LAMENTATIONS 241
and reached great artistic perfection at an early date, as appears from David's elegy on Saul and Jonathan; and as it was practised by persons of special skill, whose services were engaged by the relatives of the dead, it naturally assumed a certain formal and even artificial character. This accounts for the use in our book of the elaborate acrostic form, which to our minds seems little suited for such composition. We are not to think of these dirges as an unstudied effusion of natural feeling, but as carefully elaborated poems in which every element of pity and terror which the subject supplied is brought forward with conscious art to stir the minds of the hearers. It is far from improbable that the Lamentations were originally composed, as Ewald suggests, for a solemn act of mourning in which the captive or fugitive Israelites united, and we know that they ultimately took their place in the ritual of the great day of mourning, the 9th of Ab, when the synagogue still celebrates the fall of the temple.[1] The fast or weeping of the fifth month (Ab) was already an old usage in the time of Zechariah (vii. 3), and it is quite possible that the ritual use of the book of Lamentations goes back to the early days of this ancient custom, Such considerations meet the difficulty which has sometimes been felt in supposing a single author to have written a whole series of elegies on the fall of Jerusalem. In a solemn and formal ceremony of mourning the repetition of the same theme in successive songs of lamentation is only natural. These observations do not of course prove the unity of the book, but they add force to the arguments for unity derived from the plan and language of the whole, and urged by critics, like Ewald and Nägelsbach, who are not influenced by the tradition which makes Jeremiah the author. The evidence for unity of authorship, it may be at once ob served, applies most forcibly to the first four chapters, which are also connected by their acrostic form, and especially by the peculiarity in the order of the alphabet already alluded to as still found in chaps, ii., iii., and iv., and perhaps at one time found even in chap. i.
The first elegy commences with a picture of the distress of Zion
during and after the siege (i. 1-11), Jerusalem, or the people of
Judah, being figured as a widowed and dishonoured princess. Then
in the latter half of the poem she herself takes tip the lamentation,
describes her grievous sorrow, confesses the righteousness of
Jehovah's anger, and invokes retribution on her enemies. In the
second chapter the desolation of the city and the horrors of the
siege are again rehearsed and made more bitter by allusion to the
joy of the enemies of Israel. The cause of the calamity is national
sin, which false prophets failed to denounce while repentance was
still possible, and now no hope remains save in tears and supplication
to stir the compassion of Jehovah for the terrible fate of his people.
The third elegy takes a personal turn, and describes the affliction
of the individual Israelite or of the nation under the type of a
single individual under the sense of Jehovah's just but terrible
indignation. But even this affliction is a wholesome discipline.
It draws the heart of the singer nearer to his God in penitent
self-examination, sustained by trust in Jehovah's unfailing mercy,
which shows itself in the continued preservation of His people
through all their woes. From the lowest pit the voice of faith
calls to the Redeemer, and hears a voice that says, "Fear not."
Jehovah will yet plead the cause of His people, and so in the
closing verses the accents of humble entreaty pass into a tone of
confident appeal for just vengeance against the oppressor. In the
fourth acrostic the bitter sorrow again bursts forth in passionate
wailing. The images of horror imprinted on the poet's soul during
the last months of Jerusalem's death-struggle and in the flight that
followed are painted with more ghastly detail than in the previous
chapters, and the climax is reached when the singer describes the
capture of the king, "the breath of our nostrils, the anointed of
Jehovah, of whom, we said, 'Under his shadow we shall live among
the nations.'" The cup of Israel's sorrow is filled up. The very
completeness of the calamity is a proof that the iniquity of Zion
has met with full recompense. The day of captivity is over, and
the wrath of Jehovah is now ready to pass from His people to visit
the sins of Edom, the most merciless of its foes.
Thus far there is both unity and progress in the thought.
