Charles James Ball

“ In cryptic fashion the poet thus registers a vow of vengeance on the Philistines. Both kinds of acrostic occur side by side in the Psalms. Psalm cx., an acrostic of the same kind as David’s elegy, is followed by Psalms cxi. cxii., which are alphabetical acrostics, like the Lamentations. Such artifices are not in themselves greater clogs on poetic expression than the excessive alliteration of old Saxon verse or the strict rhymes of modern lyrics. (Alliteration, both initial and internal, is common in Lamentations.) ”

“ It must be admitted that Lamentations exhibits, upon the whole, “a poet (more) in sympathy with the old life of the nation, whose attitude towards the temple and the king is far more popular than Jeremiah’s” (W. Robertson Smith) ; cf. i. 4, 10, 19, ii. 6, 7, 20c. (v.) While we find in Lamentations some things that we should not have expected from Jeremiah, we miss other things characteristic of the prophet. There is no trace of his confident faith in the restoration of both Israel and Judah (Jer. iii. 14-18, xxiii. 3-8, xxx.-xxxiii.) ”

“ This metre came in time to be distinctive of elegy. The text of Lamentations, however, so often deviates from it, that we can only affirm the tendency of the poet to cast his couplets into this type (Driver) . Some anomalies, both of metre and of sense, may be removed by judicious emendation; and many lines become smooth enough, if we assume a crasis of open vowels of the same class, or a diphthongal pronunciation of others, or contraction or silence of certain suffixes as in Syriac. ”

“ If, however, as is generally recognized, these poems are not the spontaneous and unstudied outpourings of passionate grief, but compositions of calculated art and studied effects, written for a purpose, it is obvious that they need not be contemporary. A poet of a later generation might have sung of the great drama in this fashion. The chief incidents and episodes would be deeply graven in the popular memory; and it is the poet’s function to make the past live again. ”

“ Rather, the contrary; for he implies that The Qinoth contained not only Jeremiah’s single dirge on Josiah, but also the elegies of “all the singing men and singing women,” from the time of Josiah’s death (608) down to his own day (3rd century) . The untimely fate of Josiah became a stock allusion in dirges. It is not meant that for three centuries the dirge-writers had nothing else to sing of; much less, that they sang of the fall of Jerusalem (presupposed by our book) before its occurrence. Upon the whole, it does not seem probable, either that the Chronicler mistook Lamentations iv. ”

“ An internal connexion will now be apparent in all the stanzas.
General subject and outline of contents.—The theme of Lamentations is the final siege and fall of Jerusalem (586 B.C.) , and the attendant and subsequent miseries of the Jewish people.
In ch. i. we have a vivid picture of the distress of Zion, after all is over. The poet does not describe the events of the siege, nor the horrors of the capture, but the painful experience of subjection and tyranny which followed. Neither this nor ch. ii. is strictly a “dirge.” Zion is not dead. ”

“ The uniform gloom of this, the most dirge-like of all the pieces, is unrelieved by a single ray of hope, even the hope of vengeance; cf. chapters i. iii. iv. ad fin.
Chapter iii.—Here the nation is personified as a man (cf. Hos. xi. 1) , who laments his own calamities. In view of i. 12–22, ii. 20-22, this is hardly a serious deviation from the strict form of elegy (Klagelied) . Budde makes much of “the close external connexion with ch. ii.” The truth is that the break is as great as between any two of these poems. ”

“ The prefatory note there may come from a Hebrew MS., but perhaps refers to chapter i. only (“Jeremiah sang this dirge”) . The idea that Lamentations was originally appended to Jeremiah in the Hebrew Canon, as it is in the old versions, and was afterwards separated from it and added to the other Megilloth for the liturgical convenience of the Synagogue, rests on the fact that Josephus (Ap. i. 1, 8) and, following him, Jerome and Origen reckon 22 books, taking Ruth with Judges and Lamentations with Jeremiah; whereas the ordinary Jewish reckoning gives 24 books, as in our Hebrew Bibles. ”

“ The point of view of Lamentations sometimes differs from that of the prophet. This need not be the case in i. 21 f. where the context shows that the “enemies” are not the Chaldeans, but Judah’s ill neighbours, Edom, Ammon, Moab and the rest (cf. iv. 21 f.; iii. 59-66 may refer to the same foes) . Ch. ii. 9c may refer to popular prophecy (“her prophets”; cf. verse 14) , which would naturally be silenced by the overwhelming falsification of its comfortable predictions (iv. 14 ff.; cf. Jer. xiv. 13; Ezek. vii. 26 f.; Psalm lxxiv. 9) . ”

“ There is no evidence that this artificial reckoning according to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet was ever much more than a fanciful suggestion. Even in the Septuagint the existing order may not be original. It appears likely that Lamentations was not translated by the same hand as Jeremiah (Nöldeke) . Unlike the latter, the Septuagint Lamentations sticks closely to the Massoretic text. The two books can hardly have been united from the first. On the strength of 2 Chron. xxxv. 25, some ancient writers (e.g. Jerome ad Zech. xii. 11) held that Jeremiah composed Lamentations. ”

“ Lam. i. 10, מחמדום‎; Is. lxiv. 10; Lam. i. 15; Is. lxiii. 2; Lam. ii. 1; Is. lxvi. 1; Lam. ii. 2c; Is. xliii. 28; Lam. ii. 13 the 3 verbs; Is. xl. 18, 25; Lam. ii. 15c; Is. lx. 15b; Lam. iii. 26 דומם‎ ”