Introduction
1 How lonely sits the city
that was full of people!
How like a widow has she become,
she who was great among the nations!
She who was a princess among the provinces
has become a slave.
2 She weeps bitterly in the night,
with tears on her cheeks;
among all her lovers
she has none to comfort her;
all her friends have dealt treacherously with her;
they have become her enemies.
Within the last 150 years, the world has witnessed “the war to end all wars,” then World War II, the Holocaust, the firebombing of Dresden, Stalin’s purges, the Chinese cultural revolution, the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, Rwanda, and 9/11. Life can be hell. Sometimes it crushes our hearts. So why increase our sadness by immersing ourselves into Hebrew poetry filled with mourning and misery? When offered the opportunity, most Christians take a pass. If they do read Lamentations, it’s likely because they are systematically reading through the Bible. They have to read Lamentations to get to the good stuff in Ezekiel.
How lonely sits the city that was full of people! So reads the opening verse. The last two verses of the work also reflect deep sorrow and sadness: 21 Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored! Renew our days as of old— 22 unless you have utterly rejected us, and you remain exceedingly angry with us. The book begins and ends with deep grief. Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian hordes raised and ransacked Jerusalem, the once glorious City of David.
Most believers hear only snippets from Lamentations, especially 3:22-23. After that, though, a quick read of the book might prompt one to wonder why it is even in the Bible. It is a relentlessly brutal piece of writing. The Hebrew Bible titles Lamentations as אֵיכָה “aikah,” (how could it be?). The word itself reflects a mournful wail. That is appropriate for a set of poetry which expresses misery, sadness, anguish, heartache, darkness, agony, hurt, affliction, tribulation, calamity, torment, isolation, wretchedness, misfortune, and unmitigated pain.
We might say this book is a mournful violin exploring every note of inconceivable grief and sorrow. Its prayers arise from a profound loss as well as from God’s excruciating silence (the twin sisters of Old Testament laments). Lamentations does more than chronicle Judah’s spiritual, economic, political, environmental, and architectural disasters. It is a record of her visceral cry from the heart, the Bible’s ultimate and quintessential lament.
Babylon ripped apart Jerusalem’s walls, gates, towers, and, most importantly, the city’s temple (2:1-9). Enemy soldiers destroyed Judah’s army as its soldiers ran for their lives. Political and religious leaders were either dead, exiled, starving to death, or drowning in sorrow. Survivors huddled together, broken, and helpless. Others, not so fortunate, or executed. Normal life, including judicial and economic systems, ceased completely, ushering in suffering and starvation. Access to life’s basic needs evaporated. Jerusalem became like a destitute slave. Her citizens felt like filth and garbage. Following an empire’s military force reduced everything to destruction and smoldering rubble.
A thick veil of darkness covered the landscape. Babylon negated, violated, and destroyed everything. Death hovered around every corner. The rubble stank of rotting flesh and the future was bleak. These poems are some of the Bible’s most violent and brutal pieces of writing as they both literally and figuratively arise out of the ashes and ruins of Jerusalem and are filled with the horrifyingly dark and grisly image of raw human pain and suffering.
The church loses a great deal by ignoring the book of Lamentations. Overlooking Lamentations means, in the face of injustice and pain, we can speak only weak and anemic prayers. Thinking that God cares only about our praises, we fail to tell him about our angst and sorrow. When engulfed in sadness, our prayers seldom diverge from these four words: “thy will be done.”
If God’s throne is only a place where we show him esteem and acclaim, we ignore not only our own brokenness but also the brokenness of others. We coldly dismiss people who are struggling and depressed, who are slogging through difficulties like sickness, disease, loneliness, divorce, bankruptcy, and complete financial or emotional ruin. To the extent that Christian churches implicitly or explicitly exclude modes of anguish from their liturgies, they effectively abandon anguished people, leaving them to suffer their agonies and isolation from the worshipping assembly and also, it may seem to them, in isolation from God himself.
We see this especially at funerals. Instead of solemnity, reverence, and grief, there is a growing trend to turn burials into celebrations of life instead of facing the cruel reality that a loved one is dead. There used to be quite a bit of weeping at funerals. These days there is giggling.
