Lamentations 1

Lamentations 1 is the opening poem of the five-chapter book composed in the aftermath of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. It is a twenty-two-verse alphabetic acrostic: each verse begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, from aleph through taw, imposing rigorous formal order on the rawest possible grief. The poem opens with the Hebrew word Eikhah — How — the conventional opening of a funeral lament, and the word from which the book takes its Hebrew title. The figure who carries the chapter is the personified city, Daughter Zion, described in the opening verses as a widow, a woman in mourning, one whose lovers have abandoned her and whose children have been taken. Her roads to Zion are in mourning, her priests sigh, her virgins are afflicted, her gates are desolate. The poet speaks about her, in vivid and concrete detail, for the first eleven verses.

At verse 12, the chapter's formal pivot arrives. The poet's external description gives way and the city herself speaks: Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger. The shift is one of the most theologically powerful moves in the book. The reader — the one who passes by — is asked by the city to stop, to look, to see. The chapter ends with the city's direct petition to God, acknowledging that the Lord is righteous but asking that the enemies who have gloated over her destruction be seen for what they are. The petition receives no answer. The chapter closes in the silence that characterises the whole book. The twenty-two-letter acrostic marks the grief as complete — from the first letter to the last, the sorrow has been given its full expression — but the grief itself is not resolved.