuch as these cities suffered the most terrible punishment ever meted out. In each of the above references the sins of Israel (or the foreign lands) are considered to be perilously like the sins of the wicked cities of antiquity. But in all these cases Sodom and Gomorrah remain the standard which the other judgments approximate or equal. Only in exilic times do we find the sin of the nation exceeding that of the legendary cities! The only analogy to the Lamentations passage is in the address to the harlot Jerusalem by Ezekiel, who writes at precisely the same historical juncture:
And your elder sister in Samaria, who lived with her daughters to the north of you; and your younger sister, who lived to the south of you, is Sodom with her daughters. Yet you were not content to walk in their ways, or do according to their abominations; within a very little time you were more corrupt than they in all your ways. As I live, says the Lord God, your sister Sodom and her daughters have not done as you and your daughters have done. (16.46-48)
The special import of the Lamentations reference is that it reasons from the punishment to the sin in keeping with the most unerring Deuteronomic faith. In what respect was Zion's punishment greater than Sodom's? The latter fell by a divine holocaust from heaven which was presumably instantaneous and relatively painless for the inhabitants. ‘No hands were laid upon her’, but hands have been laid upon Jerusalem—the coarse, plundering, destructive hands of the enemy (cf. 1.7, 10, 14; 2.7; 5.8). So the fitness of the ancient Cities of the Plain as an analogy to the Fall of Jerusalem is rejected as inadequate. The earlier statements of unparalleled suffering (1.12; 2.13) are emphatically confirmed. A symbol long honoured as the epitome of divinely inflicted punishment is shattered and cast aside. The ruin of Jerusalem, Lamentations insists, defies all categorizing and comparison; it is sui generis.5
What has brought on the doom? The confession of sin, not once or twice but repeatedly, not perfunctorily or incidentally but earnestly and fundamentally, suggests the reason for the calamity. All five of the poems which comprise the Book of Lamentations witness to the prophetic concept of sin and thus form one link in the long chain of evidence bearing out the importance of Lamentations as a justification and preservation of the teaching of the prophets. Even chapter two, conspicuous in its accusations of the deity, has an awareness of sin. The prophets are at fault because they did not expose the national guilt in order to prevent captivity (2.14). All the frightful judgments might have been averted had the trusted leaders been faithful to their calling and had the sinful people heeded their warning.
The statements of guilt and responsibility for sin are presented in different ways. Sometimes they are found in the poet's description of the city (1.5d, 8a, 9a; 4.6, 13ab), sometimes in direct address to the city (2.4ad; 4.22ab), and then again they appear as confessions on the lips of the city or nation (1.14, 18ab, 22cd; 3.42; 5.7, 16). The admission of sin by the offender is an absolute necessity if forgiveness is desired. Prov. 28.13, ‘He who hides his sins shall not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them, shall have mercy,’ is a good summary of the Biblical ethos concerning the effectiveness of confessional prayer. In the next chapter we shall explore the character of the repentance which is implied in the very act of acknowledging sin.
With one possible exception the sin is manfully shouldered by the contemporary generation. In 5.7 we read: ‘Our fathers sinned and are not; we bear their guilt.’ It may be that the ‘fathers’ are not those of the preceding generations but rather the leaders or eminent among the Jews. In other words, it may be said of the former leaders who are now in captivity that they ‘are not’, i.e. so far as the Jerusalem community is concerned they have ceased to exist. There is evidence for the usage of … ’ābh, ‘father’, with respect to rulers, priests, prophets, noblemen (cf. Gen. 45.8; Judg. 17.10; 18.19; I Sam. 24.11; II Kings 2.12; 3.13; 6.21; 13.14; II Chron. 2.12). But even if it is to be referred more naturally to the ancestors, it is not a categorical shifting of responsibility because in the same poem the people aver: ‘The crown has fallen from our head; woe to us, for we have sinned!’ (5.16). From the Hebrew point of view there is no incompatibility in the entertaining of these two ideas, as indeed the case of Jeremiah so clearly confirms (cf. Jer. 14.20 and 16.10-13). In fact it was the attempted reconciliation of these two elements of Hebrew experience that was to beome one of the major endeavours of Judaism.6
First we note that the sin is the equal of the suffering. The sin which has invoked Jerusalem's downfall is more heinous than the coarse sensuality of Sodom and Gomorrah (4.6). Twice the infinitive absolute is used to reinforce the seriousness of the sin (1.8a, 20d). Her sin has been so blatant that the nations mock and desert her (1.5, 8). Her sharp reversal of fortune was solely because of her sin (1.9). The burden of iniquity was so great when placed on the back of the daughter of Zion that she was crushed to the ground (1.14). Her rebellion was so flagrant that Yahweh was unable to forgive (3.42). The evil of Zion and her people was as foul as leprosy (4.13-15). There can be no mistake about the sincerity of the closing summation:
The crown has fallen from our head; woe to us, for we have
sinned!
Because of this our heart is faint, because of these our eyes are
darkened.
(5.16,17)
As to the specific sins which constitute the great iniquity of Judah, we are surprised that more detail is not given. It may be that the incisive teaching of the prophets, contained in the denunciatory oracles of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, is here presupposed as the content of the disobedience. Or this may be a deliberate omission expressive of the poet's conviction that the sin of Judah was much more serious and deep-rooted than the combination of many overt acts. This would continue the interpretation of Jeremiah, who internalized and radicalized sin to the extent that it could no longer be thought of as simply the violation of commandments imposed from without (cf. esp. 4.14; 13.23; 17.9, 10; 31.33-35). Also, it is not typical for the lament genre to confess sin. Laments in the Psalter that are true confessions are rare (e.g., 51; 130).
The one sin that is specified in Lamentations is the irresponsible leadership of the priests and prophets who were remiss in two respects. On the one hand, they were guilty of dereliction of duty in that they delighted in frothy visions of peace and prosperity and failed to warn Judah of her sin and the coming judgment (2.14). On the other hand, they actually participated in the oppression of the righteous, even shedding their blood (4.13). Beyond this the detailed features of the national sin are not sketched. But one thing is sure: the sin is not laid solely at the door of the religious leadership, but is shared equally by the populace. This can be seen in the distinction that is made between the prophet's falsity and ‘thy guilt’ (2.14). The same is implied, furthermore, in the earnestness of the national confession of guilt and by the fact that, even when priests and prophets have been slain, banished, or carried into exile, the heavy hand of Yahweh's judgment is still upon the community. In fact the gravity of the defection of the religious leaders is only significant in terms of the national destiny and the national default.7
The scope and seriousness of the sin is indicated by the several terms employed to describe it8: … peša‘, basically ‘transgression, rebellion or infringement’, stresses activity (1.5, 14, 22; 3.42); … hēt’, primarily ‘failure or falling short’, is sin from the standpoint of a norm or formal standard (1.8; 3.39; 4.6, 13, 22; 5.7, 16); … ‘āwōn, ‘crookedness or straying’, is sin from the standpoint of content (2.14; 4.6, 13, 22; 5.7); … mārāh, ‘obstinacy, refractoriness or rebellion’ (1.18, 20; 3.42); and … tume'āh, ‘uncleanness’ (1.9; 4.15). In this connection it may be significant that … šeghāghāh, ‘sin out of ignorance and inadvertence’, which does not appear in the prophets, is also avoided in Lamentations, inasmuch as the sin of Judah had long been heralded by the prophets and was therefore inexcusable. It is evident that the several words were used to impress the sin upon the hearer and to enable the Judeans to confess wholeheartedly their iniquity before Yahweh.
The confession of sin with such radical vehemence is one of the ways in which our book shows its superiority over all extra-Biblical, and one may also add, over all Biblical laments. Apart from the unusual addendum to the Sumerian Lamentation over Ur,9 the laments of the ancient Near East known to this writer do not take seriously the connection between national sin and national judgment. This fact testifies eloquently to that deep and sensitive awareness of sin which was the fruition of the prophetic faith of Israel. It demonstrates that sin, both as disobedience and disruption, was understood in exilic Israel. Judaism, with all its defensiveness and exclusivism, developed a deep and interior sense of sin (cf. Ezra 9; Neh. 9; Dan. 9; Sir. 21.1; 39.5; Prayer of Manasseh).10
While any such distinction in Lamentations is not articulate (as it is nowhere articulate in the Bible), one senses, both in the transcendent imperious will of the deity and in the tragic brokenness of the social organism, a wedding of faith and social morality that was to be one of the great gifts of Judaism to the world. The poet in Lamentations shows us that the collective defiance of the word of the Lord (1.18) has resulted in the deepest ruptures of the community life (2.9, 14; 5.1-17). Often in the course of subsequent history there has been a tendency to turn on the one side into an arbitrary tyranny of the divine and on the other into a self-contained ethics. The latter would have been unthinkable for the Hebrews, who knew nothing of autonomous arts, autonomous politics or autonomous culture of any sort. But, the Hebrews, with the possible exception of certain apocalyptists, were not constrained to make of God an arbitrary despot. Unlike the Greek pantheon, Yahweh had the ultimate welfare of his world ever in mind. While for Lamentations, as for all Hebrew thought, there is a definite qualitative chasm between God and man, it nevertheless is true that at the same time man is the child of God and fulfills God's purposes in his historical life. This puts all the ‘commands’ of God in a new perspective and opens up the possibility of talking about natural law, even though the questions of natural law and autonomous ethics do not appear in the Old Testament itself. Nevertheless, the conditions are all there except the humanistic assumption. There is even in the naive faith of the Deuteronomist an expression of the Hebrew conviction that the good of God and good of man are One Good. In this sense Hebrew faith already presupposes and contains, though embryonically, the tensions of later theology. It is not untrue to Biblical faith to raise such rational questions as: Is God or the Good prior? Is an autonomous ethics possible? At least it is not untrue to Biblical faith if it be allowed that the modern religious man may ask religious questions in forms not precisely equivalent to those of the Bible.
The conviction that the nation which lives righteously and trusts God shall be blessed arises out of the fundamental conviction that there are not several goods at conflict with one another but One Good which is the will of Yahweh. Conversely there are not several sins but One Sin which is rebellion against the will of Yahweh. Social ethics, which lay all men under a common obligation, must, therefore, stem from monotheism. It is the given order, created by the One God Yahweh, which rescues the activities of men from sheer arbitrariness and lends them structure. This is why Hebrew religion and Hebrew ethics can never be unravelled to anyone's satisfaction. All rebellion against God is thus not simply rebellion against an ‘other’ but also against the self and the whole created order, so intimately is the welfare of all created things bound up with adherence to the ways of the creator.11 One of the great contributions of the Wisdom literature was to make this point articulate. Lam. 3.34-39 is cast against the background of the Creator God, whose ways may be mysterious, but whose purposes are always for the good of his creation. There is, then, one may venture to say, already observable in Lamentations the foundation for the insight that evil and the disintegration of human society are inextricably bound together. There is, in terms of Tillich's philosophical theology, both an autonomy and a heteronomy within theonomy.12 The terrible poignancy of the confession of sin in Lamentations is that Zion, by her rebellion, has destroyed herself.
