Book of the Bible consisting of five elegies corresponding to the five chapters of the book. The overall theological themes of these five poems are:
(a) The destruction of Jerusalem and its holy Temple (587/6 B.C.) and the subsequent Exile are direct results of Judah's grievous sins against God and not an accident of history (e.g., Lam 1:5, 8, 17-18). Judah has sinned grievously even though the nature of the sin is not specifically indicated (e.g., Lam 1:8-9). Neither idolatry nor social injustice are referred to in this book. While the current generation is certainly not blameless (e.g., Lam 5:16), the sins of previous generations may be at least partially responsible for the destruction (e.g., Lam 5:7; cf Jer 31:29; Ezek 18:2).
(b) Prophets did not call Judah's faults to her attention (Lam 2:14), and, in general, misdeeds of prophets and priests contributed to the general sinful atmosphere (e.g., Lam 4:13; cf II Kgs 24:3-4).
(c) The people can only blame themselves for the destruction. The only road to redemption is through bettering themselves and genuine repentance (e.g., Lam 3:22-41; 5:21-22).
Though these five independent poems lament the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in general, chapter 3 deals mainly with the lamentations of an unfortunate individual who suffers illness, indignity and scorn at the hands of his fellow men, and chapter 5 is a liturgical confessional by the people confessing their sins, repenting and begging God for forgiveness. Thus chapters 3 and 5 may best be classified as individual and communal laments respectively, while chapters 1, 2 and 4 belong to the more specific genre of city laments, a genre which, in the Bible, is unique to this book. The inclusion of chapters 3 and 5 as part of Lamentations can be compared to the same phenomenon in several other biblical books e.g., I Samuel 2:1-10; II Samuel chapter 22; Jonah 2:3-10; Habakkuk chapter 3, where similar psalms relating to the book's general content are included. The poetic style of Lamentations resembles that of the rest of biblical poetry in that a majority of verses consists of a pair (or pairs) of parallel stichs. There are, however, two major distinguishing stylistic features in this book:
(a) A clear preference is discernible for the so-called "dirge" meter according to which the second stich in the Hebrew is made intentionally shorter than the first (e.g., Lam 3:58).
(b) Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4 are alphabetic acrostics (1, 2 and 4 are single alphabetic acrostics consisting of 22 verses each corresponding to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, while chapter 3 is a triple alphabetic acrostic consisting of 66 verses), and chapter 5, though not being an acrostic, does consist of 22 verses, equaling the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. The traditional view which attributes Lamentations to Jeremiah is probably wrong concerning the authorship, but approximately right concerning the period of authorship, or at least the compilation of the book, i.e., the exilic period 587/6-538 B.C., when the horrors of the destruction and the upheaval caused by the Exile were still fresh in mind. Lamentations displays no knowledge of the ascent of Cyrus king of Persia, his conquest of Babylon (539 B.C.), or his subsequent edict allowing the Judeans to return to Israel and rebuild the Temple (538 B.C.), so that these later events serve as a convenient terminus ad quem for the dating of the book. The terminus a quo is, of course, the destruction itself in 587/6 B.C. The tradition that Jeremiah was the book's author, because of his major role as prophet of the destruction, already appears in the Greek Septuagint which prefixes the following words to its translation of 1:1 "And it came to pass after Israel had gone into captivity, and Jerusalem was laid waste, that Jeremiah sat weeping and composed this lament over Jerusalem and said�". Other ancient translations (e.g., the Aramaic Targum, the Latin Vulgate and the Syriac Peshitta) as well as the Babylonian Talmud (e.g., Bava Batra 15a) agree with this attribution. While there is no direct biblical evidence, reference is generally made to such verses as Jeremiah 8:21 and more specifically to II Chronicles 35:25 where it is stated that "Jeremiah also lamented for Josiah" (the Judean king who was killed in the Battle of Megiddo 609 B.C.). However, all this evidence is either late or circumstantial. Opposing it is the clear theological contradiction between the Books of Jeremiah and Lamentations: Jeremiah prophesied in advance that disaster would imminently strike Jerusalem as divine punishment for specific ethical shortcomings (Jer chap. 5; 9:1-10), while the Book of Lamentations, written after the destruction, still does not know the nature of Judah's sins.
As stated above, the genre of chapters 1, 2 and 4 is that of city laments, lamenting the fall of a city and the destruction of its Temple. Jeremiah 41:5; Zechariah 7:3-5; 8:19 etc. indicate that such mourning and fasting over the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple had become regular especially during the month of Ab, from 587/6 B.C. Thus Lamentations could have been written in order to be read (or chanted) as part of the regular public mourning (which continues to this very day on the ninth day of Ab according to the Jewish calendar).
