Five poems written at the smoking end of everything Jeremiah had spent forty years warning about. It is the shortest book in this section and the one the whole section has been moving toward.

Jeremiah’s other voice

The book carries no author’s name, but it has always been read as Jeremiah’s, and it reads like him — same city, same catastrophe, same grief. And he had been grieving it in advance for four decades.

“I wish that my head were ⌜filled with⌝ water and my eyes were a fountain of tears so that I could cry day and night for my dear people who have been killed.”Jeremiah 9:1 · GW

That is the prophet weeping over a city that was still standing. So this is not really a separate book. It is the same man’s other voice. For forty years he told them what was coming and they would not have it; Lamentations is what he had left to say once it came. Prophecy and grief out of one pen.

Which means the page to read beside this one is Jeremiah. The warnings there and the weeping here are one ministry, before and after.

Where the two measures finally agree

The kings and prophets chart runs on two measures at once, and most of the time they disagree. One asks whether a reign was good for the nation — borders, wealth, security. The other asks whether it was faithful to the covenant. A king can score well on the first and badly on the second, and many of them did.

Jeroboam II is the extreme case. Under him the northern kingdom reached its widest borders and its greatest prosperity — by the national measure, a golden age. And that is precisely when Amos and Hosea are sent, against ivory houses and fat complacency. The gap between the two measures is the entire prophetic complaint. For four centuries the prophets stand in that gap insisting the accounts do not agree and that one day they will.

In Lamentations they agree.

The nation is finished by any measure you care to use — walls down, temple burned, king blinded, people marched off. And the book does not attribute one line of it to bad luck, bad alliances, or Babylonian strength.

“The LORD is right in what he did, because I rebelled against his word.”Lamentations 1:18 · GW

That is Zion speaking, and it is an astonishing thing for a ruined city to say. Not we were outnumbered. Not God abandoned us. The LORD is right.

“The LORD has accomplished what he had planned to do. He carried out the threat he announced long ago.”Lamentations 2:17 · GW

He carried out the threat he announced long ago. That is the two measures closing. Everything the prophets said would happen has happened, on time, by the hand that said it.

And the old assumption dies out loud:

“Neither the kings of the earth nor anyone living on earth could believe that enemies or invaders would ever get through the gates of Jerusalem.”Lamentations 4:12 · GW

That is the national measure at the moment it fails. Everyone believed Jerusalem was safe because Jerusalem had always been safe — the temple was in it, God was in the temple, and the city could not fall. The next verse says why it did: not Babylonian strength, but the sins of Jerusalem’s prophets and the crimes of its priests. And notice who is left to say so — the one man who had been saying it for forty years while they called him a traitor.

Grief in alphabetical order

The shape of the book is doing something, and it is worth knowing before you read it.

Chapters 1, 2 and 4 are acrostics: twenty-two stanzas, each beginning with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph to tav. Chapter 3 does it three times over — sixty-six verses, three to a letter. Chapter 5 has twenty-two verses, the right number, and no acrostic at all.

The outline

Chapter 1 — The Desolation of Zion

The city as a widow. Once crowded with people, once important among the nations, once a princess among the provinces — now doing forced labour. Half the chapter is the prophet describing her and half is the city speaking for herself, and one line runs through both: no one offers it comfort. Five times in twenty-two verses. Said that often, it stops being a description and becomes the complaint.

Chapter 2 — The Lord has withheld His Mercy

The hardest chapter, and Henry’s heading is exact. The destroyer here is not Babylon. It is God: He planned to destroy the wall, He marked it off with a line, He did not take His hand away. Everything a reader wants to say about second causes — politics, alliances, bad kings, a stronger empire — chapter 2 refuses. The mercy is withheld, and the book will not soften it.

Chapter 3 — Zion Afflicted by the Lord

The centre of the book, and the one place it turns. It opens in the first person — I am the man who has experienced suffering under the rod of God’s fury — and goes down further than anything before it. Then, at the middle of the middle chapter, inside the tightest part of the triple acrostic, it turns on one sentence: the reason I can still find hope is that I keep this one thing in mind.

“The lovingkindnesses of Yahweh indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.”Lamentations 3:22–23 · LSB

Nothing has changed outside. The city is still rubble; no relief has arrived. The turn is not a change of circumstance but a change of what he keeps in mind — and it is set in the most rigid part of the most rigid poem in the book, about as far from a sentimental impulse as it is possible to get.

Chapter 4 — Zion Punished for Its Sin

The siege remembered in detail, and it is unbearable — mothers who cooked their own children during the blockade. This is the chapter where the old assumption dies (4:12), and where the blame is laid on the prophets and priests who had assured the city it was safe.

Chapter 5 — A Plea for God’s Mercy

No longer a poem about the fall but a prayer out of the aftermath: orphans, no music, foxes roaming on Mount Zion. Twenty-two verses, and the alphabet is gone. It ends like this —

“Why have you completely forgotten us? Why have you abandoned us for such a long time? O LORD, bring us back to you, and we’ll come back. Give us back the life we had long ago,”Lamentations 5:20–21 · GW

— and then, the last line of the book:

“unless you have completely rejected us ⌜and⌝ are very angry with us.”Lamentations 5:22 · GW

It does not resolve

That is where it stops. Not on the compassions of chapter 3, but on an unanswered unless — the possibility left standing that God is finished with them. It is hard enough an ending that in synagogue reading verse 21 is repeated afterward rather than close on it.

Leaving it unresolved is honest. The answer does not come in this book, and Jeremiah did not have it. It comes seventy years later, and it comes out of Babylon.

Which is worth noticing about where you are standing. The same catastrophe is being watched from two places at once: from inside the ruins by an old man who saw it coming, and from inside the conqueror’s palace by a young man taken out before it started. Daniel read Jeremiah there and grieved the same city from a thousand miles away. Lamentations is the view from the ashes; Daniel is the view from the court. Between them you have the whole of it.