But to attempt to rationalize sin in terms of its social consequences is not to equate the punishment thereof with a troubled conscience, or with the slow working out of requital through the process of moral ‘sowing and reaping’. The interventionist ethos of Hebraism is more vivid and direct than that. The Book of Lamentations is distinguished by the repeated emphasis upon the wrath of Yahweh which acts directly in dealing out retribution.13 Commensurable with the suffering and sin is the anger of Yahweh. The most common term for wrath is … 'aph, also ‘nostril’, a derivative of … 'ānaph, ‘breathe or snort’ (1.12; 2.1, 3, 21, 22; 3.43, 66; 4.11). Other terms are … hārōn, from … hārāhn, which has the basic notion of ‘burning or kindling’ (never alone in Lamentations but three times with … 'appō, 1.12; 2.3; 4.11); … hēmāh, from … yāam, with the idea of heat (cf. Aramaic … yeham, usually for sexual impulse of animals, 2.4; 4.11); ‘ebhrāh, from … ‘ābhar, which suggests ‘overflow, excess, outburst’ (2.2; 3.1); and … za'am, or ‘indignation’ (2.6). The verb … qāçaph, ‘to be wrathful’ (5.22) completes the vocabulary. Yahweh's wrath is represented as being ‘poured out’ … šāphakh, 2.4; 4.11) and as ‘accomplished or spent’ (… kālāh, 4.11). Elsewhere he is pictured as ‘wrapping himself in anger’ (… sākhakh, 3.43), which like a cloud is impenetrable to prayer (3.44).
The real dynamic of the motif of Yahweh's wrath, however, is lost unless one studies it in close connection with the contexts where it occurs. Only by detailed analysis of the text of Lamentations can the interpreter grasp the fierceness and violence of the divine punishment. Central to the whole matter of the inter-relation of suffering, sin, and wrath is the direct activity of Yahweh in the city's destruction. Sin against God has aroused the divine wrath and that wrath has inflicted punishment without measure or mercy. Lest the reader overlook the true nature of the disaster, the poet ceaselessly reiterates the theme of Yahweh as the relentless, destroying God. Only in the last poem is explicit reference lacking to this motif, but the framework of the chapter, beginning and ending with an appeal for Yahweh to consider and restore the city, as well as the uneasy question of the conclusion, presupposes the earlier belief in the dreadful reprisal of the Lord.
In his monograph on Yahweh as a warrior or military commander, Henning Fredriksson calls attention to the frequent idea of God as the general of foreign armies (cf. e.g. Jer. 50.9; Isa. 41.2, 25; 43.17; Ezek. 26.7; 28.7).14 Perhaps the most famous expression is that of Assyria as the rod of the divine wrath described by Isaiah of Jerusalem (10.5 ff). From this notion arose the more shocking image of Yahweh himself as the destroyer. In Amos (1.3-2.5) he sends the fire of judgment, not eschatological but simply military (cf. use of the idiom … ‘to send or kindle fire’, in Josh. 8.8, 19; Jud. 1.8; 9.49; 20.48; II Sam. 14.30 f).15 Yahweh is the one who ‘smashes the bars’, presumably of the city gates (Amos 1.4 f; Isa. 45.2; Ps. 107.16). But, as Fredriksson observes, the direct destructive work of Yahweh is exemplified in Lamentations far more baldly than in any other Old Testament book.16 More ruthless and detailed than even the judgments and punitive messages of the prophets is the inexorable coming of Yahweh as he methodically reduces Zion to ruins. The role of the Divine Punisher is most prominent in four series of strophes; in these passages is concentrated the full impact of the judgment (1.13-15; 2.1-8; 3.1-18, 43-45). The passages may, in turn, be divided into those that represent Yahweh's unmediated action against the nation and those that picture the nation in personified lament.
The second category draws into play the terminology of the individual lament which appears to have been fairly well stylized and rather widely circulated, at least in post-exilic times. Our poet has transferred this imagery of terrible affliction to the nation conceived first, in the form of the daughter of Zion and later, in the person of the prophet Jeremiah. By looking at the verbs descriptive of Yahweh's judgment we get some appreciation of the ferocity and savagery, indeed the vicious glee, with which he carried out his plan. The general term for the punishment inflicted is hōghāh, ‘to afflict’ (1.5, 12) but it is embellished by imagery declaring that Yahweh cast fire into her bones, stretched a net to entangle her feet (1.13), impressed a yoke of sin upon her (1.14), spurned her warriors, summoned a festival of slaughter and trod the bloody ‘winepress’ (1.15).
Yet the first chapter is only a foretaste of what appears in the third poem where the severity of the divine punishment mounts almost to the breaking point. The suffering man depicted is the prophet Jeremiah as a type or representative of the suffering nation; his chastisements are administered by the rod of Yahweh's wrath. … But the initial announcement of the lamenting figure is an understatement of the fury to come. In rapid succession Yahweh drives him into darkness (3.2), turns a continually hostile hand against him (3.3), wears away his bodily strength and substance (3.4), besieges him (3.5), makes him dwell in the darkness of death (3.6), walls off his path with stones (3.7, 9), burdens him with chains (3.7), ignores his prayer (3.8), ambushes and tears him like a wild beast (3.10, 11), pierces him with arrows (3.12, 13), sates him with poisonous food and drink (3.15), breaks his teeth (3.16) and forces him to cower in ashes (3.16). It is no wonder that the man cries out in despair:
Thou hast rejected me from peace; I have forgotten good,
So I say, ‘Gone is my endurance, my hope from Yahweh.’
(3.17, 18)
When we remember the historic circumstances which underlie the extravagance of the third chapter, the imagery does not appear unreasonable. Jeremiah's rejection by his countrymen was, to all appearances, the most complete which any prophet ever experienced, at least that rejection is most sensitively preserved in his writings. As to the destruction of Judah, we have already noted that never had the city of Jerusalem and the kingdom at large known such a total and humiliating defeat. While the descriptions are excessive to our Western canons of taste, they are not disproportionate to the suffering as the people of Judah, the prophet Jeremiah, and the poet had experienced it. It is important to remember that to the Israelite what we speak of as ‘the fall of Jerusalem’ was not a single instantaneous stroke but an agonizing succession of blows, a tragedy compounded of many tragedies, a lingering and excruciating pain persisting in the form of shame and reproach long after the first distresses of the siege and destruction had subsided.
For the more explicit development of the destructive fury of Yahweh, we must turn to the remaining group of passages where the divine initiative is so to the fore that the instrumentality of the judgment, namely, the Neo-Babylonians, vanishes from sight and the grim demolition of Jerusalem is carried out by God himself. This is definitely more than a poetic device; indeed, mere aesthetics would recoil from such a perverse image. It can only be understood as a calculated attempt to attribute each and every one of Zion's tragic misfortunes to the will of Yahweh. Thus the secondary cause recedes and the will which originated the destruction is pictured as executing it. He (Yahweh) has beclouded the daughter of Zion, cast her glory from heaven to earth, disregarded his footstool (2.1), destroyed the dwellings of Jacob, thrown down the fortifications, hurled king and princes to the ground (2.2), cut off Israel's strength, turned back Israel's hand before the enemy, burned in Jacob as a flaming fire (2.3), bent his bow, set his hand and slain her sons (2.4), become as an enemy, destroyed her palace and fortifications, multiplied mourning and moaning (2.5), pulled down his booth and assembly place, caused festival and Sabbath to be forgotten, spurned king and priest (2.6), rejected altar and sanctuary, measured off the walls for destruction (2.7), and caused wall and rampart to mourn (2.8).
Later in the same poem Zion addresses Yahweh on behalf of her slaughtered inhabitants:
Thou hast slain in the day of thine anger; thou hast slaughtered
without mercy.
Thou hast called as a day of festival sojourners from round
about,
And in the day of Yahweh's anger there is neither refugee nor
survivor. (2.21e-22d)
There is also a relevant passage in the third poem where the nation, in a mixture of amazement and self-reprehension, directs a prayer of protest to the Lord:
Thou hast clothed thyself with anger and pursued, thou hast
slain and had no mercy;
Thou hast clothed thyself in a cloud, prayer is unable to pass
through.
Offscouring and refuse thou hast made us in the midst of the
peoples.
(3.43-54)
Elsewhere the mocking enmity of surrounding peoples is openly attributed to Yahweh's decree (1.17). He caused the enemy to rejoice and actually exalted the strength of the foe (2.17), and he has scattered the faithless prophets and priests with his fierce countenance (4.16).
Nowhere in the five poems do we discover any mitigation of the inexorable and pitiless performance of God in the city's overthrow. To be sure other very important and hope-producing aspects of the deity are presented, but the calamity proper is consistently pictured as planned and executed by Yahweh. Even when the ruthless enemy is the centre of attention it is taken for granted that he is the momentary instrument of God, for ‘He (Yahweh) has delivered into the hands of the enemy the walls of her palaces’ (2.7) and ‘The Lord gave me into the hands of those whom I cannot withstand’ (1.14). One suspects that the repeated insistence upon this point is the poet's way of impressing his conviction on the wavering and doubtful in Judah. How widely the proposition was shared among the Jews remaining in Palestine is difficult to estimate, but in Lamentations it is clearly axiomatic. No accident, no demon, no foreign god was responsible for the plight of Israel, but Yahweh alone. In fact this becomes the basis of the enemy's cruellest scorn: the god who, by your own definition, should have protected you, has destroyed you!
Listen when I groan! There is none to comfort me;
All my enemies rejoice over my fate that thou hast done it!
(1.21)
And still more emphatic is the announcement that
Yahweh has done what he purposed; he has accomplished his
threat
Which he decreed from days of old; he has pulled down
without mercy,
And caused the enemy to rejoice over you; he has exalted the
strength of your enemies.
(2.17)
Next to the loss of community with Yahweh and his purposes, the bitterest aspect of doom is the shame and reproach of defeat. The shame of Jerusalem consists primarily in her weakness so that she is unable to stand against the onslaughts of the foe (1.7-10; 2.16). She utterly failed to live up to her self-styled image as the city honoured (1.1e, 8c). As a consequence of the devastating blow which befell her, the nation is overcome with shame. Her disgrace is seen in two directions. In the first place she is swept by revulsion because of her sins (1.8). The daughter of Zion appears in the shocking image of a brazen harlot whose filthiness is publicly known. The force of the word ‘filthy’ … niddah; in Lam. nīdhah) can be seen in its technical usage for a mestruating woman (Ezek. 18.6; 22.10; 36.17; Lev. 12.2; 15.19, 20; 24-26; 18.19). By her callous persistence in sin, the daughter of Zion has so defiled herself that she is a thing of utter abhorrence to herself and others and in her revulsion she ‘turns away’ from the gaze of her former lovers (1.8, 9, 17).
In a similar manner the figure of leprosy is used to communicate the horrible aversion felt toward the faithless persons who held positions of religious leadership. The garments of priests and prophets are polluted and the community expels them from its midst with the warning cry of the leper: ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ (4.13-15). Jerusalem's sin, then, is like a foul and infectious disease that continually contaminates the daughter of Zion, exposing her to the open contempt and ostracism of the larger Near Eastern Community. But in a more limited sense, those especially guilty within the nation, the priests and prophets, are doubly infected and bear a particular scorn and ignominy.
The cruellest shame borne by Zion is the reproach of the enemy and neighbour who delight in mockery and revel in the punishment of Israel. The sharpest sting of Judah's sinfulness is the fact that it has been uncovered to the curious and hateful view of former friends. ‘All her admirers despise her, for they have seen her nakedness’ … ‘erwāthāh, 1.8, is another word of offence, actually a euphemism for the pudenda, cf. Gen. 9.22, 23; Ezek. 16.37; 23.10, 29; Isa. 20.4; 47.3). And it is evident from 4.21, 22 that the identical shameful exposure of Edom is anticipated, when her sins will be bared to the castigating derision of all the nations, for ‘you shall become drunk and strip yourself bare … he [Yahweh] will uncover your sins.’
It was observed in the previous chapter that there is a frequent contrast in the Book of Lamentations between Judah's fall and the enemy's rise. This reversal of fortune is inextricably bound up with a sense of bitter reproach:
Her enemies have gained the ascendancy, her foes have
triumphed.
(1.5 ab)
The enemies see her; they laugh at her annihilation.
(1.7gh)
So that her fall is awesome, with none to comfort her.
