Day 237. Lamentations 1-2

The five poems that make up the Book of Lamentations are laments bewailing the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. They were traditionally ascribed to Jeremiah, but in truth no one really knows who wrote them. The first four poems are acrostics—each stanza begins with one of the 22 consecutive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The ancients loved these word-games, and in a preliterate age the pattern was no doubt an aid to memory when the poems were recited.
Poem 1
Here the despoiled and deserted city of Jerusalem is compared to a widow, alone and weeping because "Judah has gone into exile with suffering" (1:3) and "her children have gone away" (1:5). Widows in Bible time, deprived of the support of husband and children, were in a truly unenviable position. God was praised as the husband of widows and the protector of orphans. But widowed Jerusalem has been abandoned even by God. She is given a voice to cry out--"Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me, which the LORD inflicted on the day of his fierce anger' (1:12). The one who was rich is now destitute and dependent-- the one who was once a "princess among the provinces has become a vassal" (1:1). She is alone now, except for passers-by who mock her--"The roads to Zion mourn, for no one comes to the festivals" (1:4). She sits alone and "remembers . . . all the precious things that were hers in days of
old" (1:7).
The poem is filled with images of desecration and rape. Jerusalem "has seen the nations invade her sanctuary" (1:10)—during the sack of the city, the Babylonians plundered the temple, entering even those places forbidden to the priests to loot them. Violation and sacrilege have left the city in shock—"he left me stunned," she says, "faint all day long" (1:13). She acknowledges her sinfulness, but at the same time suggests that her punishment is not proportionate to her crimes—"The LORD was in the right, for I have rebelled against his word, but hear, all you peoples, and behold my suffering; my young women and young men have gone into captivity" (1:18). Has God gone too far?
Poem 2
This question is carried forward into Poem 2, and the voice becomes even bolder in raising the problem of innocent suffering.
God is portrayed as forgetful, negligent and spiteful. The writer blames the LORD for not having "remembered his footstool in the day of anger" (2:1)—referring to either to the temple or the Ark of the Covenant. The one who had been the protector of Israel "has bent his bow like an enemy" (2:4). The LORD who had promised to establish the house of David and protect the Levitical priesthood has in "his fierce indignation . . . spurned [both] king and priest" (2:6). The voice laments the nation's loss of both human leadership and divine revelation--"her king and princes are among the nations; guidance is no more, and her prophets obtain no vision from the LORD" (2:9).
But it is the suffering of the innocent that overshadows all other losses in the poem. "My eyes are spent with weeping," the voice cries, "because infants and babies faint in the streets of the city" (2:11), and the lives of children are "poured out on their mothers' bosom" (2:12). The LORD has carried out the threat he sent through his prophets; "he has demolished without pity" (2:17). But the punishment raises the deeper questions about who God is and whether the suffering inflicted upon the innocent is his will. Those who witness that suffering can only "lift [their] hands to him for the lives of [his] children, who faint from hunger at the head of every street" (2:19). They can only ask whether there is any way such wounds can be healed--Is there any remedy sufficient for certain magnitudes of suffering—the holocaust, for instance? The question raises ethical questions about the very nature of God himself.
The writer audaciously demands that God consider the horrors of the siege in which mothers were driven to cannibalism by hunger and privation—"Look, LORD, and consider! To whom have you done this? Should women eat their offspring, the children they have borne? Should priest and prophet be killed in the sanctuary of the LORD?" (2:20). Shouldn't a just God place limits upon the punishment he inflicts? When does justice become cruelty? The Book of Lamentations asks these questions as bluntly and honestly as they have ever been asked. We look at photographs of survivors wandering about in the ruins of German cities after the Allied bombings, and ask—Where is God in all this? What are the limits of punishment?