When engulfed in darkness, when the bitterness feels almost tangible, God does not invite us to simply pray, “Whatever you say, Lord.” No. He wants us to speak our mind. Pour out our heart. Even challenge and question him. Faithfulness does not always imply the passive acceptance of trial and torment. A lament is not merely an articulation of unhappiness. It seeks in the midst of unhappiness to recover communion with God. The deep longing to reconnect with Yahweh lies at the heart of Lamentations. The book’s protests explore the fissures of God’s absence and covenantal brokenness. The book is a choice to explore, not ignore, grief. When we ignore grief, it often metastasizes into deadly pathologies that distort reality, leading us into more pain. This book is Yahweh’s “yes” to expressing our grief, to sorrow, to crying, and to mourning. It offers spiritual and theological categories to help us make sense of what happened, as well as how to survive it.
It is true that Jerusalem’s demise in 587 BC and the ensuing catastrophe are far from most of our lived experiences. We do not relate with everything in Lamentations We’re separated by time, locale, language, and the experience of the event. But we still face disasters. Our world experiences tsunamis, genocides, pandemics, fires, earthquakes, mass shootings, mass devastation, and mass starvation. And we all face death.
When we pray the book of Lamentations, we pray with the faithful who have been victims of violence, rape, murder, and every sort of chaos. We plead with God to turn from judgment to mercy and to heal his broken world. This book serves every successive generation of the suffering faithful for whom history has become unbearable. The book corrects euphoric and celebratory notions of faith that romantically portrayed the Christian life as consisting of only sweetness and light. Cries of anguish and lamentations help us avoid a one-sided, happiness only mindset that cannot deal forthrightly with tragedies. After all, expressing our pain to God is the first step toward God healing our pain.
Lamentations honors Judah’s suffering, so we may honor our own as those baptized into the Christ who suffered for us, as well as encourage the suffering all around us. The book calls us inward to address our own wounds. Outward to address the wounds of the world. And upward to bring these wounds before the throne of our loving savior. Lamentations is our lament!
Interpreting the lamentations within the Christian canon enables us to know how God will respond to Judah’s demise and disaster. Divine silence at the end of the book does not mean that God has nothing to say. On the contrary. Over a century earlier, through Isaiah chapters 40 through 55, God had spoken openly to the abyss into which Zion has now fallen. These 16 chapters preemptively address the anguish later expressed throughout the book of Lamentations. That section is a harmonious, almost antiphonal, prophetic answering of the lament that establishes the basic framework within which the dialogues are engaged.
HISTORICAL SETTING
JHWH’s attempts at disciplining Judah repeatedly failed to result in her repentance. He got to the point where he could no longer bear her evil doings and abominations. YHWH came to the end of his rope proclaiming that he was “tired of relenting” (15:6). He promised he was about to deal “a very grievous blow (14:7). In other words, God was about to kill his first-born son Israel before he would raise them to life again.
The book of Lamentations describes the Babylonian conquest and its aftermath, the narrative of which you can read in Jeremiah 52 and following. But Lamentations describes it as an emotional, heart wrenching event. It leaves out the dates and the people from Jeremiah 52. It suppresses the historical details about the places, times, and people. Military events are missing. It is poetry, not prose. The account in Jeremiah 52 is a documentary film, while this book is a painting or a sculpture. Through 5 elaborate poems, the book expresses more emotions than historical data.
It is a visceral recital of everything Jerusalem lost. The picture we are shown in these poems is one in which society has broken down completely. The rich are destitute. The leaders are not respected. Priests, prophets, and elders have lost their roles in society. Ordinary men and women cannot function as they should. And God is silent.
This book sidesteps bare historical data and instead addresses the survivors spiritual and emotional needs. The vivid poetry functions much like artwork, giving Judeans metaphors and imagery to help them make sense of their shattered world. It provides a teaching dialogue to help reflect the emotional reality of the broken people and their world it describes.