Behold, O Yahweh, my affliction, for the enemy magnifies
himself!
(1.9c-f)
Behold, O Yahweh, and consider, for I am despised! (1.11ef)
All my enemies rejoice over my evil that thou hast done it.
(1.21cd)
So odious has Judah become that in one passage she declares that Yahweh has made her like garbage or manure (…‘what has been rejected’; …‘what has been scraped off or cleared away’, cf. Ezek. 26.4 and the Talmudic ‘refuse’ and the Targumic… ‘dirt, dung’).
Other verses tell of the nations directing taunt songs against the desolated city:
He has made me a laughing-stock to all my people, their song
of derision all the day.
(3.14)
All our enemies open their mouth at us.
(3.46)
Thou hast heard their taunts, O Yahweh, all their plans
against me,
The lips of my assailants and their thoughts against me all the
day;
Behold their sitting and their rising! For I am their song of
derision!
(3.61-63)
The taunt or mocking song must have been a firmly established Semitic genre. One of the earliest fragments of Hebrew poetry preserves just such a derisive song against Heshbon (Num. 21.27-29). Two later taunt songs, though polished by literary finesse and reshaped by prophetic ideas, are instructive for our understanding of the type (Isa. 14, 47). But we are still more fortunate in having retained in the text of Lamentations what appear to be some of the phrases and refrains from the typical exilic taunt song. We cannot know whether they record the actual words that were hurled at Judah by certain of the enemy but it is enough if they retain the spirit. Accompanied as they are by gestures, malicious joy and hateful malignancy, the sharp whiplash of their scorn is not lost to the modern interpreter:
All who pass by clap their hands at you;
They hiss and shake their heads at the daughter of Jerusalem;
“Is this the city of which they said ‘perfect in beauty,
the joy of
all the earth’?”
All your enemies open their mouth at you;
They hiss and gnash their teeth, they say, ‘We have destroyed
her!’
‘Surely this is the day for which we waited. It is ours! We see
it!’
(2.15, 16)
It is interesting that in Isa. 14 and 23 we have the same ironic type of question as in 2.15, questions calculated to stress the great chasm between former pretension and present weakness and humiliation. The former accomplish by means of dramatic contrast very nearly the same effect as Shelley achieved in his sonnet ‘Ozymandias’.
Those who see you will stare at you,
and ponder over you:
‘Is this the man who made the earth tremble,
who shook kingdoms,
Who made the world like a desert
and overthrew its cities,
who did not let the prisoners go home?’
(Isa. 14.16, 17)
‘Is this your exultant city
whose origin is from days of old,
whose feet carried her
to settle afar?’
(Isa. 23.7)
The very fact that the greatest shame revealed in the poems is not the personal shame of sin but the public shame of reproach poses the crucial theological issue of a universal God confining himself to a particular people. The light that has fallen on Israel has been gravely refracted, for Israel has all too often understood her Lord as the protector of her national interests and, conversely, she has tended to define God's enemies in terms of her own enemies. From the standpoint of Christianity, and also in the opinion of many adherents of Judaism, a shattering of the theocracy was necessary in order to release the word of God from its too narrow and too selfish confines.
But even in its post-exilic form, Judaism did not become a world religion in actuality. This must be insisted upon in spite of widespread geographical dispersion and, for a period at least, a thriving proselyte movement.17 The loftiest sentiments of universalism did not set aside the plain fact that to share the religion of the One God Yahweh meant that one must become a Jew culturally. There can be little doubt that the rise of Christianity shut the door on whatever hope there might have been for a truly universal Judaism, or perhaps one ought to say that the universalistic tendencies in Judaism found their expression in the daughter religion of Christianity. At any rate, it appears that only the one ‘branch’ of Hebrew-Jewish faith, namely Christianity, succeeded in overcoming the connection between faith and nationality. In the very process of doing so it became heretical to the parent faith. It is true that Christianity retained an offence, but in place of the offence of nationality, it placed the offence of the cross (and the related offence of the incarnation).18 While both were scandals of particularity, the Christian offence was able to cut radically across all levels of society, culture and race—something which Judaism has never quite succeeded in doing. Christ was and is a scandal to the proud man as man; Judaism was and is a scandal to the gentile as gentile. Christianity therefore realizes all that is best in the historical faith of Hebraism and Judaism but, in addition, lifts this faith to a level where it is accessible to men everywhere, without demanding of them extraneous cultural and ritual submission. This is typified in the fact that Jesus utterly transformed a Jewish title of limited national meaning into a term of universal significance. If it is true that Hebrew faith gives us the necessary understanding of the term Christ, it is also true that Jesus invested the title with its decisive content—a content that could never have been predicted or inferred from its Old Testament antecedents.19 When the Church calls itself ‘the New Israel’ this simply means that Christians believe themselves to be participating in the promises of God which were not alone to Israel but through Israel to all the world.
In this criticism of Jewish pride, we do not mean that an insensitivity to the reproach of the enemy and the onlooker would have been the ideal attitude for the poet of Lamentations. Without this sting the lament would have been plainly insipid! Furthermore, this sensitivity shows a recognition that all the brutality and cruelty of the foe could not be equated solely with Yahweh's will. Although an instrument in Yahweh's hand, the enemy was not passive. Its wilfulness became apparent in delight over the havoc which it wrought. Nevertheless the fact persists that the great indulgence of Lamentations in the reproach of the enemy is a blemish of national pride not suited to the mission of Israel. Wiesmann argues that by virtue of Israel's uniqueness as the people of revelation, she was ‘marked’ as the special target of scorn by the surrounding nations. Because of her privileges and peculiarities, Israel was easily incited to pride and nothing would be more rancorous in the breast of surrounding peoples than such superiority.20 The destruction of Jerusalem should have taught the Jew not only humility toward Yahweh but a greater charity toward the non-Jew. While the distinction has been very hard for men to make, especially religious men, there is a difference between suffering for the sake of one's faith and suffering because of recalcitrance and stubborn pride. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that in the very superbness of Hebraism with its privileges and excellencies there was a perverseness of pride which God had to judge—a perverseness which is not absent from the Christian Church or indeed from any organization or nation that has some basis for self-satisfaction.
Precisely as in the prophets, Lamentations does not totally renounce the election doctrine of Israel. In spite of that, by means of the enormity of her sin and the exhortation to patience and a wider trust in the overarching and mysterious ways of God, a number of reservations are introduced into the optimistic formulations of the election faith. Not only is responsibility primary, but there is some indication that Yahweh's purposes are too grand and unpredictable to be limited to one people. From the following in Lamentations it is only a short step to the great statements of universalism in Second Isaiah:
Who is this who speaks and it is so, unless the Lord commands?
From the mouth of the Most High has there not gone forth
evil and good?
Why should a living man murmur, a man because of his sins?
(3.37-39)
In our consideration of the theology of doom in Lamentations, we turn finally to the motif of the Day of Yahweh21 … (yām yhwh) which forms another link between our book and the prophets. All discussion of the Day of Yahweh begins with Amos who clearly shows that the concept as popularly held in his day was a creation of quasi-religious patriotism (5.18). His comprehension was quite otherwise, for he envisioned stern judgment on gentile and Israelite alike. It is this view of a radical ‘root and branch’ destruction of evil, regardless of national boundaries, that is perpetuated and restated by a long succession of prophets (Isa. 2.12; Zeph. 1.10-12; Ezek. 7.10; Joel 1.14; Mal. 4.1).22
When we examine Lamentations we are impressed with the extent to which it bears out this prophetic conviction. In no sense is its conception of the Day of Yahweh related to the popular idea reflected in Amos. There are several references to the Day of Yahweh, although in only one does the usual name appear and this may be a gloss (2.22). But the features of that day accord with the prophetic teaching:
Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Behold and consider
If there is any pain like my pain which was dealt to me,
Which Yahweh inflicted in the day of his fierce
anger.
(1.12, … beyōm harōn ' appō)
O how the Lord has eclipsed in his anger the daughter of Zion!
Has cast from heaven to earth the glory of Israel!
And has taken no thought of his footstool in
the day of his anger!
(2.1, … beyōm 'appō)
Young and old lie prostrate in the streets;
My maidens and young men fall by the sword;
Thou hast slain in the day of thine anger;
thou hast slaughtered
without mercy.
(2.21, … beyōm 'appekhā)
Thou hast called as a day of festival sojourners from round
about,
And in the day of Yahweh's anger
there is neither refugee nor survivor;
Those whom I fondled and reared my enemy consumed.
(2.22, … beyōm 'aph-yhwh)
Of immediate interest in these passages is the identification of the Day of Yahweh with the fall of Jerusalem in confirmation of the prophets’ firm faith that it was to be a day of doom for Israel. As Černý observes, the designation of the Day of Yahweh as past is absolutely unique to the Book of Lamentations.23 The significance of this fact must not be overlooked. First, it shows the decisive and epochal nature of the fall of the city. If was of such world-shaking import for Israel that it could be described as the Day of Yahweh. This confirms the many other indications of the sui generis nature of the catastrophe. Secondly, it should be abundantly clear that Day of Yahweh in our period, at least for the poet of Lamentations, could scarcely have been regarded as the culmination of history, i.e. the point at which history ends in one great act of God. If it had been so regarded, it would have been impossible to equate the fall of the city, however calamitous, with that Day, for it was obvious that history was still in process. Finally, it clarifies for the exegete the basic connotation of the Day of Yahweh. We shall see momentarily that Lamentations not only regards the Day of Yahweh as past but also conceives of it as future (1.21). Were the Day a given period of time consisting of twenty-four hours, or even a single event, such a bifurcation would be ridiculous. But the Day of Yahweh is not any stated period of time.24 Temporality is involved only in the sense that Yahweh will act openly in history. Thus it is Yahweh's ‘Day’ because it is the time when God acts. ‘Day’ is simply that portion of history in which God moves decisively to judge men and to fulfill his purposes. Lamentations is thereby able to represent two or more times as the Day of Yahweh, corresponding to the twofold character of his judgment: once upon Israel in the past and again upon the enemy nations in the future. Both of these are Yahweh's Day without any sense of inconsistency. Lamentations is unique in this double reference for the Day of Yahweh. It can only be explained in the light of the enormity of the impression made by the fall of the city.
If the Day of Yahweh is essentially the period of time in which Yahweh acts (cf. Mal. 3.17), what is the character of his action? Our book is uniform in its witness that the action of God is the expression of his wrath (cf. Isa. 13.6, 9; Zeph. 1.18; 2.2 f; 3.9 f; Ezek. 7.19). In fact the accepted expression in Lamentations is ‘the Day of his anger’. We have already seen how the intense wrath of Yahweh is pictured as afflicting, annihilating, and profaning the city of Jerusalem, its citizens and holy places.
Among the imagery in which the Day of Yahweh is decked out, the most prominent is the battle-motif. Yahweh appears as a slaying warrior (2.4, 5, 21; 3.43), drenched in the ‘vintage’ blood of his victims (1.15), burning (1.13; 2.3-4; 4.11) and demolishing (2.2, 5-6) the city. Some of this imagery has a demonic coloration, attributing to Yahweh functions once cared for by the lesser divinities who intervened capriciously in the affairs of men (cf. Gen. 32.22 ff). Fredriksson singles out for consideration the blazing face of Yahweh which destroys and scatters, a tradition going back to the numinous Sinai experience when it was said that no man could look upon Yahweh's face and live (Ex. 34.29 ff).25 It is the hostile face of Yahweh that dissipates the faithless leaders (4.16). Yahweh as an archer whose arrows cause sickness and misfortune takes over that function from demonology (3.2 f cf. Job 6.4; 16.12 f; Deut. 32.22; Ps. 38.3; 64.8).26 We have noted the starkness of the imagery of God's punishment and also the extent to which the secondary cause (the enemy) is overlooked and the primary cause (Yahweh) is emphasized. S. R. Driver remarks that this habit is typical of the Day of Yahweh theme: ‘The conception places out of sight the human agents, by whom actually the judgment, as a rule, is effected, and regards the decisive movements of history as the exclusive manifestation of Jehovah's purpose and power.’27
The darkness-motif of Amos (cf. Isa. 13.9 f; Joel 2.2, 10 f; Ezek. 30.3) is not so explicit in Lamentations. The image of Zion as a star eclipsed by the wrath of Yahweh may be an instance (2.1). But unrecognized by most commentators is the sacrifice-motif in the reference ‘as to a day of appointed festival’ (2.22). This ironic word makes explicit and understandable one feature of the Day of Yahweh that appears for the first time in Zephaniah:
Be silent before the Lord God!
