A Literary Approach to the Book of Lamentations

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[First posted in 2013. The original Introduction:

It is timely to feature a book which, most likely, few students venture into reading; for why would anyone wish to vicariously experience the horror of witnessing YHWH’s destruction of the remnant of His people, in His center of worship and governance? Why timely? Because the 9th of Av is a date on which tragic events have occurred in the history of Israel. This commentary is from the book we have featured here as MUST READ/MUST OWN, THE LITERARY GUIDE TO THE BIBLE.

Reformatted and highlighted for S6K post.—Admin1.]

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Lamentations

Francis Landy

Lamentations is as historical as the Song of Songs; it marks, with untempered immediacy, the focal calamity of the Bible, the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E.

The lyric discharges the cumulative emotions suppressed in the narrative and anticipated or recalled in the Prophets. The alienation, temporal and social, of the Prophets suddenly becomes a collective experience. There is no more need to persuade, to find communicable symbols; the voice simply bears witness to its failure, turns over broken images and hopes. The barrenness and desolation of the poem are, then, also matters of rhetoric; the descriptive voice is direct, unenigmatic, as if the scene spoke for itself, and uses rhetorical techniques—repetition, metaphor, personification, and so forth—in the service of negation.

Laments must be as old as love poems; we find laments

for the destroyed cities of Sumer,
laments for the dying god Tammuz,
and, in the Bible, David’s laments for Saul and Jonathan and for Abner.

The Prophets, especially Ezekiel, compose derisive laments for the cities whose doom they foretell.

Grief tries to find expression in an order or words that will —

restore the dead to the human community,
articulate the inexpressible,
turn death into beauty.

Thus the lament closes and echoes back the narrative, as it does in Gilgamesh;

it consummates the prophecy.
It preserves for us the direct impact of the fall of Jerusalem.
But with one reservation: there are five laments.
- Each has its own perspective,
- its own vocabulary
- and rhetorical technique,
- linked by the form (the acrostic, whereby each verse begins with its corresponding letter of the Hebrew alphabet)
- and by verbal and thematic correspondences.

The effect is both of overwhelming plangency, finding the solace of repeated poetic expression, and of polysemy, as the inarticulate initial cry, ‘eikhah, “how,” generates linguistic divergence.

The discourse attempts to—

explain,
illustrate,
and thus mitigate the catastrophe,
to house it in a familiar literary framework;
it must also communicate its own inadequacy.

Its success, in a sense, depends on its failure. This happens, for example, if a poem fades out in a whimper or an ineffectual cry for revenge, and it has to recognize the silence that exhausts it, the power of the enemy, and the necessity of starting again. But this success through the enactment of inadequacy is also reflected, as always, in the details of language.

Let us take the superb beginning: ‘eikhah yashvah badad ha’ir, “How doth the city sit solitary.” Badad, “solitary,” is ambiguous; the city may be solitary because it is unpopulated or because it is isolated among the nations; its uniqueness turns into its nemesis.

This ambiguity is compounded by rabati-‘am, “that was full of people,” which could also mean “mistress of people,” linking the present misery of the city to its former grandeur as rabati bagoyim sarati bamedinot, “mistress of the nations, princess of the provinces” (that is, countries [AR]).

The populace (‘am) could refer either to Zion’s citizens or to the world, and hence to psalms such as 48, quoted in Lamentations 2:15, in which Jerusalem is called “the joy of the whole earth.” But this magnitude is perilous, since the city’s pretensions to grandeur and its illicit relations with the world—hence the loaded terms “mistress … princess”—are held responsible for its fate.

Thus the culminating simile of the first line, “she has become as a widow” [AT], is also ambiguous:

is she bereft of her people,
of YHWH,
of her lovers,
or of all three?

This simile complements “she has become tributary” [AT] at the end of the second line; the repeated verb “has become,” together with the opening “doth sit,” imposes a stillness and finality on the verse that also permeates the second: “She weepeth sore [literally, ‘Weeping she weeps’] in the night, and her tears are [literally, ‘tear is’] on her cheeks [literally, ‘cheek’]: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her.” The repetition of the verb “weep,” though a Hebrew emphatic idiom, suggests reiteration, an ever-replenish plaint: it could well be a model for the book. The sorrow is silhouetted by the quiet of the night and the destroyed city. But the figure of continuity and repetition is juxtaposed with one of arrested time: “her tear is on her cheek.” It is as if she will never escape this moment. This introduces a powerful motif of the first chapter, “There is none to comfort her.”

What, then, is the function —

of the poet
and the poem,
as an attempt at response and consolation?

And further, what is the function of the arch comforter, God?

We come to the central dilemma of the book. It draws on the ready-made explanations of the calamity—

Jerusalem has sinned,
its prophets lied,
they shed innocent blood, and so forth—
without apparent question (at least until the very end, 5:20), as if a bad explanation were better than no explanation, and juxtaposes them with descriptions of misery.

