Lamentations 5

¹Remember, O LORD, what has befallen us; look, and see our disgrace!
²Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to aliens.
³We have become orphans, fatherless; our mothers are like widows.
⁴We must pay for the water we drink; the wood we get must be bought.
⁵With a yoke on our necks we are hard driven; we are weary, we are given no rest.
⁶We have made a pact with Egypt and Assyria, to get enough bread.
⁷Our ancestors sinned; they are no more, and we bear their iniquities.
⁸Slaves rule over us; there is no one to deliver us from their hand.
⁹We get our bread at the peril of our lives, because of the sword in the wilderness.
¹⁰Our skin is black as an oven from the scorching heat of famine.
¹¹Women are raped in Zion, virgins in the towns of Judah.
¹²Princes are hung up by their hands; no respect is shown to the elders.
¹³Young men are compelled to grind, and boys stagger under loads of wood.
¹⁴The old men have left the city gate, the young men their music.
¹⁵The joy of our hearts has ceased; our dancing has been turned to mourning.
¹⁶The crown has fallen from our head; woe to us, for we have sinned!
¹⁷Because of this our hearts are sick, because of these things our eyes have grown dim:
¹⁸because of Mount Zion, which lies desolate; jackals prowl over it.
¹⁹But you, O LORD, reign forever; your throne endures to all generations.
²⁰Why have you forgotten us completely? Why have you forsaken us these many days?
²¹Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may be restored; renew our days as of old —
²²unless you have utterly rejected us, and are angry with us beyond measure.

This final poem of Lamentations is the shortest of the five poems that make up the book and it has several differences from the preceding poems. It is one third of the length of the first three poems and half the length of Lamentations four. It also drops the acrostic[1] form but maintains the twenty-two lines that acrostic poems maintain. Yet more significant than the change in form and length is the change in voice and addressee. Previously there have been strong individual voices: daughter Zion, the narrator and the strong man, but now the voice of the poem becomes the communal ‘we.’ God has been a subject of the previous poems but was rarely addressed, now God is the direct addressee of this final poem. God has been absent and closed off throughout this book and yet the poet refuses to give up on God’s countenance returning to consider the plight of the people and acting upon that plight.

Most modern people of faith are used ideas of God inherited from philosophy that refer to God being omnipresent, omniscient, and all powerful. Yet, Hebrew thought doesn’t move in these patterns, nor would they care about a God who was all powerful and all seeing but did not act upon their world. The God of the Hebrew Scriptures is not an unmoved mover but a passionate and responsive God who may turn away in anger but whose steadfast love is unending. Yet, in this moment the people have experienced a God who in anger chooses not to see, hear, or respond to the people. This final poem, now in the voice of the people, once again calls upon their God to look at their situation, to see their troubles and their disgrace, and to act. In many ways the poem is echoes the protest psalms[2] which call upon God to remember the people and to deliver them from their turmoil.

The initial chapters of Jeremiah[3] utilize the metaphor of marriage between God and Jerusalem/Judah/the people, an image that is also utilized in Ezekiel 16 and is implied in the personification of daughter Zion in the initial two chapters of Lamentations. Now the image is reversed in this world where the inheritance of the people has been turned over to strangers and their homes to aliens. In a world where the people of Jerusalem and Judah have become orphans, the LORD is the absent father who has left their mothers to be like widows. God has abandoned the role of protector and provider for the people. Now the people are finding themselves as orphans in a world where nothing is provided. Water and wood must be purchased with hard labor. The joyous memory of childhood is forgotten under the hard labor and long days of their current bondage.

In verse six the people look in retrospect at the past alliances that they utilized to get the food they needed. They have relied upon Egypt and Assyria both for trade and for protection rather than trusting in their God. This reliance on God instead of military might, alliances, trade, and wealth has been a consistent theme in the law and the prophets but also was probably viewed as a naïve and unrealistic approach by many leaders of Israel and Judah. Yet, the poet looks upon the compromises of the past as evidence of the infidelity of the people to the LORD. They went to Egypt and Assyria to get bread in the past because they either did not fully rely on the LORD or were unfaithful to the covenant and therefore under judgment. By the time of Lamentations, Assyria was no longer a power in the world. Egypt continued to be relied on, even though they proved unreliable at the critical moment, by Judah until the collapse of Jerusalem. As the poet tries to make sense of the community’s current reality they look back to the sins of the past to explain the suffering of the present.

