Lamentations Lamentations of Jeremiah

LAMENTATIONS (LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH). A book of the Old Testament, placed in the Hebrew Bible amongst the five "Megilloth" or "Rolls" in the third canon (Hagiographa), and in the LXX, Vulgate and most modern Bibles, after the Book of Jeremiah.

Structure and Form.

The book consists of five "dirges," or poetical elegies. Such poems were properly composed on the death of individuals, but all these deal with the fall and desolation of Jerusalem. Hebrew metres are scanned by the number of strongly accented syllables that the lines contain; and as the phonetic prin ciples of the language require that each independent and significant word should carry one such accent, it is the thought as much as the sound which gives to each form of metre its peculiar character. Each line is divided into two (or, occasionally, three) parts, which frequently correspond to one another in general sense, the second half being a repetition or an echo of the first. The two commonest metres are (a) those in which a line contains six significant terms —six "word-accents," each part having three, though sometimes, especially in prophetic poetry, we find 2 : 2 : 2 ; (b) the so-called "Qinah," in which each line has either five or four word-accents, divided as 3 :2,2:2 or (somewhat rarely) 2:3. This last was corn monly used for dirges, and is the metre of the first four poems in Lamentations ; the fifth is written in 3 :3.

There is another striking difference between Lam. i.–iv. and Lam. v. The former are "alphabetic acrostics," that is to say they are divided into short "stanzas," or equal groups of lines, and each group begins with a characteristic letter, the whole being arranged in twenty-two groups in the order of the Hebrew alphabet. The peculiarities may be illustrated by the following rough attempt at a translation of the first few verses of Lam. i.: (In the above the order of the English alphabet is followed; the Hebrew is rather different.) Lam. iii. differs from i., ii. and iv., in that each of the three lines of the "stanza" begins with the appropriate letter, instead of the first only as in the example quoted. Ch. iv., again, is peculiar,

in that it has two lines to the "stanza" instead of three. Chs.

iii. and iv. are also peculiar in their arrangement of the alphabet. In the normal Hebrew reckoning of the letters the sixteenth is "Pe" and the seventeenth "Ayin," and this is the order now found in Lam. i., but in the next three poems these two letters are transposed. Finally Lam. v., though it contains twenty-two verses (the Hebrew alphabet has twenty-two letters), is written in 3:3 metre and has little trace of the acrostic.

Date and Authorship.

The traditional ascription of these poems to Jeremiah seems to rest on a misunderstanding of II Chron. xxxv. 25, which states that Jeremiah sang a dirge over Josiah, and that this was included with a number of others on the same king, all being preserved in a book of dirges. But none of these poems deals with Josiah, and while "dirges" over the kings of Judah from Jehoahaz onwards are preserved in Jer. xxii., none of them in the least resembles any of the poems in Lamentations.

It seems to be clear that all five were composed in the period during which the walls of Jerusalem lay in ruins, i.e., between the time of Zedekiah and that of Nehemiah. The artificial form sug gests that the first pangs of the agony inflicted by the fall of the city had given place to a steady grief, and the poems vary among themselves alike in the keenness of the sorrow which they express and in their poetic quality. There is no certainty that they were the work of the same author; on the contrary, they were more probably from different hands, though there is enough similarity between Lam. ii. and iv. to suggest to some students that both are to be attributed to the same poet. In any case these are prob ably the two earliest of the five ; next in order, alike of merit and of time, stands Lam. i. Lam. iii. may come from the end of the exile or even from a time after the return, while Lam. v. is not strictly a dirge at all, but a prayer for deliverance from the govern ment of a foreign oppressor, and would suit any period between the destruction of the city and the rebuilding of the walls in