For the day of the Lord is at hand;
the Lord has prepared a sacrifice
and consecrated his guests.
And on the day of the Lord's sacrifice—
‘I will punish the official and the king's
sons
and all who array themselves in foreign attire.’
(1.7 f)
It is also found prior to Lamentations in Jer. 46.10:28
That day is the day of the Lord God of hosts,
a day of vengeance,
to avenge himself on his foes.
The sword shall devour and be sated,
and drink its fill of their blood.
For the Lord God of hosts holds a sacrifice
in the north country by the river Euphrates.
In exilic times and thereafter the sacrifice was developed into the great eschatological feast (cf. Isa. 34.5-7; Ezek. 39.4, 17-20; Pseudo-Isaiah 25.6-8; I Enoch 62.14; II Esdras 6.52; II Baruch 29.4; Luke 14.15-24; Matt. 7.11; 22.2-14).29 The figure originated perhaps in the popular patriotic idea that the Day of Yahweh was to be a day of joyful deliverance, a truly festal occasion.30 If the anticipated day was an outgrowth of the cult then the idea of the festival of Yahweh would be all the more understandable.31 The difficulty is, of course, that each of the facets of the Day of Yahweh permits of the same kind of provincial interpretation. The battle imagery suggests a military origin.32 The nature imagery suggests a cosmic setting supplied by myth or eschatology.33 The truth may be that military, cosmic, and cultic imagery was employed to give colour to a conception that was derived from none of these supposed ‘sources’.
The ironic twist that the prophets gave to the sacrifice-motif was strictly for the purpose of lending force to their persuasion that judgment would begin with God's people. ‘Yes,’ agrees the grieving poet, ‘we came as those who are summoned to a festival. We crowded Jerusalem in anticipation of victory over the Babylonians but on Yahweh's Day none of us escaped. The sword was turned against us and instead of feasting we were feasted upon!’ The mention of cannibalism in the context carries overtones of sadism and brutality that underline the demonic spectacle.34 It is also possible that in the third poem the statements ‘he has driven me into darkness and not light’ (3.2 cf. Amos 5.18c, 20) and ‘like a bear he ambushed me, like a lion in hiding’ (3.10 cf. Amos 5.19ab) are employed with the thought that the appalling suffering here inflicted is the Day of Yahweh now realized as Amos predicted it.
Ordinarily commentators discuss the last two strophes of the second poem simply as an instance of unbridled vengefulness. Vengeance is not to be excluded, but, in addition, we find here a crucial reference to the Day of Yahweh as a day of visitation on the nations:
Listen when I groan! There is none to comfort me;
All my enemies rejoice over my fate that thou hast done it;
Bring to pass the day thou didst proclaim
when they shall be as I!
Bring all their evil before thee! and do with them
As thou hast done with me, because of all my sins.
For great are my groanings and my heart is faint.
(1.21, 22)
Pedersen remarks that in spite of the protest of Amos, many of the later prophets fostered the view that God would one day smite the foes of Israel and reign over his people as King (cf. Zeph. 3.18, 15; Obad. 15, 21; Isa. 27; 33-35; 52; Ezek. 38.9; Zech. 14; Joel 2.28-3.20).35 In this spirit the poet of Lamentations believed not only that there is a Day of Yahweh for Israel but also a Day of Yahweh for the foe ‘when they shall be as I’, i.e. when their evils are dealt with. And this is no afterthought in the divine plan but a Day long ‘announced’ by Yahweh (1.21, … qārā). Here is something more than mere vengeance; it is the protest of outraged injustice.36 It is not denied, or in any way excluded, that the fall of the city was a bona fide judgment of Yahweh, but it is felt that the chastisement of Judah did not fully rectify the injustices of history. There is an increment of judgment yet to come. Punishment of the nations as the logical outgrowth of God's universal rule is similarly accented in the introduction to the foreign oracles of the book of Jeremiah: ‘For behold, I begin to do evil at the city which is called by my name, and shall you [the nations] escape unpunished?’ (25.29).
That all is not complete with Yahweh's administration of justice is evident in the mockery and glee of the foe. The punishment of Israel did not cure all evil; indeed, it gave opportunity for the lust and vicious traits of the enemy to be indulged (1.21; 2.7, 15, 16; 3.59-63; 4.18, 21; 5.5, 11, 12). Thus we have the germ of the universal judgment when at the Great Assize God will review the evil of all men and reward them as he has prematurely rewarded Israel. Such an outlook is not contradictory to Amos, for the reverse side of the herdsman's teaching about God's universal rule (9.7) was the conviction that the Universal Ruler would hold these nations responsible for their wrongs (1.3-2.3). Given the changed situation of the exile, it was inevitable that this other side of the doctrine would be developed.
The destructive or ‘demonic’ character of Yahweh was an apprehension of the deity which Hebraism never surrendered. It is crucial, nevertheless, to recognize the way in which pure caprice and arbitrariness were subordinated by the prophets to the righteous purposes of the Most High. In the next chapter we shall have more to say about this ‘ethicizing’ of the demonic. What is unique in Lamentations is the author's fearlessness in boldly asserting the explosive and destructive side of the divine nature. What is of importance is not merely the tremendous power and energy of Yahweh which can destroy the proudest works of man. That which is of enduring significance is the determination and ability of Yahweh to act in history in fulfilment of his announced word. The doom that he has brought upon Judah is not the result of fitful moodiness but is in accordance with the long proclaimed and inevitable requital of disobedience and rebellion. The Book of Lamentations was the first to take up the prophets' theme in the wake of the tragedy they announced and to vindicate their claims.
The consequence of this acceptance of the prophetic interpretation of national tragedy was immense. It deserves to be regarded as the greatest single spiritual achievement of the exile. The continuation of Hebrew religion depended upon it, for the survival of Israel's faith was predicated on the existence of at least a nucleus of believers who would be disposed to heed the words of men like Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah. Lamentations, originating on the home soil of Palestine, addressed to the people and intended for popular consumption, lays bare the heart of the process by which despair was turned to faith and disillusion to hope. In the attributing of the destruction and disorder of the nation to the divine will, strange as it may seem, we may discern the roots of new life. Calamity in itself might profit nothing. Humanly speaking, everything depended on a substantial number of Israelites recognizing the chastening hand of God at work in the unhappy events. Only in this way could history become revelatory with the purposes of God. Following 586 b.c. historical religion wavered perilously between collapse and reaffirmation. What was demanded in a great act of faith was the acceptance of the doom as Yahweh's doing, in large measure attributable to Israel's sins, but even in its incomprehensibility and mystery, still wholly within the designs of God.
.....
Not many years ago the very mention of a message of hope would have been enough to demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that such a message did not originate with the prophets. There was an ironclad ‘law’ of prophecy which forbade the spokesman of Yahweh ever to hold forth promises or to offer consolation. At least this was the case with the pre-exilic prophets, and, to the degree that certain exilic and post-exilic prophets departed from the word of absolute doom, to that degree they were thought of as forsaking the rigorous prophetic heights and compromising their mission by concessions to the feelings of the people at large.
But all this is changed. It is now widely recognized that the prophet was no mere automaton who had only one thing to say and only one way of saying it, like a record endlessly repeated. A study of the prophets only increases our amazement at their individuality and adaptability in the face of changing circumstances. To cut out all elements of hope from the prophecies of Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah calls for such wholesale surgery on the text and does such violence to the psychology of the prophets themselves, that the pursuit, if not wholly abandoned, is now tempered with much greater caution and reserve.
This is not to say that every passage of hope in the pre-exilic prophets is genuine.37 Each one must be tested on its own merits and, to a great extent, the negative judgments of previous critics are to be maintained. What must be decried is their doctrinaire presumption which allowed, or even forced, them to reject passages on principle. Even so historically exacting a critic as T. J. Meek has pointed to the likelihood of a prophetic message of hope inasmuch as the combination of threat and promise can be detected in Egyptian writings as early as the Twelfth Dynasty (2000-1800 b.c.).38
We have, however, not only the evidence of the writings themselves and the probabilities suggested by Egyptian parallels, but we have the historical survival of prophetic religion. Had the prophets preached destruction only, and held forth no glimmer of hope beyond tragedy, it is difficult to understand how Yahwism could have survived. Again and again students of the Old Testament have observed that Israel affords an amazing exception to the ancient Near Eastern pattern; Hebrew faith did not decline with national adversity but actually was confirmed and deepened. This was in large measure due to the prophetic conviction about chastisement, repentance, conversion, and hope. Martin Noth has given apt expression to the present tendency in prophetic interpretation:
In the midst of the annihilating events of the past one and a half centuries the prophets of the 8th and 7th centuries had not only spoken their warning of the imminent judgment of God, which was already in operation, but at the same time they had occasionally spoken of God's further plans for Israel.39
With this in mind, then, it will not seem strange or impossible that Lamentations, in its declaration of hope, is taking up a prophetic strain of thought and giving it that development and emphasis which could only have been possible after the predicted calamity had fallen. Specifically, the theology of hope in the Book of Lamentations is not a finely wrought description of future glory in the apocalyptic style. It is, rather, the intimation of a bright future which is determined by the nature of Israel's God. This rules out all speculative indulgence about the precise character of the future. On the contrary, this ‘theology of hope’ concentrates upon the revealed character of the God who determines the future and upon that response which is required of Israel if she is to participate in God's future.
We may begin our tracing of this hope by noting the frequency with which prayer appears in our book. The several imperatives directed to God are of theological importance inasmuch as they show that Yahweh's control of events is still very much alive in Israel's faith. It was true that he appeared utterly intransigent, but it was not thought of as vain to make appeal, for he might have mercy: ‘Perhaps there is hope’ (3.29b). In addition, Lamentations offers us some knowledge of the exilic ideals of prayer.
The nation begs Yahweh to behold its affliction (1.9ef), its reproach (1.11ef; 5.1), its rebellious exhaustion (1.20), the slaughter of children, youth and religious leaders (2.20). It pleads with the deity to give ear to the entreaty for help (3.56), to judge the cause of the innocent (3.59), and to restore the nation (5.22). The assumption is that Yahweh can do something about these conditions if he so wills. The most natural conclusion, granted the thought world of the ancient Near East, was the one Israel most stoutly resisted. Jerusalem did not fall because of Yahweh's impotence, but because of his strength. Since destruction is never final, affliction may be healed, reproach requited, rebellion forgiven, innocence justified, and the nation revived.
Lamentations makes it plain that appeals to all other quarters are fruitless. The passers-by do not respond with so much as a shred of mercy (1.12) but only add insult to injury by their revilings (2.15). The nations are oblivious to her pain (1.18). They boast in her downfall and make sport of her tragic lot (2.16). Healing from any human source is impossible (2.13). These categorical negations of earthly aid or comfort serve to intensify the urgent summons which the poet addresses to his people to call upon Yahweh (2.18, 19).
