Lamentations — who's who

The dominant figure of chapters 1 and 2 and a recurring presence throughout. Jerusalem personified as a widow and abandoned mother: her lovers have abandoned her, her children are in captivity, her temple violated, her roads in mourning. In chapter 1, after eleven verses of third-person description, the city speaks for herself — "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?" The shift is the book's most powerful single move. She is the structural device by which the poet gives the destruction a face, and the figure the book most insists must be seen.

The first-person male voice who speaks the triple acrostic at the formal centre of the book. He calls himself the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of God's wrath. The first twenty verses describe his suffering in concentrated language; then, at verse 21, he turns deliberately: "This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope" — and gives the most quoted passage of the whole book. He moves from suffering to recovered theology to renewed petition, and the book does not resolve him. He is the figure through whom the book offers its central answer to grief.

The voice of chapter 5, the only chapter not in acrostic form. The shift from the individual voices of the first four chapters to the collective we is theologically significant: this is the remnant speaking, the surviving fragment of the destroyed city, addressing God directly. The chapter is a catalogue of what has been lost and what is now endured, closing with the petition "Turn thou us unto thee, O Lord" — and then the most debated verse in the book, whose grammar leaves the ending open.

God is named on every page of the book and speaks on no page. There is no oracle, no answer, no consoling framework delivered in God's voice. He is named as the agent of the destruction in chapter 2 — "the Lord has become as an enemy" — and as the addressee of every petition in the book. The community's final petition in chapter 5 receives no answer within the text. The book preserves the silence, without resolving it, as one of its theological gifts to every community that has had to live with the same absence.

The book returns to the children again and again. Babies faint in the streets. Young children beg bread from their mothers and receive none. The tongue of the suckling child cleaves to the roof of his mouth for thirst. Mothers compassionate have boiled their own children — a horror recorded in 2:20 and 4:10 without euphemism or abstraction. The surviving children are not a theme; they are the evidence. They are the reason the book refuses to move quickly toward consolation.

The religious and civic leadership of Jerusalem appear throughout the book as figures of broken authority. The priests sigh; the prophets find no vision from the Lord; the elders sit upon the ground in silence, dust on their heads and sackcloth on their bodies. They are not primarily condemned in Lamentations — the prophetic indictment of false prophets and corrupt priests belongs to Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Here they sit silent in the ash with everyone else. Their silence is part of what the book records.