Lamentations 2

Lamentations 2 continues the alphabetic acrostic structure of chapter 1, with twenty-two verses each beginning with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It is the most theologically unsparing chapter in the book. Where chapter 1 gives the destruction its face through the personified city, chapter 2 insists on naming its ultimate cause. The Lord has become as an enemy: he hath swallowed up Israel, he hath swallowed up all her palaces, he hath destroyed his strong holds, and hath increased in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation. The chapter does not attribute the catastrophe to Babylonian military superiority or to political failure. It attributes it, directly and repeatedly, to God. He has cast down from heaven to earth the beauty of Israel. He has cut down without pity. He has thrown down and has not pitied. The tension this creates — the God who destroys and the God to whom the surviving community must still speak — is the theological tension the book lives in throughout.

The chapter moves through the institutions of the destroyed city in systematic order: the temple, the altar, the wall, the gates, the king, the princes, the prophets, the elders. Each is gone or silenced. The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground and keep silence; they have cast up dust upon their heads; they have girded themselves with sackcloth. The virgins of Jerusalem hang their heads down to the ground. The children faint in the streets, asking their mothers for bread and receiving none. Into this catalogue of ruin the poet inserts a direct address to the city — O daughter of Jerusalem, what shall I liken to thee? — before closing the chapter with the city's own petition: see, O Lord, to whom thou hast done this. The chapter is one sustained act of theological witness: God is the agent, the destruction is real and specific and complete, and the silence that answers the city's petition is the deepest fact in the book.