Lamentations 1:1-22

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.

SHE SITS AMONG THE RUINS, slumped slightly to one side. Her elbow rests on the arm of her throne. Her gaze is turned downward in a resolute frown. Her appearance reveals that she has endured great suffering, a grief too deep for words, perhaps even for tears. Though the crown on her head gives her a regal air, she is despondent. The queen who answers to this description was carved into stone by William Wetmore Story (1819–1895). Story’s sculpture establishes an imposing presence in the galleries of Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The inscription at the base of the woman’s throne identifies her as “Jerusalem in Her Desolation.”

The queenly city William Story carved into stone is Jerusalem personified, the Jerusalem that barely survived the tragic events described at the end of the book of Jeremiah. She had already experienced all the indignities and indecencies of the Babylonian assault. After a long siege, the city finally fell to Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC, and her citizens were deported to Babylon. Story’s sculpture depicts the aftermath— a city still numb with grief. The crumbled bits of mortar around her suggest a city in ruins. 

Yet the most significant detail is the tiny serpent slithering near the queen’s feet. The serpent stands for sin, showing that Jerusalem’s desolation was the result of her disobedience. Not surprisingly, Story based his work on Lamentations, a forgotten book written in the days following Jerusalem’s fall to Babylon. Lamentations is closely related to the events described in the book of Jeremiah. It is not so much a sequel to Jeremiah, however, as it is a response. The book’s melancholy, almost plaintive tone is apparent from its very first verse, which laments the triple disaster of childlessness, widowhood, and slavery.

SUFFERING, A-Z

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.

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,  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.

For all its pathos, Lamentations is not an emotional outburst. The book is actually a collection of elegies, formal poems written for a funeral. The poems were written with deliberate artistry. While some aspects of Hebrew poetry remain a mystery to scholars, it seems that Lamentations has a rhythm all its own. The poetic phrasing used throughout the book is distinctive. Some think the Jews used this special cadence for funerals and other occasions of sorrow.

Each of the five chapters in Lamentations is a complete poem in itself. The book thus consists of five separate laments for a fallen city and a fallen people. What is important to know is that each lament was composed in the form of an alphabetic acrostic. In other words, each chapter (with one exception, as we shall discover) is divided into twenty-two separate sections, one for every letter in the Hebrew alphabet. Each verse, or set of verses, begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. Lamentations thus describes the sufferings of God’s people from A to Z, from aleph to taw.

The elaborate artistry of these five laments communicates something important about their purpose. The lamentations are not simply cries from the heart, although they certainly are that. They are rather an attempt to reflect on the meaning of human suffering. The book of Lamentations is a theodicy, an attempt to explain the ways of God to humanity. The writer wants to do something more than vent his feelings. He also seeks to gain perspective on suffering, and to share that perspective with his fellow sufferers. The book of Jeremiah ended with a factual account of the last, desperate days of the Jerusalem Jeremiah knew and loved. The book of Lamentations is an attempt to interpret the meaning of that catastrophe.

Since this catastrophe was shared by an entire society, the identity of the person who wrote the five laments is relatively unimportant – although Jeremiah is the most likely author. Lamentations is not about the sufferings of an individual. The five poems that make up the book are communal rather than personal laments. This is what distinguishes Lamentations from another Biblical theodicy, the book of Job. Whereas Job deals with the problem of personal suffering, Lamentations deals with the problem of national suffering. There is a further difference as well: Job’s sufferings were undeserved, whereas Jerusalem deserved her desolation.

The book of Lamentations helps people make sense of national disasters like famine, warfare, and genocide. For example, Lamentations is where the Jews turned for help and comfort when their temple was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70. It is also where the American-Jewish composer Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) turned for the text of the last movement of his first symphony, “Jeremiah,” which was composed and performed during the Holocaust of the 1940s. In a world of overwhelming human suffering, Lamentations gives voice to the deepest agonies of grief, with the hope that some comfort may come from crying out to God for mercy.