One word must be said about the intercessory prayer. ‘Lift up your hands to him for your children's lives!’ (2.19ef) adjures the poet. Thereupon the daughter of Zion, as the mother of all Israelites, pleads fervently for her children: the young, the priests and prophets, the aged, the maidens and warriors (2.20-22). One cannot help but think of the poignant picture of the ancestral mother Rachel weeping over her captive young (Jer. 31.15), and the later Jewish figure of the tribal ancestress in deep mourning for her offspring (Baruch 4.8-12; Syr. Bar. 10.16; 4th Esdras 10.7). The same sort of maternal pathos is encountered in the Babylonian mother goddess Ishtar who, after the great deluge, sang the funeral song over annihilated mankind. The fact that she is the goddess and not the nation personified is of course the important difference, but the same passionate intercessory concern is present, although there is no one to whom Ishtar may appeal for she herself has initiated the flood:
She bewails as one who has given birth:
‘The generation passed away has become loam
because I in the assembly of the gods commanded evil.
Yea, I commanded evil in the assembly of the gods,
For the destruction of my people I commanded battle.
I alone gave birth to my people!
And now they fill the sea like spawning fish.’(40)
A second instance of intercessory prayer is 3.49-51 where the poet in his grief vows to weep unceasingly until Yahweh looks down from heaven and beholds. There is the feeling that if he, as the bewailing poet, can be importunate enough he may gain the hearing of Yahweh who will then have mercy upon the whole city.
In his magnum opus on prayer, Heiler declares that lamentation is one of the prime ingredients of ‘Prophetic’ or ‘Biblical’ prayer and that it is quite in keeping with what he considers that type of prayer's essential content and motive: the unrestricted expression of compelling emotion, an involuntary and spontaneous discharge which the Old Testament figure ‘outpouring of the heart’ (cf. 2.19c) happily depicts.41 In the Biblical complaint, anxious questions sometimes pass over into bitter reproach (Jer. 4.10; 15.9; 20.7; Hab. 1.2). Heiler cites Lam. 2.20 ff as an example of shockingly blasphemous lament.42 ‘Behold, O Yahweh, to whom thou hast done this!’ is the audacious protest. Some construe this as a reference to the election faith of Israel. Overtones of that idea may be present, but a close study of the context would indicate that it applies to the mother and the priest and prophet. In other words, ‘Lord, consider what you have done, turning women into cannibals and slaughtering your sacred ones in the holy place!’
We have, then, in Lamentations with its insistent appeals for Yahweh to intervene, that peculiar mark of Biblical prayer which naively seems to believe that God does not see atrocity or misfortune unless his special attention is called to it. Moreover there is the belief that importunity will bring results. Was Jesus scoring this attitude when he said ‘they shall not be heard for their much speaking’ (Matt. 6.7)? Or was he commending it when he urged that by her very importunity the widow was heard (Luke 18.1-8)? One has the feeling that by the boldest possible statement of the suffering, God will be moved to pity (2.20-22; 3.42-43) and thus the grim aspects of the book, the repetitions of sorrows and horrors are not solely for the catharsis of grief but are also intended to gain God's sympathy and aid. In truth, the chief characteristic of the prayers in Lamentations is that they are motives calculated to arouse God to action. Indeed this motivation of prayer as a means of affecting God survived and took on additional forms in later centuries.
Norman Johnson, in his study of prayer in inter-testamental Judaism, points out that the petitions to God were oftentimes accompanied by fasting, sexual abstinence, donning of sackcloth and ashes, beating of the breast and tearing of garments. These habits, ancient in origin, tended to become conventionalized, but they retained, nevertheless, the coloration of motives.43
While many of these practices became a means of cultivating piety in the man himself, there can be little doubt that originally they were projected toward God's mercy and that the original function remained alongside the other.
Lamentations, with all its associated postures and gestures, offers a superb example of Biblical prayer in the starkest and most irreducible form. We see prayer in its naked objective power, passionately directed toward specific purposes. And if it is this aspect of prayer which is most baffling to the modern religious man, who would rather reduce prayer to a psychological act of piety, then it is precisely this aspect which our historical study needs to bring to the attention of Biblical theology as part of the data to which it must do justice even when that data runs counter to the mood of the day.
But what was there in the nature of God which prompted such violent prayer? Again we are thrust back upon the moral categories of sin and righteousness. That Yahweh had been perfectly justified in his harsh treatment of Zion is witnessed by the frequent confessions of sin. In the first and third poems, however, the author expressly enunciates the righteousness of God as a kind of fixed article of faith to which the doubting may cling. The daughter of Zion is made to say, ‘Yahweh is righteous for I have rebelled against his word’ (1.18ab). This is equivalent to saying, ‘I have no excuse to offer.’ In the middle poem, in what are the climactic verses of the whole composition, there is a magnificent utterance of the Lord's disavowal of all injustice:
To crush under foot all the prisoners of the earth,
To turn aside a man's right in the very presence of the Most
High,
To mislead a man in his case, the Lord does not approve.
(3.34-36)
It is because of this assurance that the sorely tried nation is able to entrust its case to Yahweh, for he has contended for Israel's cause in days of old (3.58). He will judge the right of his people in the present crisis (3.59; 4.22). The foundations have been shaken but the divine government of the world is still administered from the steadfast throne of Yahweh. The easy optimism of the old enthronement hymns has vanished but their central affirmation still serves to express the faith of Israel: ‘Thou, O Yahweh, dost endure forever, thy throne to generation on generation!’ (5.19).
By means of this conviction about the enduring righteousness of Yahweh, his destructive demonic qualities were brought under control. Still, in sketching such a process, we must beware of thinking that for the Israelite this meant subjecting the deity to human definitions of the good.44 As a matter of fact Yahweh remained self-determined but that self-determination revealed certain fixed points of fidelity and dependability. Because of his mystery and awe, his unassailability as God, there was no criticism of deity such as one finds so openly engaged in by the Greeks, who were able to dethrone the Olympian pantheon, analysing and dismissing them as one might treat any object of sensory perception. If we are speaking from the standpoint of Biblical revelation, the ‘moralization of God’ was not something which the Hebrews achieved, but something which God himself revealed. No matter what we think of this viewpoint ourselves, a faithful analysis of the mind of exilic Israel requires at this point that we forsake our philosophic and anthropocentric categories. To say this is not to undercut the importance of the historical context in which the righteousness of God was grasped; it is actually to affirm it, for, in Israel's faith, it is only through the medium of the collective historical experience of the covenant people that Yahweh makes himself known.
Rudolph Volz has observed that with the great writing prophets ‘the demonic was separated from the holy’.45 The sheer destructive power of Yahweh was in the service, not of rationally-stated moral norms, but of a righteousness which was holy. It was the great virtue of the category of the Holy that it could take on moral dimensions and still retain the primitive sense of mystery and ‘shuddering’.46 Two outstanding instances of this deepening of the doctrine of God by the interpenetration and fusion of the moral and the ‘demonic’ so that they become the Holy are found in Hos. 11.9 and Isa. 5.16:
I will not execute my fierce anger,
I will not again destroy Ephraim;
for I am God and not man,
the Holy One in your midst,
and I will not come to destroy.
But the Lord of hosts is exalted in justice,
and the Holy One shows himself holy in righteousness.
It is apparent that the Book of Lamentations perpetuates this insight, asserting it with all possible vehemence: Yahweh does not crush the captive, brush aside the clamour for justice, nor subvert a man in the rightness of his cause. We can readily understand how relevant this message was for the dark days of exilic despair. Israel is mistaken if she supposes that Yahweh has acted out of caprice or whimsey. Whatever the enormity and irrationality of the judgment from the human point of view, he has not disregarded the merits of the case. God is chastening Israel because he has her welfare at heart. He is guided by a righteous motive and a righteous goal.
Righteousness thus delineated borders on the covenant love of God.47 Yahweh's hesedh appears triumphant over the miasmal bitterness and despair of the suffering prophet. It is the sufferer's remembrance of that covenant love which renews hope within him:
O remember my affliction and homelessness, the wormwood
and the gall!
Thou wilt surely remember and bow down to me;
This I take to heart, therefore I have hope.
The covenant loyalties … of Yahweh that do not
fail, his mercies … that are not consumed,
Are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness!
‘Yahweh is my inheritance!’ says my soul, ‘therefore
I hope
in him!’
(3.19-24)
We are at once reminded of Zeph. 3.5:
The Lord within her [Jerusalem] is righteous,
he does no wrong;
every morning he shows forth his justice,
each dawn he does not fail;
but the unjust knows no shame.
Yahweh will not always afflict and reject, but will have mercy according to the abundance of his covenant loyalty. He does not arbitrarily or voluntarily mete out evil.
For the Lord will not reject forever;
If he grieves, he will have mercy according to the abundance
of his covenant loyalty;
For he does not afflict from his heart, nor grieve the sons of
men.
(3.31-33)
In contrast to his hesedh, Yahweh's affliction and rejection of men is temporary, the necessity in a given circumstance, but never the final word. He brings his anger to an end, but his covenant loyalties are never consumed and his mercies are never exhausted. The expression ‘he does not afflict from the heart’ is the high watermark in Lamentations' understanding of God. As long as such a view of God was held in Israel there was no danger of the extinction of Yahwism. The angry side of his nature, turned so unflinchingly against Jerusalem, is not the determinative factor in the divine purposes. Begrudgingly, regretfully, if there is no other way toward his higher purposes, he may unleash the forces of evil, but ‘his heart’ is not in it! His deepest and truest intentions are otherwise; they are bent toward hesedh. It is easy to see how a view of educational value in suffering could develop from such a faith.
Eichrodt singles out Lam. 3.22 ff as one instance of the strong relationship of the God of love to the sufferer.48 The most outrageous blows of fortune and the severest chastisement cannot alienate the man who feels this attachment to his God. It is hardly necessary to remind ourselves that this attachment is not a matter of like attracting like, which is the moving spirit in all absorption mysticism and also in the magical religions of the Near East, among whom Israel's faith was an anomaly. The attachment which finds expression in the religion of Israel, beginning as early as Moses, is one which has been established by the prior initiative of God. Israel thus lays no claim upon God, but is claimed by him. This is the primal faith to which the prophets plead for a return. This is the faith of Lamentations. In the light of this fatherly connection, the Jews are to perceive God's grace within his judgment or, to state the matter more precisely, to recognize that his judgment was one aspect of his hesedh, even though it was not always possible to trace the direct connection between the two.
So intense had been the suffering that it was almost too much to expect that Yahweh would forgive. The poet does not come by his conviction of the divine love easily! Israel's sin had been very great (3.42) and Yahweh's anger pitiless (3.43). Köberle surely misunderstands the passage when he states that the line, ‘We have sinned and rebelled; thou hast not forgiven’ is proof that the people felt that God was obliged to forgive and therefore they are affronted.49 But the very opposite is the case. If he does forgive, it will be a marvel of the goodness of God, for ‘Why should a living man murmur, a man because of his sins?’ (3.39). God, therefore, owes nothing to Israel, but from the ground of the divine mercy it could be hoped and prayed that he might turn his anger and be gracious. Still nothing is guaranteed or automatic, for it is not God's business to forgive, and Lamentations closes with the troubled question, ‘Or hast thou utterly rejected us? Art thou exceedingly angry with us?’ (5.22). Judging by the book as a whole, the poet was thoroughly disabused of Israel's claims upon God. He makes almost nothing of the doctrine of election (2.20ab?). Central to his thought, however, was Yahweh's faithfulness to his own nature and purposes which might once again result in favour to the chastised nation. We are left confronting the unfathomable divine love and mercy which can never be calculated but comes only as a gift. This is the sole comfort which the poet has to offer his people but it casts a ray of hope over the otherwise dismal scene.