Behind the division into four acrostics lies a larger grouping in three sections, each of which begins with the elegiac i"G*K, followed by a representation in increasing detail of the great calamity, and passes on through the thought of Jehovah's righteousness to hope, which, as in Psalm cxxxvii., finds its characteristic culmination and point of rest in the assurance of righteous vengeance. The central section (chaps, ii. and iii. ) is the most subdued in tone, and sounds the profoundest depths of religious feeling, while the opening sec tion presents the theme in its broadest unity, under the form of personification, and is balanced in chap. iv. by the surging flood of an anguish which pours itself forth all the more unreservedly that it contains the seeds of hope.
The fifth chapter, which takes the form of a prayer, does not follow the scheme common to the three foregoing sections. The elegy proper must begin with the utterance of grief for its own sake. Here on the contrary the first words are a petition, and the picture of Israel's woes comes in to support the prayer. The point of rest too is changed, and the chapter closes under the sense of continued wrath. The centre of the singer's feeling no longer lies in the recollection of the last days of Jerusalem, but in the long continuance of a divine indignation which seems to lay a measureless interval between the present afflicted state of Israel and those happy days of old which are so fresh in the recollection of the poet in the first four chapters. The details too are drawn less from one crowning misfortune than from a continued state of bondage to the servants of the foreign tyrant (ver. 8), and a continued series of insults and miseries. And with this goes a change in the consciousness of sin: "Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities" (ver. 7; compare Zech. i. 2-6, and similar complaints in very late psalms). These differences, combined with the absence of the acrostic form, suggest that the chapter may be a later addition. It may be noted also that in ver. 6 the community which joins in the prayer has humiliating relations to Assyria (Syria?) on the one hand and to Egypt on the other, which seems to imply that it dwells in Palestine, – a situation to which the complaint that strangers possess its land and houses, that the weak remnant of Israel is in constant danger from Bedouin incursions (ver. 9), and the picture of the foxes that walk among the ruins of Zion, may also point. Moreover, the fact that the book has five parts, like the Psalter and the Pentateuch, makes it very conceivable that it received its present form after the Pentateuch was complete, that is, after the time of Ezra. The linguistic arguments for the unity of the book (most fully stated by Nägelsbach, p. xvi.) seem to break down as regards chap. v.
According to a tradition which passed unquestioned
among Jews and Christians till recent times, the author of
the whole book is the prophet Jeremiah. To estimate the
value of this tradition, we must trace it back as far as
possible. A note prefixed to the Septuagint translation
says that, "after Israel was taken captive and Jerusalem
laid waste, Jeremiah sat down and wept, and sang this
elegy over Jerusalem." This note may very possibly have
stood in the Hebrew copy of the translator, but it certainly
cannot be regarded as part of the original text, and it does
not bring the tradition within three hundred years of the
age of Jeremiah. Another argument bearing on the
authority of the tradition has regard to the original place
of the book in the Old Testament canon. In Hebrew
Bibles the Lamentations stand among the Hagiographa,
forming one of the five Megilloth or small books written
on separate rolls for liturgical use on separate occasions.
In the common order of printed Hebrew Bibles the book
stands third among the Megilloth, because in the order of
the ecclesiastical year the solemnity of the 9th of Ab was
the third annual occasion at which a Megillah was used
(see CANTICLES, vol. v. p. 32). In the Septuagint and
Syriac, on the other hand, the Lamentations are attached
to the book of Jeremiah, Baruch intervening in the former
version; and it has been often supposed that this was the
older arrangement, that is, that even in Hebrew copies the
book originally formed an appendix to Jeremiah, and was
afterwards separated for liturgical reasons. The argument
for this view turns on the fact that side by side with the
Talmudic enumeration of twenty-four Old Testament books,
agreeably to the present Hebrew arrangement, there was
another enumeration which gave twenty-two books, taking
Ruth with Judges and Lamentations with Jeremiah
(Jerome, Prol. Gal.). This seems to be the reckoning
- ↑ See Mas. Sôpherîm, chap, xviii., and the notes in Müller's edition, Leipsic, 1878.
