Writings
אֵיכָה
Lamentations
Acrostic poems over a destroyed city: formally tight, emotionally unguarded.
Hebrew nameEikhah, meaning howChapters5Position6 of 11 in Writings
What is in it
Five poems on the fall of Jerusalem. Four are alphabetical acrostics, and the third is a triple one, which means the most extreme grief in the book is also the most rigidly structured part of it.
That tension is the point. The form holds while the content does not.
If you read one chapter
Lamentations 3
The centre: the darkest chapter, and the one line of hope inside it.
Passages worth knowing
- Lamentations 1:1How doth the city sit solitary.
- Lamentations 3:22 to 23His compassions fail not, they are new every morning.
- Lamentations 5:20 to 22The ending, which does not resolve.
Questions to sit with
- 01
Why write the most painful material in the strictest possible form?
- 02
The book ends without comfort. What does refusing to resolve achieve?