That said, there are places in the book that describe what happened historically in general terms. These include failed foreign treaties (1:2, 19), exile (1:3), famine, rape, the dismantling of the architecture, the author’s near-death experience (3:52-57), cannibalism, the capture of Yahweh’s messiah (Zedekiah, 4:20). There are enough references to traumatic actions to give a concrete sense to the traumatic emotion.
There are historical connections between the events listed in Lamentations and the narrative accounts of the same events found in Second Kings, Jeremiah, and Lamentations. All three books have references to the siege of Jerusalem, famine, the leaders trying to sneak away, burning of buildings, breaking down of walls, exile, temple looting, execution of the leaders, and Judah’s diminished political status.
Long before 587 BC, Judah was in a political quagmire. Beginning in the 8th century BC, the near eastern superpowers of Assyria, Egypt, and Babylon began to run roughshod over this contested area of Palestine. Things came to a head in 612 BC, when Babylon sacked the Assyrian capital of Nineveh and became a superpower. From 652 until 605 BC Nebuchadnezzar II envisioned an empire that ruled over the entirety of the fertile Crescent. He wanted to eliminate Egypt’s influence. Israel became Ground Zero where the heavyweight Kingdoms of Babylon and Egypt faced off.
In a last-ditch effort to save their collapsing empire, Egypt raced to help Assyria in a fight to the finish. King Josiah’s attempt to halt Pharaoh Neco’s march was in vain as the king of Judah died at the battle of Megiddo in 609 BC. Then, in 605 BC, Nebuchadnezzar overwhelmed the Egyptians at the battle of Carchemish. A massive political earthquake ensued. Assyria was decimated. Egypt was critically wounded. And there was a new bully on the block, Babylon. It would be the dominant political power for the next 70 years. Egged on by those who wanted an independent Judean state, Judah’s leadership made a series of futile attempts to break free of the Babylonian yoke.
Enter Jeremiah. From 6:05 BC until Judah’s destruction in 587 BC the prophet repeatedly urged the Judean government to submit to Babylon. No one listened. The leaders behaved duplicitously and shamelessly. King Jehoiakim even cut up Jeremiah’s scroll and threw its pieces into the fire (Jeremiah 36:23). The prophet condemned the king. But no one noticed. No one cared.
Jehoiakim had learned nothing from his godly father, Josiah. Initially he submitted to Babylonian rule, but then he rolled the dice and cast his lot with Egypt (2 Kings 24:1). With lightning speed, Nebuchadnezzar launched an attack. Jehoiakim died and his son Jehoiachin, raised the white flag of surrender. Babylon exiled Jehoiachin, along with Ezekiel and others. Nebuchadnezzar installed Zedekiah, another foolhardy son of Josiah, who vacillated between compromise with Babylon and conspiracy against the empire.
Why did Judah’s leaders have such confidence against a far greater military force? The people simply did not believe that Jerusalem could ever fall. The city was invincible. Happy talk prophets urged the people on with their “God is love” mantra. No one would listen to Jeremiah and his downer news that judgment was upon them. In Jeremiah Chapter 7 Yahweh promised them that Jerusalem would wind up just like Shiloh. Shiloh was where the ark was set when the children of Israel entered the land with Joshua. God appeared to the prophet Samuel at Shiloh. But the Philistines utterly destroyed the locale in 1050 BC and carted off the ark of the covenant (1 Samuel 4). The “it could never happen” crowd only needed to look about 20 miles north of their location to realize that God was not the great respecter of holy places they thought him to be.
The downward spiral escalated with Zedekiah (597-587 BC), a puppet king of Babylon. After 10 years, he also rebelled against Babylon (2 Kings 24:20). He also sought help from Egypt. This drove some people out of Jerusalem. But their flight did them no good as the invading Babylonians decimated the countryside before setting their sights on Jerusalem (Jeremiah 34:6-7). Zedekiah’s revolt was the last straw for Nebuchadnezzar. Acting as God’s servant, he toppled the city walls and torched Jerusalem’s temple. His full fury raised the whole city on August 28th, 587 BC. Eighty percent of Judah’s cities, towns, and villages were destroyed or abandoned.
