Lamentations - Introduction

Introduction

It has to be said that Lamentations is not the most cheerful of books, but it is an important part of Scripture. It was written after the fall of Jerusalem, hence its rather sad nature. The book doesn’t state who it was written by, but tradition has it that Jeremiah was the author, and this makes good sense. The  first four chapters are acrostics, ie there are 22 verse, each one beginning with a consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The fifth chapter also has 22 lines, but does not follow the struct alphabetic sequence.

The first, second and fourth chapters begin with the Hebrew word “ekah”, meaning “How ...!”, and is where the title Lamentations comes from. The book is trying to come to terms with what has happened. An essential part of this is that it is not just the tragedy and the suffering that it seeks to come to terms with, but is also not afraid to face up to the fact of Judah’s sin and her responsibility before God for what had happened. So often in modern preaching there will be a focus on the suffering and tragedy of an event, but a complete denial of the role of our sin in affairs. We witnessed this in the homilies about covid, very few talked about man’s sin. Yet, if we do not face up to the reality of our sin and society’s sin there can be no true understanding, and there can be no salvation.

The graphic descriptions of the destruction of Jerusalem indicate a date not long after the events, with approx 575 BC being a reasonable estimate. The style of writing is similar to that of Jeremiah, and Jeremiah was an eyewitness of the events. So it is reasonable, though not certain, to ascribe authorship to him.