The great power and incomprehensibility of God were two aspects of the divine nature that post-exilic Judaism seized upon. They were amplified and embellished in the great flood of literature from the sixth century on. Here, after all, was the only security and refuge for a people whose superficial optimism had been crushed by the adversities of historical life. We meet the omnipotent and veiled God in Ezekiel, Deutero-Isaiah, the P Code, and then again, with renewed emphasis, in Chronicles, Job, Daniel, and extra-canonical literature like Fourth Esdras. Rankin discusses with penetration the importance of the transcendent World-Creator to the post-exilic age and, in particular, notes its significance for the book last-named:50
All that remains is faith in the Creator's will as being wise and good. This line of thought is taken up in Judaism at a much later date in the Fourth Book of Ezra when, after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the problem of suffering and of providence lay heavy on the heart of the stricken nation.
He fails to realize, however, that this very concern over providence was aroused by a similar historical situation six centuries earlier and that, in Lamentations, many of the interests and moods of the Wisdom literature are foreshadowed.
Of course it should not be overlooked that the conditions for the development of these ideas were long latent in the older prophets’ stress on God's control of history. For example, Amos’ chain of questions is a case in point (3.3-6). They may be understood as more than an effective rhetorical scheme for stating the law of cause and effect. His sense of the overpowering urgency of the divine will is clearly intended and there is more than an inkling of the later magnifying of Yahweh's majesty. But it remained for the exilic and post-exilic eras to exalt the omnipotence and inscrutability and to confess in dust and ashes that his ways were past finding out.
It is very noticeable in Lamentations that the ultimate appeal of the book is not alone to God's love and mercy but also to his unfathomed depths. Precisely as in Job, the very mystery of God is alluded to as at least a partial solution of the thorny problem of suffering:
Who is this who speaks and it is so, unless the Lord commands?
From the mouth of the Most High has there not gone forth evil
and good?
Why should a living man murmur, a man because of his sins?
(3.37-39)
The transcendence of God is seen in the appellation for the deity: Most High. … It is circular reasoning to date the third poem late because Elyon is a supposedly late title.51 Actually a perusal of the other passages where it appears52 indicates several which are certainly exilic and some undoubtedly pre-exilic.53 Furthermore, Elyon is a term used in Phoenician and Canaanite literature which in most cases antedates the exile by centuries.54 Even if the usage of Elyon in Lamentations is the first in Hebrew literature, it could not be imagined in a more likely circumstance and context. It is specious to shift the poem to a post-exilic date when all its characteristics authenticate the historical situation of sixth-century Palestine, simply because it uses a word that is not common until a later time.
God as the author of evil as well as good was a familiar theme in pre-exilic Israel (e.g. Ex. 4.21; 9.12; I Kings 22.23; Amos 3.6; Zeph. 3.6), but it did not become the subject of critical reflection until Israel had tasted the bitter dregs of that evil. Then the questionings were inevitable. Could this suffering, all of it and in its every grim aspect, be the will of Yahweh? Thus arose the first awareness of complexity within God himself—levels of volition, if you will, which we often designate as permissive and primary will. Some distinction of the sort is presupposed when the same poet could say that ‘he does not afflict from the heart’ and also that ‘from the Most High come forth good and evil.’
With this insight Israel confessed that slowly she was learning the bitterest lesson of the religious life—that there is no simple one to one correspondence between man's hope and God's will. In this sense, Lamentations is the true teacher of later Judaism, even more so than the other more prominent exilic books, for its author was the first to acknowledge that his people's sufferings were dealt them by a God whose purposes are not always apparent and, therefore, must forever elude the definitions of even an elected people. Lamentations thus goes beyond Deuteronomy and is not far from the chastened spirit of the Talmud: ‘It is not in our power’, said R. Jannai, ‘to explain either the prosperity of the wicked or the afflictions of the righteous.’55
It may be assumed that the frequent confession of sin in Lamentations presupposes repentance. The recovery of a right relationship with Yahweh involves not only the admission of … but repentance, i.e., ‘turning’. … Israel has turned from Yahweh to sin and her contrition must now express itself in just as definite an act of the will—a turning back to Yahweh. Repentance implies an abrupt break with the offensive conduct or state of mind (cf. Ezek. 14.6; 21.23; Amos 5.14 f; Hosea 14.2; Josh. 24.23; Dan. 4.24).
Following the assurance of God's goodness and love, the nation summons itself, as it were, to return to Yahweh:
Let us search and examine our ways, and return to Yahweh!
Let us lift up our hearts not our hands, to God in the
heavens!
We have sinned and rebelled; thou hast not forgiven.
(3.40-42)
Such a ‘return’ to the Lord is more than a flight to consolation or a petulant play on the divine sympathy. It is accompanied by a searching and re-examination of the national ways (cf. Ps. 32.3, 5). Critical introspection gives way to the lifting of the heart to God and the confession of sin. There is the suggestion here that the poet is aware of the need for a new heart which was a prophetic insight so superbly stated by Jeremiah (31.31-34). At any rate there is the realization that now the people have done all within their power. They wait penitently and contritely for the divine forgiveness.
Erich Dietrich has called attention to the fact that in the Old Testament, while repentance is often pictured as the work of men, it is also frequently described as the work of God. No contradiction was felt for ‘we must herewith emphasize that the Old Testament in general has no systematic doctrine concerning efficient causation’.56 He singles out the presence of both human and divine operations in certain of the prophets.57
It is noteworthy that just this coexistence of the human and divine aspects of repentance is seen in Lamentations. The closing exclamation of the book vehemently calls upon the Lord, ‘Turn us to thyself, O Yahweh, and we shall be turned!’ (5.21). This plea must be interpreted against the backdrop of the utter supineness and exhaustion of God's people so painfully pictured throughout the poem, a lingering abjectness born of wretched servitude and the despairing conditions of life, plus the great burden of sin and guilt that Israel bears. In herself she knows no power to return to Yahweh. But, while the regal vigour of Israel is destroyed (5.16), Yahweh dwells resplendent upon his throne of world government (5.19). The consequence that our poet draws is that if the Jews are to turn to Yahweh then he must initiate the process of returning.
In Lamentations 5.21, as in the Jeremiah parallel of 31.18, it is difficult to know whether it should be interpreted politically or spiritually.58 Certainly it is not a matter of ‘pure spirit’. The parallel hemistich, ‘renew our days as of old!’ sounds suspiciously like a return of the kingship, the temple, and the religious order (cf. 1.7). However there is something additional. In the first place, as Dietrich stresses, this prayer is uttered in Palestine and cannot be explained simply as a return of the exiles.59 Furthermore if a restoration of political life were primary in the poet's mind, one might have expected the more suitable expression ‘restore our fortunes’, … cf. Deut. 30.3; Jer. 30.3, 18; Ezek. 39.25) instead of ‘turn us to thyself.’ … Here is a clear parallel to 3.41, ‘Let us lift up our hearts not our hands to God.’ But it is this turning to God which Israel, because of the magnitude of her sin and suffering, is unable to accomplish. She has exhausted herself in frenzied prayer and to no effect. Although the modes of his working are not clear, if God were to turn Israel's heart to himself then a true restoration of her fortunes would occur. So there is a definite distinction to be drawn between ‘turning to Yahweh’ and ‘return of fortune’. The one is the precondition of the other, i.e. conversion is required.
This notion becomes increasingly normative for post-exilic Jewish ideas of repentance. The heinousness of sin and the weakness of man were so keenly experienced that the great gulf between God and man had to be bridged by the divine initiative (cf. Zech. 5.5-11; Dan. 12.10). In later Judaism, the cry of Lam. 5.21 was incorporated in the Eighteen Benedictions.60 In Lamentations, therefore, we find repentance not only as the basis of favour and restoration but also repentance as an act made possible by God, namely conversion.
The submissive spirit which the Book of Lamentations inculcates is another of the motifs that can best be understood in the wider Near Eastern context. To some extent the stress upon submission is related culturally to the loss of dynamic, the weariness which overcame the Semitic world from the Assyrian era onwards.61 Albright remarks on several non-Israelite analogies to the submissiveness of the Suffering Servant in Deutero-Isaiah.62 Valuable as this orientation may be, attention must also be directed to the Hebrew prototypes for the meekness of the Servant. The Prophets Zephaniah (2.3, 10; 3.11 f) and Habakkuk (3.16) contain early examples of the new accent on humility and passivity. But in Lamentations we come upon the most outspoken appeals for submission to be found anywhere in the Old Testament:
Yahweh is good to him who waits for him, to the person who
seeks him;
It is good that one should silently wait for the salvation of
Yahweh;
It is good for a man to bear a yoke in his youth.
He sits alone and is silent since it has been laid upon him;
He puts his mouth in the dust, perhaps there is hope;
He gives his cheek to the smiter, he is sated with contempt.
(3.25-30)
Especially striking is the admonition, ‘Let him give his cheek to the smiter’, for it is in sharp contrast to the reproach and vengeance which elsewhere receive such violent expression. In this passage there is an extinction or suppression of all pride and personal feeling, the stilling of every angry protest. Why this indifference, this almost Stoic forbearance and self-effacement? Because the suffering originates with the Lord and is ultimately an expression of his goodness, the sufferer must wait upon his action (3.25-27). In fact it is good that the yoke of suffering be borne patiently, for even in adversity Yahweh displays his goodness. In the utter dejection of the sufferer, when he lay spent and crushed in the dust, at precisely that moment the possibility of hope was still alive. The grief that Yahweh has dealt out is not wilful nor perpetual but a seasonal chastening and tempering that is bound to give way to his compassion and love (3.31-33).
At first glance this strikes us as quite different from the ordinary prophetic attitude. For example, Jeremiah railed bitterly at his enemies and was restive under their scron. Yet the difference is not so great if it be remembered that submission in Lamentations is an admonition, an exemplary standard, and even within the same poem the old cry of vengeance is raised once more (3.66). But to say that submissiveness served as an exhortation is not to rob it of its meaning, for by means of his faith in Yahweh the poet was able to believe that even the smitings and insults of the foe were embraced in Yahweh's plans, and though only a pervert could delight in the mockery, the present pain could be endured.
The persistence of the submissive spirit as a motif in Hebrew literature is especially evident in Second Isaiah's characterization of the Servant of Yahweh (42.2-4; 49.4; 50.5-7; 53.7). It is easy to believe that this spirit of acquiescence in suffering, in order that God's good purposes might be achieved in his own time and way, was one of Second Isaiah's debts to the Book of Lamentations. The fact that the books were written in different lands, Lamentations in Palestine and Second Isaiah in Babylon, is no great difficulty. From the prophet Ezekiel it is clear that there was constant communication between the two areas.63 That the pupil went beyond his mentor is indisputable. For one thing, the goal of exaltation and triumph is much more articulate in the Suffering Servant passages. There is an exuberance and abounding hope which would not have been natural for the dark hours in which our poet wrote. Yet it is conceivable that the patient spirit of Lamentations, plodding though it be, was the necessary prelude to the flights of the Babylonian prophet. It is Lamentations, and not Ezekiel or Deutero-Isaiah, which shows how the Jews bore the first dismal doubts and wild griefs and deep despair of their fate and by ‘laying the spectres low one by one’ were able to preserve their common faith in Yahweh so that at the propitious hour the prophet of a more certain hope might announce the New Creation.