Parataxis works to establish not connections but dissonances. This is very clear in chapter 2, the second poem in the sequence, where God’s wrath is contrasted without comment with the grief of the aged and the young girls, the incessant weeping of the poet, and the starvation of children.

The same images repeat themselves at intervals, as if fixated in the memory, only to be carried ultimately to a logical inversion.

The mothers eat their children,
- to whom they cannot give suck;
the mourners,
- covered in ritual ash,
- lie dead in the dust.

But this is God’s work: “Thou hast slain them in the day of thine anger; thou hast killed, and not pitied” (2:21).

In the first half of the chapter,
- which is an unremitting, frightening, yet almost objective account of God’s onslaught,
- the focus is essentially on physical destruction
- and the paradox of God’s violation of his own holy place;
in the second half of the chapter,
- the catastrophe is solely and gratuitously human.

Yet the sacrilege and the human suffering cannot be entirely dissociated, because the victims are God’s children.

The chapter begins its conclusion with a rhetorical question,

“Behold, O Lord, and consider:

to whom hast thou done this?” (2:20 [AR]).

Among the victims are —

priest
and prophet,although the prophets have ceased to receive visions (2:9)
- killed in the sanctuary (2:20),

and have prophesied falsely (2:14).

Thereby God has fulfilled his ancient purpose,

“that he had commanded in the days of old” (2:17).

Not only are the false prophets, then, agents of his will—a persistent and traumatic biblical theme (for example, in the story of Micaiah, 1 Kings 22)—

but also God is being induced to recognize equated through parallelism in 2:20 to the starving and cannibalized children.
- that despite their wrongdoing
- they are his servants,

But this might also be a metaphorical equivalence: like the children sucking dry breasts,
the prophets receive no vision, there is no Torah (2:9),
and God greedily swallows—just like the death-god Mot in Canaanite myth—his people (2:2, 5, 8).

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The first part of chapter 2 is controlled by

the metaphor of God as an enemy who destroys what is his.
The fortresses of the daughter of Judah(v. 2)
- are really his fortresses (v. 5),
- over which she laments (v. 5).
He substitutes for his mo’ed—
- meaning both “festival”
- and “appointed time”
- —the celebration of the victors in the Temple (v. 7).

The shifting of terms is insistent. The enemy are summoned to this convocation by God, whose instrument they are; God, however, is only apparently an enemy—hence the simile ka’oyev, “like an enemy” (vv. 4, 5)—and will ultimately, so the poet hopes, invite them to a festival or appointed time of retribution (2:22). The compounding of illusions tactically displaces the reality of horror and the hardly concealed conceptual chasm when all the symbols of religious identity have vanished.

Another example of this predicament is “The Lord hath caused the solemn feasts and Sabbaths to be forgotten in Zion” (v. 6), which also uses the word mo’ed.

But festivals and Sabbaths are

seasons of remembrance,
points of contract between contingent time and mythic time,
and hence assertions of cosmic order.

In erasing this memory, God implicitly annuls the symbolic links through which we situate ourselves in the world; amnesia is a reversion to chaos.

The pitiless sequence is interrupted only twice,

once by the grief of the daughter of Judah (2:5),
and a second time by that of the walls of Jerusalem, in a lovely alliterating phrase waya’avel hel wehomah yahdaw ‘umlalu, “therefore he made the rampart and the wall to lament; they languished together” (2:8). The weeping of stones (see 2:18) appeals against God’s relentlessness.

Chapter 3 attempts to escape from these quandaries through transposition to another mode. In it, the central chapter of the book, the poet grieves over his own fate, in terms very reminiscent of Jeremiah, Job, and the anonymous Psalms of Lament. The particular catastrophe, with its vivid immediacy, is replaced by a genre.

The eyewitness of the first two chapters gives way to a series of stock metaphors. This may be illustrated by the initial words of the poems. ‘Eikhah, “How,” the sheer response to something beyond words, is opposed in chapter 3 by ‘ani, “I,” as self-definition as “the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath” (3:1), whose uniqueness is unconvincing because of its conventionality.

The tradition is, however, being used as a resource and a foil. Its evocation affirms that the difference between individual and collective calamity is one of degree, not of kind, that language which was efficacious in the past may also be of service now. It is thus a search through old formulas for a context through which to comprehend this new catastrophe, a search that does not work because it never worked. It is not as if the tradition were directly criticized. The poet talks like Job one minute, and like one of Job’s friends the next. He seems unaware of the contradiction—that a God who refuses to listen to prayer may be persuaded by it. But the appeal is to no avail: the end of the poem is as desperate as the beginning, with a passionate but as yet impotent cry for vindication.

The fourth chapter returns to the theme of the first two, the fall of Jerusalem, and to their initial word, ‘eikhah: it repeats much of their material. It is, however, more understated and shorter; two-line acrostic strophes replace three-line ones. It lacks the pathos of the first chapter, with its personification of weeping Jerusalem, and the dramatic sweep of the second. Instead there is a note of returning reality.

