Bible Dictionary
Lamentations
Title
The Hebrew title of this book, Ecah, is taken, like thetitles of the five books of Moses, from the Hebrew word withwhich it opens. Author
The poems included in this collectionappear in the Hebrew canon with no name attached to them, butJeremiah has been almost universally regarded as their author.Date
The poems belong unmistakably to the last days of thekingdom, or the commencement of the exile, B.C. 629-586. Theyare written by one who speaks, with the vividness and intensityof an eye-witness, of the misery which he bewails.Contents
The book consists of five chapter, each of which,however, is a separate poem, complete in itself, and having adistinct subject, but brought at the same time under a planwhich includes them all. A complicated alphabetic structurepervades nearly the whole book. (1) Chs. 1,2 and 4 containtwenty-two verses each, arranged in alphabetic order, eachverse falling into three nearly balanced clauses; ch.(lamentations 2:19) forms an exception, as having a fourthclause. (2) Ch. 3 contains three short verses under each letterof the alphabet, the initial letter being three times repeated.(3) Ch. 5 contains the same number of verses as chs. 1,2,4, butwithout the alphabetic order. Jeremiah was not merely apatriot-poet, weeping over the ruin of his country; he was aprophet who had seen all this coming, and had foretold it asinevitable. There are perhaps few portions of the Old Testamentwhich appear to have done the work they were meant to do moreeffectually than this. The book has supplied thousands with thefullest utterance for their sorrows in the critical periods ofnational or individual suffering. We may well believe that itsoothed the weary years of the Babylonian exile. It enterslargely into the order of the Latin Church for the services ofpassion-week. On the ninth day of the month of Ab(july-august), the Lamentations of Jeremiah were read, year byyear, with fasting and weeping, to commemorate the misery outof which the people had been delivered.
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