The first lament opens with Jerusalem’s response to her sad predicament: “She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks” (1:2a). There was much to be lamented:

From on high he sent fire; into my bones he made it descend; he spread a net for my feet; he turned me back; he has left me stunned, faint all the day long. My transgressions were bound into a yoke; by his hand they were fastened together; they were set upon my neck; he caused my strength to fail; the Lord gave me into the hands of those whom I cannot withstand. The LORD rejected all my mighty men in my midst; he summoned an assembly against me to crush my young men; the Lord has trodden as in a winepress the virgin daughter of Judah. (vv. 13– 15)

Jerusalem was devastated. She mourned by this time less for what she had suffered than for what she had become. Jerusalem had been betrayed by her allies, especially Egypt: 

Among all her lovers she has none to comfort her; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her; they have become her enemies… When her people fell into the hand of the foe, and there was none to help her, her foes gloated over her; they mocked at her downfall…. I called to my lovers, but they deceived me; my priests and elders perished in the city, while they sought food to revive their strength. (vv. 2b, 7b, 19; cf. Jeremiah 37:7)

Many of her inhabitants had been sent into exile in Babylon: 

Judah has gone into exile because of affliction and hard servitude; she dwells now among the nations, but finds no resting place; her pursuers have all overtaken her in the midst of her distress…. Her foes have become the head; her enemies prosper … her children have gone away, captives before the foe…. … hear, all you peoples, and see my suffering; my young women and my young men have gone into captivity.” (vv. 3, 5a, 5c, 18b)

The holy city, the seat of David, had suffered countless losses. Pilgrims no longer thronged to “The festival” (v. 4a). Merchants no longer walked through her gates (v. 4b). The “majesty” (God) had departed from her temple (v. 6a). Her princes were “like deer that find no pasture; they fled without strength before the pursuer” (v. 6b). Her palaces were looted and her Holy of Holies was defiled: 

Jerusalem remembers in the days of her affliction and wandering all the precious things that were hers from days of old…. The enemy has stretched out his hands over all her precious things; for she has seen the nations enter her sanctuary, those whom you forbade to enter your congregation. (vv. 7a, 10)

In the streets, desperate people negotiated for their very lives.

All her people groan as they search for bread; they trade their treasures for food to revive their strength. (v. 11a; cf. v. 19b)

After suffering all these calamities, the survivors were reduced to bitter and unrelieved anguish: 

The roads to Zion mourn, for none come to the festival; all her gates are desolate; her priests groan; her virgins have been afflicted, and she herself suffers bitterly…. For these things I weep; my eyes flow with tears; for a comforter is far from me, one to revive my spirit; my children are desolate, for the enemy has prevailed. (vv. 4, 16)

The reason for Jerusalem’s defeat, and thus for her sorrow, was not hard to find. The prophet Jeremiah had been warning about it for decades. He had seen it all coming— the failed alliances (Jeremiah 2:18, 36, 37; 37:7), the deadly siege (4:16, 17; 6: 3– 6), the desperate famine (5:17; 8:13; 9:15; 12:10– 13; 14:1– 6), the fallen temple (7:12– 15; 27:16– 22), and the forgotten festivals (7:34; 16: 1– 9; 25:10), followed by a long exile (9:16; 10:18; 13:18, 19; 25: 8– 11). All this was the result of Judah’s sin: “The LORD has afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions” (Lamentations 1:5b). The word Jeremiah uses for “Transgressions” here suggests outright rebellion. To emphasize the point, he compares Jerusalem to a debased, abused woman still smeared in her own blood.

Jerusalem sinned grievously; therefore she became filthy; all who honored her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness; she herself groans and turns her face away. Her uncleanness was in her skirts; she took no thought of her future; therefore her fall is terrible; she has no comforter. (vv. 8, 9a)

What Jerusalem experienced was fitting punishment for her sins. When, if ever, would she repent? Finally the city speaks. Interspersed with the poetic description of her woes are several comments addressed directly to God, not by the prophet Jeremiah, but by the city of Jerusalem. “O LORD, behold my affliction, for the enemy has triumphed!” (v. 9c). “Look, O LORD, and see, for I am despised” (v. 11b). What follows is Jerusalem’s complaint about the mistreatment she has received at the hands of her enemies, with an appeal for God to judge them:

They heard my groaning, yet there is no one to comfort me. All my enemies have heard of my trouble; they are glad that you have done it. You have brought the day you announced; now let them be as I am. Let all their evildoing come before you, and deal with them as you have dealt with me because of all my transgressions; for my groans are many, and my heart is faint. (vv. 21, 22)

Even while the city cries for vengeance, however, she confesses her many sins:

The LORD is in the right, for I have rebelled against his word…. Look, O LORD, for I am in distress; my stomach churns; my heart is wrung within me, because I have been very rebellious. In the street the sword bereaves; in the house it is like death. (vv. 18a, 20)

The book of Lamentations is one long illustration of the eternal principle that “whatever one sows, that will he also reap” (Galatians 6: 7b). As Jerusalem discovered, most of sin’s wounds are self-inflicted. Rudyard Kipling (1865– 1936) made this point in a poem called “Natural Theology.” The poem was Kipling’s way of wrestling with the question, why does God let bad things happen to good people? In the poem, suffering souls wrestle with the meaning of their afflictions. Each of them asks, “Why have the gods afflicted me?” This was Kipling’s answer: 

This was none of the good Lord’s pleasure; For the Spirit He sets in Man is free; But what comes after is measure for measure And not a God that afflicteth thee. As was the sowing so the reaping is now, and evermore shall be. Thou art delivered to thine own keeping. Only thyself hath afflicted thee.

There is a major problem with Kipling’s theology. Suffering is the Lord’s pleasure, the result of his providence as well as his justice. Jerusalem suffered what God decreed that she should suffer:

Zion stretches out her hands, but there is none to comfort her; the LORD has commanded against Jacob that his neighbors should be his foes; Jerusalem has become a filthy thing among them. (Lamentations 1:17)

Yet the point Kipling was trying to make is valid: Measure for measure, the wounds of sin are self-inflicted. In the end, Jerusalem got exactly what she deserved, and she had only herself to blame. Happily, the message of the Bible is that God has provided a way to escape his wrath. There is a hint of this in Judah’s first lament, which includes a verse Christians have long considered descriptive or even prophetic of the sufferings of Christ:

Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me, which the LORD inflicted on the day of his fierce anger. (v. 12)

In a work entitled “Crucifixion,” the musician John Stainer (1840–1901) put the words of this cry into the mouth of Christ on the cross: “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?” This verse is considered a foreshadowing of the cross for three reasons. First, the crucifixion was the most severe of all sufferings, involving both the spiritual pain of the Son’s separation from the Father and the physical pain of his long, slow asphyxiation. Was any suffering like his suffering? 

Furthermore, what Christ endured on the cross was the wrath of God. God brought suffering on the crucified Christ in “The day of his fierce anger.” Finally, no one recognized what was being accomplished on the cross— namely, the redemption of lost sinners. The people who passed by considered Christ nothing, pausing only long enough to give him their mockery and abuse.

Like Jerusalem before him, Jesus was not simply despised and rejected— he was also ignored. The Interpreter’s Bible draws this comparison: 

Years ago there was painted a picture that haunts the memory of those who have seen it. It is a scene in some public place. Christ is at the center, not on a cross, but tied by his hands with a rope to a kind of altar, head bowed, a crown of thorns on it, his body bent low in suffering. Near by is the inscription Deo Ignoto— “To the Unknown God.” Past him is flowing, on one side and the other, a crowd of people representative of our modern life, men and women in rich dress and poor people in ragged attire; clergymen engaged in heated theological discussion; men reading newspapers, a priest intoning a prayer, a mother and her child— all sorts of people. Only one of them looks at the suffering figure of the Savior, and she but for one shocked glance. Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? What a picture of our modern life in its neglect of the Christ!

Those who stop long enough for an answer discover that the cross means everything in the world. It means forgiveness of sin, peace with God, and everlasting life. Thus the Christian lingers at the cross, and sings: 

O glorious King, we bless thee, no longer pass thee by; O Jesus, we confess thee, the Son enthroned on high. Lord, grant to us remission; life through thy death restore; Yea, grant us the fruition of life forevermore. 

 Who has believed what he has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? 2For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. 3He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. 4Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 5But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.