The dominant figure of speech is comparison, which here operates as a powerful distancing device, in contrast to the metaphors of the first two chapters.

Mothers are as cruel to their children as the proverbial ostriches;
the sin of Jerusalem was worse than that of Sodom;
its Nazirites were whiter than snow, are now blacker than black.

These insistent comparisons set the catastrophe in a context that is partly literary, partly historical. The carelessness of ostriches (4:3) effects a spatial displacement to the wilderness, to the absurdity of nature, as in God’s speech from the whirlwind in Job, and the comparison is of course unfair to the mothers of Jerusalem, and consequently a conceit.

Alongside these rhetorical devices that idealize and divert is a simple account of the fall of the city. We experience the defenders waiting in vain for relief,

the growing claustrophobia,
the celerity of the enemy,
the capture of the king.

A feature of this description is emotional economy; for example, the king is depicted as “the breath of our nostrils, the anointed of the Lord” (4:20). (The image is very ancient and has been found in the Tel-el Amarna letters, written a thousand years earlier.) He signifies at once—

the vitality of the state through which his subjects live,
and a divine effluence, as the one who directs his kingdom.

The perception is appropriate and comprehensive; elsewhere in the book, however, it might have been greatly expanded.

Finally, there is a curse against the daughter of Edom, which is reminiscent not only of Obadiah but of the imprecation against Babylon in Psalm 137. The absence of specification of the real enemy, the Babylonians, is perhaps evidence of political expedience, of a people living under occupation; at any rate, Edom, the brother-cum-enemy, is of far g

reater symbolic import. We see here (as in Malachi) the possible beginning of Edom’s career in Hebrew literature as the archetype of Rome and all the enemies of Israel.

The final chapter is an evident coda, distinguished from the others by its brevity and its lack of a formal acrostic. It is a prayer to YHWH to remember all Israel’s sufferings, which are summarized in rapid detail. The language calls to mind that of Job as well as of chapter 3, but without any of Job’s subversive implications. From the appeal to the memory of God and the desolation of Zion, the poet evokes his eternity and apparent forgetfulness, concluding with a plea—despite God’s continuing wrath and utter rejection—for a reversal and renewal of time, a time fraught with ambiguity from the beginning.

Lamentations is one of the most obstrusively formal books in the Bible.

On each side, two chapters of twenty-two verses each surround one of sixty-six verses;
each except the last in an alphabetic acrostic (the third chapter is a triple acrostic;
hence its sixty-six verses).

This formal arrangement is useful for the study of Hebrew metrics, since for once we know where verses begin and end. The acrostic provides a purely external structure for the poem, predictable and yet open to all the possibilities of expression and fragmentation. This assurance and freedom counteract the loss of political and religious structure described in the poem. They may be seen as an ironic wish-fulfilling gesture, an ineffectual assertion of control over language, and hence over thought, in the face of devastating reality. But this formal structure works on a deeper level.

The acrostic is—

a sign of language—
the system of signs—
in which all the letters of the alphabet cooperate to generate meaning.
Beyond this it is a sign language–
- as play,
- free of signification,
  - of the multiple word games that permeate Hebrew poetry.
Language is
- self-fulfilling,
- self-gratifying.

We return to the theme of the first chapter: “She hath none to comfort her.”

Out of the dark night, in which Jerusalem’s tear is on her cheek, the voice rises,

turning the weeping into differentiated poems and words,
human desolation into grandeur.

That plangent phrase recurs through the chapter,

changing context,
seeking a corresponding phrase of consolation from God as well as from Zion’s faithless lovers,
eliciting identification and appeasement from us.

So the phrase, like the poem,

speaks of our solitude amid our ruins,
that the destruction to which it bears witness should turn to hope.

Source: Exodus/Shemoth 24 – "the sight of the Glory of YHVH (was) like a consuming fire" -- We gentiles living in this 21st century are able to experience that climactic moment [God appearing on Sinai] by reading and studying this portion of the TORAH. Indeed, we see YHWH not quite as dramatically as the mixed multitude did, but perhaps even better through these accounts recorded in Exodus. There is a saying that hindsight is 20/20 vision, i.e., we begin to see and understand the question marks in our past only later in our lives, as we mature and hopefully become wiser and more introspective about the meaning or seeming meaninglessness of happenings in history, whether personal, national, or universal. Søren Kierkegaard adds a twist to this: “Only 20:20 vision is hindsight. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” As we endeavor to understand each portion in the TORAH of YHWH, much of it will seem irrelevant to our current situation but if we see beyond the time-bound cultural and religious situations and begin to understand what truly has not change—human nature and the Great Revelator who designed the perfect blueprint for living in peace, happily and contentedly with family, community, country and the nations, the unquestionable conclusion is: TORAH is relevant to ALL humankind, not just to Israel, to this very day.

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