I. Name

In our Hebrew Bible it is called Ekhah, "Ah, how!" from the fact that this word begins three of the five sections into which the book is divided. In the Talmud, and among the later Jews it is called Qinoth, "Dirges," "Elegies." In the Septuagint it is called Threnoi, in the Vulgate, Lamentationes. Hence our English Lamentations. The words "Of Jeremiah" are added to the title in the Septuagint.

II. Position

In the Hebrew Bible it forms the third of the five Megilloth and was read annually on the ninth day of the month Ab (our August), the day observed in commemoration of the destruction of the Temple. In the Septuagint and the Vulgate it follows the book of Jeremiah and this is its position in our English Bible. Bleek thinks that in the Hebrew Bible it originally stood next to Jeremiah, but was removed to its present position among the Megilloth in order to have them all in one place.

III. Contents

The book consists of five dirges, having the same general subject, the overthrow of the kingdom of Judah, but each one giving expression to a special phase of the calamity. In the third the nation is personified in the person of the writer.

Dirge 1. The desolation wrought by transgression. Ch 1.

Dirge 2. The terrors of judgment when Jehovah appears. Ch. 2.

Dirge 3. The nation's anguish and its hope. Ch. 3.

Dirge 4. The sad contrast between the past and the present. Ch. 4.

Dirge 5. The confession and plea for help. Ch. 5.

The nature of the subject allows a freedom of treatment which would not be expected in an ordinary composition.

IV. Its Structure

The mechanical structure demands attention. The first four of the five dirges are acrostics, each verse beginning with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet in succession. In the third dirge the initial letter is repeated three times, thus giving to it sixty-six verses while the others have only twenty-two. The fifth has twenty-two verses but they lack the alphabetical order. In the first four the verses are longer than usual and are generally marked by the caesural pause, which divides the line into a longer and a shorter section, the second being less closely allied to the first than is common in Hebrew poetry. (i:i; 2:3.)

As a specimen of elegiac poetry the book stands without a rival. Its characteristic feature is the irregular formation of the verse lines. The peculiar rhythm is well sustained throughout. As it dwells upon the details of the misery and suffering, laments the causes which have occasioned it, seeks for relief in the thought of God's mercy and sees a gleam of hope in the abiding faithfulness of Him who has shown His displeasure by visiting them in judgment, we are reminded of Tennyson's In Memoriam. The nation has fallen, the sorrow is unmeasured, but God has done it and through repentance His favor may be regained.

The book is plainly the product of art as well as the expression of grief, but the art gives an added pathos to the grief, since it brings out the details in such a way as to lead us through the various elements of the suffering up to the final supplication for mercy and the relief found in the thought of a covenant-keeping God.

V. The Author

In the Septuagint we find this statement in the way of a preface: "And it came to pass, after Israel was taken captive and Jerusalem devastated, that Jeremiah sat weeping, and lamented this lamentation over Jerusalem, and said." This is not in the Hebrew text, but its presence in the first translation shows that the idea that Jeremiah wrote the book is of very early origin. The Targum repeats the assertion and Josephus, Antiq., X. 5, I, speaks of such a work of Jeremiah, but says it referred to the death of King Josiah, rather than to the destruction of Jerusalem. This statement seems to have grown out of the assertion made in 2 Chron. 35:25, but the two works are evidently independent of each other. That Jeremiah is the author is inferred from the fact that the Septuagint and Syriac translations have placed it along with the prophecies of Jeremiah and added to the title, "Lamentations," the words "of Jeremiah."

The same tender, reverent spirit, broken yet submissive because the punishment was deserved, runs through the entire poem and is entirely in agreement with Jeremiah as seen in his prophecies.

It was evidently written by an eye-witness of the disaster and one able to appreciate the greatness of the destruction, because of his intimate knowledge of all the details of the condition of both city and people, as Jeremiah was.

There is great similarity of style and manner of individual expression between the two books, such as "Daughter of my people," Lam. 2:11, 3:48, 4:10, and Jer. 8:11, 14:17; and the reference to tears as evidence of grief, Lam. 1:16, 3:48, and Jer. 9:1, 14:17. This similarity extends also to the peculiar words. Lam. 3:47 and Jer. 48:43.

Later critics have denied both the unity of the book and the authorship of Jeremiah, claiming that the fifth poem, not having the acrostic arrangement, and the first four, not being constructed alike, call for different authorship, as if such technical variations could not be the work of one man. They also find occasional expressions which do not seem to them to be suitable to Jeremiah, while some words found in Lamentations are not found in the Prophecies. They argue also that a writer of Jeremiah's genius would not submit himself to such restraint as is demanded in the acrostic composition of the Lamentations. To which we may reply that such technicalities are often resorted to to increase the power of a poem, and further it is idle to attempt to define the limits within which a writer will confine himself in the expression of his ideas.

Kautzsch, The Literature of the Old Testament, p. 92, says, "Lamentations betrays in almost every part so lively a recollection of the closing period of the siege and taking of Jerusalem, that at least the greater portion of it can have been written by no one who was not an eye-witness or a younger contemporary of these events." And Bleek says, Introduction to the Old Testament, II. p. 102, "The traditional view that Jeremiah was the author of these songs . . . may be assumed as certain."

LITERATURE

Commentaries of Keil, Cheyne, Plumptre and Henderson at the end of their commentaries on Jeremiah. Introductions of Bleek, Driver, Keil, and article "Lamentations," in Bible Dictionaries of Kitto, Smith, Hastings, and same article in Encyclopedia Britannica.