People ran for their lives. Women were violated. Dead bodies were stacked up. The smell of blood and death was overwhelming. There were the groans of the wounded And the shouts of victors dividing their spoils. Everything that could burn was set on fire. The fall of Jerusalem was the most horrendous national catastrophe in the history of Judah, the most colossal break in the entire relationship between God and Isreal since the beginning.
Built by Solomon 400 years earlier, the temple was defiled by the enemy, who looted its liturgical vessels. Zedekiah and his entourage took off running in the night. What else could they do? The Babylonians caught them in the plains of Jericho where Zedekiah watched his four sons executed in his presence. Then his eyes were blinded, and he was imprisoned in Babylon.
Zedekiah’s capture was followed by more unimaginable horrors. More raping and starvation, along with indiscriminate killing of noncombatants, as well as forced marches into exile. The profound loss shattered the core of Judah’s existence. God abandoned his people to Babylonian savagery. He sent them all packing back to Abraham’s birthplace. Jeremiah’s prophecies had been spot on. The end had come (Lamentations 4:18). The combination of Israel’s own religious unfaithfulness, moral corruption, and political folly (unrepented and undeterred by multiple warnings) made it inevitable.
After 587 BC, the Babylonian occupiers installed a pro-Babylonian Jew as the regional overseer. About five years later the overseer was assassinated (Jeremiah 40:1-41:18). In response, the Babylonians ordered another punitive deportation (Jeremiah 52:30). Since Judah lacked walled cities, a standing army, or any way to resist, her neighbors took advantage of this open door. They looted and pillaged.
In all, Jeremiah lists 3 deportations. The first in 597 BC, during the reign of Jehoiakim. The second in 587 BC during the reign of Zedekiah. And the third in 582 BC. Social turbulence, death, spiritual confusion, and cataclysmic destruction filled the land. Jerusalem became a ghost town. Judeans who survived the starving and slaughter experienced unspeakable suffering. They were forced to cope with memories of loved ones killed in combat, food scarcity, and foreign occupation. Everything spiraled out of control. It was a dog-eat-dog world on the streets. What do people do when confronted with extreme starvation when society completely breaks down? They eat other people (Jeremiah 19:9; Lamentations 2:20; 4:10).
What was lost? The Davidic king and Solomonic temple. Everything was lost.
That is why at the heart of these biblical laments are the questions: can God still be trusted? Can we still believe in him? After all that has happened are his promises real? And yet lament, even at its most bitter, still represents an act of faith.
There was a time when Yahweh rescued state slaves, provided water and manna, overthrew kings and their armies, and gave Israel the land flowing with milk and honey. Instead of trying to explain loss, laments long for God to renew his story of salvation.
THE PASTOR PROPHET
There’s one last remarkable thing I want us to notice about this book. It concerns the man who wrote it, or at least the man who is reputed to have written it whom I firmly believe to be Jeremiah. Jeremiah spent over 40 years in Jerusalem warning the people of Judah that God’s horrific judgment was coming. Like Jesus, he was despised and rejected among men. Socially rejected, physically abused, and at best, ignored, this man remained faithful to God’s gloomy message. But the people refused to hear, preferring instead the happy-talk preachers that promised God would never abandon his beloved city.
If I were Jeremiah I would have wasted only enough time to figure out the appropriate snotty, superior response to give to all those nasty people who had treated me so poorly and rejected me so repeatedly. And just a hint here but my gesture would not be the sign of the cross! Yet this prophet, so despised by the people, does not flip them off. He does not lecture them. He stays to help them grieve. He could have reveled in their abject poverty and misery. But instead, he stays to be a tender shepherd to his broken people.
He sat down and wrote five poems about this horrific event to help his remaining pathetic people begin to grieve and work through the destruction that has decimated their lives. These people have been happily ignoring God for over 40 years. They had been ignoring God’s prophet for over 40 years. And now that same despised, rejected prophet is ministering desperately-needed words of life to them.
When we think of Jeremiah in that situation, and yet with that godly attitude, it brings to mind the one verse that sums up Jeremiah’s life:
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
