The Message Remix (240 page)

INTRODUCTIONLAMENTATIONS

 

Lamentations is a concentrated and intense biblical witness to suffering.
Suffering is a huge, unavoidable element in the human condition. To be human is to suffer. No one gets an exemption.
It comes as no surprise then to find that our Holy Scriptures, immersed as they are in the human condition, provide extensive witness to suffering.

There are two polar events in the history of the Hebrew people: the Exodus from Egypt and the Exile into Babylon. Exodus is the definitive story of salvation into a free life. God delivered his people from Egyptian slavery (in about 1200 B.C.). It is a story of freedom. It’s accompanied by singing and dancing—an exuberant experience. Exile is the definitive story of judgment accompanied by immense suffering. God’s people are taken into Babylonian slavery (the fall of Jerusalem in 587 B.C. marks the event). It is a time of devastation and lament. It is a terrible experience. The two events, Exodus and Exile, are bookends holding together the wide-ranging experiences of God’s people that fall between the exuberance that accompanies salvation and the suffering associated with judgment.

Lamentations, written out of the Exile experience, provides the community of faith with a form and vocabulary for dealing with loss and pain. The precipitating event, the fall of Jerusalem, is told in 2 Kings 25 and Jeremiah 52. It is impossible to overstate either the intensity or the complexity of the suffering that came to a head in the devastation of Jerusalem and then continued on into the seventy years of exile in Babylon. Loss was total. Carnage was rampant. Cannibalism and sacrilege were twin horrors stalking the streets of destroyed Jerusalem. The desperate slaying of innocent children showed complete loss of respect for human worth, and the angry murder of priests showed absolute loss of respect for divine will. The worst that can happen to body and spirit, to person and nation, happened here—a nadir of suffering. And throughout the world the suffering continues, both in large-scale horrors and in personal agonies.

Neither explaining suffering nor offering a program for the elimination of suffering, Lamentations keeps company with the extensive biblical witness that gives dignity to suffering by insisting that God enters our suffering and is companion to our suffering.

 

 

From:
One tradition says the prophet Jeremiah wrote it, but the book doesn’t say. The poet doubtless lived through the horrors he described.

 

To:
The Jews who went as prisoners of war to Babylon had to figure out how to live after catastrophe. One way they survived was by writing and listening to poetry about the event. Lamentations has the rhythm of traditional funeral dirges. Even today, Jewish synagogues read it aloud each year to mark the twin anniversaries of their Temple’s destruction by Babylon (when the book was written) and later by Rome (in A.D. 70).

 

Re:
587 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who reduced Jerusalem to charred rubble, had a taste for beauty. He built massive walls around Babylon with a magnificently decorated blue gate dedicated to the goddess Ishtar. His Persian wife was lonely in his desert city, so he built her a mountain planted with flowering trees and bushes from Persia. To irrigate it, water had to be pumped from the Euphrates River to the top of the mountain—an amazing feat in those days. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.