The poem describes an unsafe world that the people of Jerusalem now endure. The references may be to the time of the siege of Jerusalem or the entry into exile under Babylon. If the poem refers to the time of the siege of Jerusalem, the slaves that ruled over the people would come from Jerusalem. These would be the leaders left after the initial exile of leaders in 593 BCE when the Babylonians brought the king, many of the nobles and priests, and the best of the nation into Babylon. This is the background of the narrative beginning of the book of Daniel and the place where Ezekiel’s prophecies emerge from. Another alternative is that the ‘slaves’ are the servants of Nebuchadrezzar and the taskmasters who oversaw the removal of the people of Judah to their exile in Babylon. The witnesses of the siege of Jerusalem and the aftermath of the collapse both point to a treacherous time for the people. Providing for the daily needs of an individual or family in this chaotic time may have been a dangerous business. I’m reminded of the situation in Bosnia before U.N. Peacekeepers attempted to provide some stability, where men and women had to risk sniper fire to go to get groceries. Armed violent men could make even the simplest situations perilous. As mentioned in the previous poem, the nobles who had previously avoided having sunburned skin from working outdoors now have their fairer skin blackened by the sun and their fatness reduced by famine. Women are often the victims in times of conflict, and the poem does not shy away from the rape of both virgins and married women.

Elders and princes do not escape the punishment by the newly powerful ones. Being hung up by the hands is a form of torture and humiliation. It is probably not crucifixion, since that seems to emerge from the Persian empire, nor strappado which was a medieval punishment where the person is suspended by their hands being tied behind their back, used famously in Vietnam as a punishment for captured prisoners of war. Young men and old men both suffer in this moment. Young men carry the millstone, and the word for millstone (tehon) used here is not one of the regular words for this. A household millstone would be something a normal young man could easily bear, but perhaps this is something larger, and likewise carrying wood is something boys can do unless these are loads too heavy to bear. It is possible that these young men and boys are being asked to carry the loads that pack animals would normally carry and are being crushed under an unbearable weight. (Goldingay, 2022, p. 201)

The old men and the young men have ceased their normal activities. The music of the young and the gathering at the city gate by the old are now gone. The poem may intentionally echo the ceasing (NRSV are no more) of verse seven to indicate that the reason the music and gathering no loner happen is that the men are gone, they died in the conflict and the initial exile. Death hangs over the people and the remnant likely feel like they are ghosts of their former selves. They are heart sick, and their eyes have dimmed in their despair. Mount Zion, which they believed was established forever, is now the haunt of jackals.

The crisis for the people is the LORD’s inaction. They do not believe that the LORD is incapable of addressing their situation but rather that the LORD has forgotten and forsaken the people. The protest of this poet and the people lead them to cry to their God for restoration. Restore us, O LORD, that we may be restored. But the poem, and this collection of poems, ends surprisingly with a depressing possibility: the LORD has utterly rejected the people, and God whose steadfast love has always been stronger than God’s wrath is now angry beyond measure. The poet, based on the current situation of the people, holds this closing thought as a plausible reality. That they now live in a world where God has permanently turned away, where their prayers will never again be heard, when they will never again be the people of the LORD. It is almost like the poem ends with a shrug. If this is the way, then the orphaned people will have to learn how to live in the absence of their father. If the sins of their ancestors are unforgivable then they will have to learn to live in this dangerous world as the unforgiven.

Lamentations is an uncomfortable book. As Kathleen O’Connor eloquently states about the divine absence in the book:

There is only the blind God, the missing voice that hovers over the entire book. Lamentations is about absence…The experience of divine absence, blindness, and imperviousness to human suffering, expressed in countless ways by several speakers, is the book’s central subject. It is God’s absence from the poems, however, that creates space for the speakers to explore their momentous suffering, to move from numb silence and pre-literate groans to speech that is eloquent, beautiful and evocative and that gives form and shape to the unspeakable. (NIB VI: 1071)

The perception of God’s absence in moments of great suffering is a common experience in both individual and communal sufferings. The scriptures, particularly the Hebrew Scriptures, wrestle and protest God’s apparent absence at critical moments in the stories of the people and individual faithful ones. Lamentations voices a “daring, momentous honesty about the One who hides behind clouds, turns away prayers, and will not pay attention.” (NIB VI:1071) This is an audacious protest to God and is a model of a faithful poet, or poets, attempting to make sense of their place in a world where God seems absent and unwilling to see or hear.

Lamentations is one voice in the collection of voices that make up our scriptures. It is a voice from a time where the poet’s world has collapsed, and God appears absent. Yael Ziegler suggests that the book of Isaiah intentionally adopts some of the language of Lamentations to provide a new vision of hope for the people who survived the exile. (Ziegler, 2021, p. 478) Although the poems of Lamentations come to an end, the people who preserved these poems did not. There would be a time of renewed hope and a new beginning beyond this time of tragedy and heartbreak. Yet, they had to grieve before a new hope could be born. They would encounter this time of God’s wrath, silence, and abandonment before they would encounter a time where God would do a new thing in their midst. The book of Lamentations attempts to use words and structure to bring meaning and order to their grief and suffering. The reality that the community would continue to hand on these poems and later generations would continue to hold them as a part of their sacred writings even as God remains silent throughout the book testifies to their resonance with suffers from many generations.

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[1] Acrostic poetry begins each line with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

[2] Psalm 44; 74; 79.

[3] Particularly Jeremiah 2-4.