Because in the suffering there was the promise of good, it is clear that the attitude enjoined was not simply passive meekness or a mere compliance with fate. There was some apprehension of the sufferer's participation in the greater good which endures beyond the city's rubble and the nation's fallen pride (3.25-27). It was, to be sure, a punishment for sin and should be accepted without murmur (3.39), but it was also man's part in the divine plan. H. H. Rowley in a comparative study of attitudes concerning submission in suffering as found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity, reports that in the Semitic religions, particularly Judaism and Christianity, the submissiveness is not prostration before an arbitrary destiny but subservience to a greater good which the deity is bringing to pass.64 Suffering becomes creative and is ‘received with an activity of spirit, that seeks to learn its lessons and to appropriate its profit, and not merely with resignation’.65
To what extent that spirit has permeated our book is another question. It is not the constant thought which Jerusalem entertains, for she is much more concerned with the bitterness of suffering and the pangs of sin. Yet when there is pause for reflection, some elements of hope and promise insistently emerge. The restive mood of the laments shows that passivity is not the total intent of the poet. His consciousness that the disciplinary suffering is only temporary indicates that the waiting is not fruitless nor without expectation of better things. An intimation of suffering that is purposeful is the central teaching of Lamentations, the axis around which all the confessing and lamenting revolves. The resulting submission and resignation became ever more firmly entrenched in the ethos of Judaism (cf. e.g. Sir. 2.1-5; the prose setting of the Book of Job; and in the Talmudic period: Berakoth 5a, and Cant. Rabba II.16.2).
As a result of our close scrutiny of the religious message of the Book of Lamentations we are compelled to assign it to the main stream of Hebrew prophecy. Again and again we have discovered points of essential agreement with the great prophetic teaching. Some critics object that if it were truly in the prophetic tradition the hope offered would be more positive in tone. For example, C. J. Ball contends:66
There is no trace of his [Jeremiah's] confident faith in the restoration of both Israel and Judah (Jer. 3.14-18; 23.3-8; 30-33) nor of his unique doctrine of the New Covenant (Jer. 31.31-34) as a ground of hope and consolation for Zion.
But it should be apparent that Ball, in his anxiety to dismiss Jeremianic authorship, has failed to take into account the several ways of expressing prophetic hope in the future, some quite different than those familiar to Jeremiah. If Lamentations deviates in certain respects from Jeremiah, it is no more than the difference between an Amos and a Hosea or an Isaiah and a Micah. Disinclination, or even actual disproof, of Jeremianic authorship must not be confused with the denial of prophetic affinities.
It is equally futile to make the hope innocuous by dating the third chapter after the restoration.67 All attempts to minimize or deny the optimism of Lamentations are in danger of ignoring the peculiar vitality of Hebrew-Jewish faith which is strikingly evidenced, as H. W. Robinson remarks, in the fact that Israel's ‘faith in Yahweh increased as her historical position decreased’.68 It deserves reiteration that the Book of Lamentations displays precisely this baffling character: it originates in a period when Israel's historical life is in decline but it bears witness to a quality of faith which has been deepened by the catastrophe and, if anything, is in the ascendancy.
Briefly, how may we formulate the content of the hope which stirred in the mind of the author of Lamentations? It is not predicated on the prevailing conditions. There is nothing in the external situation (not even a Cyrus! cf. Isa. 44.28; 45.1-14) to offer the least bit of encouragement. In fact the ruined city and wasted countryside still stagger under the burdens of defeat. Attempts at economic, social, and religious reconstruction have been largely ineffectual (Chap. 5). So it is not surprising that the poet is unable to point to any instrumentality of hope in the contemporary scene. The ground of hope is in the unshakable nature of Yahweh's justice and love. His constancy guarantees that the disappointments and defeats are not ultimate inasmuch as sovereign grace stands behind and beyond them (3.36-39). As to the particular forms the future restoration would take, we may note the following:
1. There is the hope of universal judgment. The salutary factor in the book's treatment of vengeance, as we have seen, is the recognition that not Israel alone but all mankind must conform to the divine will (1.21-22; 3.34-36, 64; 4.21-22).
2. There is the hope of the satisfaction of guilt. The enormity of Zion's sin has raised the doubt as to whether forgiveness is possible (3.42; 5.22), but the close of the fourth poem states ecstatically that ‘thy punishment, O daughter of Zion, is accomplished!’ (4.22). And this statement is made in the same poem that so firmly emphasizes the unparalleled magnitude of the sin (4.6)! The fall of Jerusalem, the ruin and bloodshed, a fate worse than Sodom's, was accepted as the just but ample recompense of the guilt of Judah. The tremendous consolation which this oracular word must have brought is conveyed in the enthusiastic praise of the Midrash:69
The Rabbis said: ‘Better was the Book of Lamentations for Israel than the forty years during which Jeremiah inveighed against them.’ Why? Because in it Israel received full settlement for their iniquities on the day of the Temple's destruction. That is what is written, ‘the punishment of thine iniquity is accomplished, O daughter of Zion.’
Immediately we recall the comforting words that introduce the prophecies of Second Isaiah (40.1-2). The prophet has taken up the assuring word of Lamentations and added the significant detail of double punishment. After years of exile and suffering subsequent to the writing of the fourth chapter, it would be natural to assume that if restitution for past sin had been fully paid at that time, then an excess of atonement had surely accrued to Israel's favour by the time of Cyrus.
3. There is the hope of the end of exile. Those who remained in the land must have felt keenly the loss of Jadah's leadership, especially after the brutal assassination of Gedaliah (Jer. 41). With several thousand of the choice citizens deported to Babylon, the Israel of God was actually a divided Israel until such a time as the exiles might return. In 4.22 the promise of their release is distinctly sounded with the words: … lō' yōsīph le haghlōthēkh, which may be translated either ‘he will never again carry you into exile’ or ‘he will keep you in exile no longer’. The sentiment is the same: the deep longing for a united Israel.
4. There is the hope of political and religious restoration. The content of the plea to ‘renew our days as of old’ (5.21) implies at the very least a return of national freedom under king and priesthood with independence of movement, re-establishment of civil order and the exercise of worship and festivity.70 All the sacred memories of a theocracy, of the favours and privileges of a select people, formed a halo around the past. It is too crass to call it political restoration alone, but it is too abstract and vapid to call it a spiritual restoration. Since Hebraism had so long been institutional, it was impossible to think of a bright future without the reconstruction of those ancient and venerated forms through which God made his will and goodness known. Lamentations thus foreshadows that compound of the devoutly spiritual and the rabidly institutional which formed the ethos of the New Israel (cf. e.g. Psalms and the Priestly Code).
Our delineation of the hope has remained rather indefinite at best. The passage which gives the most eloquent expression to that hope, namely 3.19-33, lacks any concrete account of its object, but it communicates to the sympathetic reader, better than a definition or a programme, the indestructible optimism of those who faced history with the secure faith that the future belonged to their God. With great sobriety and with earnest persuasion the Book of Lamentations proclaims Israel's incredible faith in a history creating and controlling God—a faith to which two of the solid facts of history still add their testimony: the survival of Judaism in the face of impossible odds and the rise of Christianity through which the boons of Israelite religion have been spread throughout the world.
Notes
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Cf. esp. James Muilenburg, ‘The History of the Religion of Israel’, The Interpreter's Bible, Vol. I, p. 331. J. C. Todd begins his Politics and Religion in Ancient Israel (London, 1904) with this sweeping claim: ‘The Old Testament is the epos of the Fall of Jerusalem. From the first verse of Genesis to the last of Malachi there rings through it the note of the Capture, the Sack, and the Destruction of the City by the Babylonian Army in 586 b.c. That terrible event is the key to the book. The circumstances which led up to it, the disaster itself, and the consequences which followed, form the subject of the whole.’
-
Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (Boston, 1815), p. 235.
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H. Wiesmann, ‘Das Leid im Buche der Klagelieder' Zeitschrift für Aszese und Mystik 4 (1929), p. 109.
-
Richard Kraetzschmar, ‘Der Mythus von Sodoms Ende’, ZAW 17 (1897), pp. 81-92, argues that Gen. 18-19 contain two literary strands, one in which Yahweh alone is present (singular person) and another where he is represented by three angels (plural person). The whole myth was originally a Canaanite elohim saga accounting for the volcanic destruction of the cities (cf. Isa. 34.9). By a long process, including several editings, it has been appropriated to prophetic Yahwism. But Kraetzschmar does not touch upon the theological significance of the basic myth nor allusions to it in subsequent centuries. In fact, among the later passages, he omits Lam. 4.6.
-
The enormity of the catastrophe is often expressed in exilic and post-exilic writings, cf. e.g., in the confessional prayer of Daniel 9.12: ‘He has confirmed his words, which he spoke against our rulers who ruled us, by bringing upon us a great calamity, for under the whole heaven there has not been done the like of what has been done against Jerusalem.’
-
Justus Köberle, Sünde and Gnade im religiösen Leben des Volkes Israel bis auf Christum (München, 1905), p. 277.
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Cf. J. Philip Hyatt, Prophetic Religion (Nashville, 1947), pp. 57-60.
-
The explanation of the Hebrew terminology is derived from Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1906) and Walter Eichrodt, Theologie des Alten Testaments (Berlin, 1950), Teil III, pp. 81 f; and G. Quell, G. Bertram, G. Stählin, and W. Grundmann, Sin (Kittel's Bible Key Words), London, 1951. Cf. also Pederson, Israel (London, 1926) I-II, p. 414.
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James Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton, 1950), pp. 455-463.
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Cf. Norman B. Johnson, Prayer in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. A Study in the Jewish Concept of God (Journal of Biblical Literature Monograph Series, Philadelphia, 1948), pp. 24 ff.
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The idea that sin is not simply rebellion against divine fiat but is inimical to human life is implied in much of the prophetic teaching, but it is unusually clear in Hosea's stress upon the knowledge of God as the foundation of social life (cf. 4.1 f, 6, 14; 7.9; 9.7).
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Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago, 1951), Vol. 1, pp. 83 ff. As I understand Tillich's discussion of autonomy and heteronomy, the essential point is that ethics is rooted in the created order. On p. 85 he says: ‘Autonomy and heteronomy are rooted in theonomy, and each goes astray when their theonomous unity is broken. Theonomy does not mean the acceptance of a divine law imposed on reason by a highest authority; it means autonomous reason united with its own depth. In a theonomous situation reason actualizes itself in obedience to its structural laws and in the power of its own inexhaustible ground. Since God (theos) is the law (nomos) for both the structure and the ground of reason, they are united in him, and their unity is manifest in a theonomous situation.’ So far as the Biblical world view was concerned it naturally pictured God as one who commands from without, but it is improper to conceive of his command solely as an arbitrary imposition. This command or Word of God addressed itself to the structural necessity of man. It was directed toward his best interests as when a father issues orders for the good of his son. This is seen at its deepest level in the Old Testament's insistence that the God of Israel and the Creator God are one and the same. Revelation and nature thus have one ultimate source. It seems to me that this drive toward the unification of religious experience would also have a corresponding tendency toward the relating of faith and ethics. Precisely this happened in the Wisdom literature. Thus the increasing cosmogonic reflection of Israel during the exile was not primarily speculative but religio-ethical (cf. Muilenburg, The Interpreter's Bible, Vol. I, p. 331).
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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.
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Henning Fredriksson, Jahwe als Krieger. Studien zum alttestamentlicben Gottesbild (Lund, 1945), pp. 23-27.
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Henning Fredriksson, Jahwe als Krieger. Studien zum alttestamentlichen Gottesbild (Lund, 1945), p. 93.
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Loc. cit.
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Cf. Bernard Bamberger, Proselytism in the Talmudic Period (Cincinnati, 1939) and his article in The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 9, pp. 1-3.
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A superb discussion of the scandal of the cross can be found in Paul Minear, Eyes of Faith (Philadelphia, 1946), pp. 270 f.
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This concentration of originally independent titles and expectations in Jesus of Nazareth so that, in effect, he remakes the categories, is thoroughly depicted in William Manson, Jesus the Messiah (Philadelphia, 1946).
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Wiesmann, op. cit., p. 108.
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The origin and import of the Day of Yahweh has been the subject of intense and protracted debate. The two classic works are Hugo Gressmann, Der Ursprung der israelitischen-jüdischen Eschatologie (Göttingen, 1905), pp. 141-158, and Sigmund Mowinckel, Psalmenstudien II. Das Thronbesteigungsfest Jahwäs und der Ursprung der Eschatologie (Kristiana, 1922). The most searching recent criticisms of their theories are well summarized in Stanley Frost, Old Testament Apocalyptic. Its Origins and Growth (London, 1952), pp. 39 ff, and H. W. Robinson, Inspiration and Revelation in the Old Testament (Oxford, 1946), pp. 139 ff. Perhaps the most satisfactory line of approach is that taken by J. M. P. Smith, ‘The Day of Yahweh’, American Journal of Theology 5 (1901), pp. 505-533, who stresses the uniqueness of Israelite eschatology as the ancillary of the historical faith in Yahweh. He sees the roots of the conception as early as the Yahwist epic. The most exhaustive recent treatment is that of Ladislav Çerný, The Day of Yahweh and Some Relevant Problems (Prague, 1948) who strongly accents the social and historical factors which shaped the development of Hebrew eschatology. When pressed to state wherein the uniqueness of the latter may be found he is driven to affirm that ‘it is only this idea of the necessity of change in the existing world which makes the conception of the Day of Yahweh unique among the Hebrews’ (p. 98).
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It is worth noting, however, that the Day of Yahweh, or at least the term, does not appear in Hosea, Micah or Habakkuk. The reason for this omission may well have been a desire to avoid any misunderstanding on the part of the people who, hearing mention of the Day of Yahweh, would have misconstrued it in the nationalistic sense (J. M. P. Smith, op. cit., p. 515).
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Çerný, op. cit., p. 20.
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Ibid., Chap. I.
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Fredriksson, op. cit., p. 90.
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Ibid., p. 95.
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S. R. Driver, Joel and Amos. The Cambridge Bible (Cambridge, 1901), p. 185.
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The oracle in Jeremiah 46 concerning the Battle of Carchemish is attributed to the prophet of Anathoth by nearly all commentators.
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Excellent discussions of the eschatological feast in its various developments are found in Frost, op. cit., pp. 52, 90, 152 f; Gressmann, op. cit., pp. 136-141; Mowinckel, op. cit., pp. 296 f.
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Cf. Georg Hoffmann, ‘Versuche zu Amos’, ZAW 3 (1883), p. 112.
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Mowinckel's forte is in the cultic interpretation.
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W. R. Smith, The Prophets of Israel (London, 1897), pp. 397 f, argues that the Day of Yahweh originated as a Day of Battle.
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W. Cossmann, Die Entwicklung des Gerichtsgedankens bei dem alttestamentlichen Propheten. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 29 (1915), pp. 178 ff, maintains that the Day of Yahweh was originally a term for Yahweh's revelation, devoid of any judgment associations, as the nature imagery clearly shows.
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Although no direct connection is likely, Çerný points to an Assyrian text associating cannibalism with the future judgment. It is predicted that in the reign of a certain prince ‘the brother will eat his brother’ and ‘the people will sell their children for money’ (p. 64).
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Pedersen, op. cit., III-IV, p. 546.
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Paul Heinisch, Theology of the Old Testament (Collegeville, Minnesota, 1950), p. 201, defends certain of the Old Testament expressions of hostility as follows: ‘ … every violent word reflects the consciousness of intimate union with God and a living faith in His justice. The hatred of the pious, whose sentiments the Old Testament hands down to us, is directed primarily against sin, and thereby is elevated above a merely personal or natural spirit of revenge.’ H. G. Mitchell, The Ethics of the Old Testament (Chicago, 1912), p. 235, emphasizes the same point: ‘Insofar as the instruments that Yahweh has chosen have gone beyond his instructions, they are guilty and must in their turn pay the penalty of their presumption.’ Commenting on our book he says: ‘The moral tone of the book comes out most strongly in Lam. 4.22, where the author announces to Zion the termination of her suffering, and to Edom the approach of a similar visitation, because the former has satisfied the demands of the divine justice while the latter has not yet atoned for her offences.’
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J. Philip Hyatt, Prophetic Religion (Nashville, 1947), pp. 96-108 suggests useful criteria for determining authentic passages of hope.
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T. J. Meek, Hebrew Origins (New York, 1950 rev. ed.), p. 181.
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Martin Noth, The History of Israel (London and New York, 1958), p. 297.
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Translated from the German rendering in H. Jahnow, Das bebräische Leichenlied im Rahmen der Völkerdichtung. BZ AW 36 (1923), p. 177.
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Friedrich Heiler, Das Gebet (M¨nchen, 1921), pp. 348-354.
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Ibid., p. 360.
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Norman B. Johnson, Prayer in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. A Study in the Jewish Concept of God. JBL Monograph Series, Vol. 2, 1948, 72 f.
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This is the mistake that humanism and religious liberalism usually make. Because, in terms of the evolutionary process as a whole, the moral character of God was relatively late in rising to human consciousness, it is assumed that the discovery was simply an inference from the human situation. The fallacious deduction is to make of God a pious fiction or at best a useful ideal. The historical development of religion neither proves nor disproves the unchanging nature and purpose of God. It is altogether possible that religious man in his discovery of the moral nature of deity laid hold of something as objectively real as the natural sciences in their research into the laws of nature. Only the religious realm of discourse is competent to judge the issues involved. A good example of the approach of religious liberalism to the ethical monotheism of the Old Testament is in I. G. Matthews, The Religious Pilgrimage of Israel (New York, 1947), p. 126, where it is said regarding the writing prophets: ‘That Yahweh was a moral being was one of their far-reaching contributions to religious thought. This was correlative to their interpretation that the leaders were doomed and that the existing institution violated human rights and dignity. Building on what to them was axiomatic, they concluded that Yahweh was as fair-minded and as just as was man himself. In the world of men, where right was paramount, God himself must be the embodiment of right. This was a step forward in the realm of religious ideas.’ Whatever measure of truth may exist in this analysis, when Matthews talks exclusively of human rights and dignity, of inference and ideas, he betrays a wilful disregard of the prophetic frame of thought. An appraisal of this sort completely loses sight of the divine initiative and purpose which was the primary datum of the prophetic experience and message. Such interpretations easily reduce God from the rank of creator and controller of history to a phenomenon in the history of ideas. Can Biblical theology, i.e. theology which attempts to formulate the Hebrew-Christian faith, whether for historical or constructive purposes—can such theology deny the fundamental presupposition upon which the whole tradition rests?
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Rudolph Volz, Das Dämonische in Jahwe. Sammlung gemeinverständlicher Vorträge und Schriften aus dem Gebet der Theologie und Religionsgeschichte 110 (1924), p. 38.
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Cf. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (London, 1950), esp. Chap. XIII.
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Norman Snaith, The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament (London, 1945), p. 102 surveys the Old Testament usages of the term hesedh and concludes that, while it has definite associations with slowness to anger and mercy, its basic meaning is steadfastness and constancy
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Walter Eichrodt, Theologie des Alten Testaments (Berlin, 1950), Vol. 1. p. 124. He regards Lam. 3 as an individual lament, but his insight applies just as well to a national interpretation. Attention is called to other examples from prayer literature, e.g. Job 33.16 ff; 36.15; Jonah 4.2; Sir. 4.17-19; Neh. 9.17, 31; II Chron. 30.9.
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Justus Köberle, Sünde und Gnade im religiösen Leben des Volkes Israel (München, 1905), p. 368.
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O. S. Rankin, Israel's Wisdom Literature (Edinburgh, 1936), p. 17.
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Gustav Westphal, Jabwes Wobnstätten nach den Anschauungen der alten Hebräer. BZAW 15 (1908), pp. 258, 262, gives the typical arguments for regarding El Elyon as a late exilic development. He treats the significance of the name, especially in the Balaam Oracles, and concludes that it was originally a Baal title, later applied to Yahweh to express his transcendence over all other gods, and became frequent in use when out of reverence the name of God was no longer spoken.
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Gen. 14.18-22; Num. 24.16; Deut. 32.8; Ps. 9.3; 18.14 cf. II Sam. 22.14; Ps. 21.8; 46.5; 50.14; 73.11; 77.11; 78.17; 83.19; 87.5; 91.1, 9; 92.2; 107.11; Isa. 14.14.
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A. R. Johnson, ‘The Role of the King in the Jerusalem Cultus’, The Labyrinth, ed. by S. H. Hooke (London, 1935), pp. 81-85), contends that there was a preIsraelite Elyon cult at Jerusalem. If this is true then Elyon is an ancient title and our post-exilic theories need drastic revision.
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Cf. citations in Köhler-Baumgartner, Lexicon in Veteris Testamenti Libros (Leiden, 1948-1953), p. 708.
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Pirke Aboth iv. 19. Quoted in C. G. Montefiore, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion (London, 1893, 2nd ed.), p. 451, who also remarks: ‘No feelings rooted themselves more deeply in Judasim than those of absolute faith in God and unconditional resignation to his will.’
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Erich Kurt Dietrich, Die Umkehr (Bekehrung und Busse) im Alten Testamnet und im Judentum (Stuttgart, 1936), p. 125.
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Ibid., pp. 122-125, 149-152, 161-165. Cf. e.g. Zeph. 2.1-3 and 3.11-13; Jer. 3.12 f, 22; 4.14; 7.3, 5; 18.11; 25.2; 29.13; 35.15 and 15.9; 24.7; 31.18, 31 f; Ezek. 14.6; 18.21; 33.11 and 11.9 f; 36.25 ff; 37.23; and Isa. 46.12; 55.3 and 44.21 f.
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Erich Klamroth, Die jüdischen Exulanten in Babylonien. Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten Testament 10 (1912), p. 36, finds that the fifth poem was written in Babylon (cf. v. 2) and says that 5.21 is simply a thoughtless imitation of Jer. 31.18 and thus refers to a purely external restoration. It means simply, ‘lead us back from exile to your land, to your residence upon Zion, in order that we may again build an independent nation.’
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Dietrich, op. cit., p. 127.
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Ibid., pp. 126 f. This is the famous Shemoneh ‘Esreh or Amidah, the principal supplicatory prayer of the Jewish liturgy, v. Elbogen, Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. IV, pp. 22-27 and A. Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Liturgy and its Development (New York, 1932), pp. 93-109.
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W. F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity (Baltimore, 1946), p. 240 f and William C. Graham, The Prophets and Israel's Culture (Chicago, 1934), pp. 58 f.
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Albright, op. cit., pp. 254 f.
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Cf. Henry A. Redpath, The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (London, 1907), p. xxxix, and Volkmar Herntrich, Ezechielprobleme BZ AW 51 (1932), p. 129. Herntrich theorizes that, like Ezekiel, Lamentations was a Palestinian product which underwent later Babylonian revision.
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H. H. Rowley, Submission in Suffering (Cardiff, 1951).
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Ibid., p. 62.
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C. J. Ball, ‘Lamentations’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Ed., Vol. 15, p. 128.
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Alex. R. Gordon, The Poets of the Old Testament (London, 1912), p. 77.
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H. Wheeler Robinson, Inspiration and Revelation in the Old Testament (Oxford, 1946), p. 142.
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A. Cohen, tr., Midrash Rabbah. Lamentations (London, 1939), pp. 234 f.
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J. Pedersen, Israel, I-II, p. 488, shows that such a plea does not mean to turn back the progress of time but to bring again the substance of those days for ‘the events with their character and substance make time alive’.
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