Lamentations 3

Lamentations 3 is the longest and most formally elaborate chapter in the book. It is a triple acrostic: three verses begin with aleph, three with bet, and so on through all twenty-two Hebrew letters, for a total of sixty-six verses. The speaker is a first-person male voice — the man that hath seen affliction — who has no name and is not identified with Jeremiah or any historical figure, despite the traditional attribution. He is a speaker who carries the book's central role: the individual who has experienced the catastrophe from within and who must find a way to speak from it. The first twenty verses are a description of his suffering in language that draws on the full tradition of Hebrew personal lament: darkness, broken bones, enclosure, derision, despair. He has been made a derision to all his people; their song all the day; he remembers his affliction and his misery, the wormwood and the gall.

At verse 21 the chapter pivots. This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. The pivot is deliberate: the verb is call to mind, and the speaker makes explicit that what follows is an act of memory, not a response to changed circumstances. He is not consoled by events; he calls up what he had been taught. It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. These verses — 3:22-23, and the surrounding passage — are the theological summit of the book and its most widely cited passage. The chapter does not remain at that summit; it returns to petition, to communal lament, to the description of suffering, and to the call for God to see and act. But the centre, held by those verses, gives the book its single strongest statement that grief and faithfulness can occupy the same moment. The chapter closes not with resolution but with the speaker's renewed request that God render to his enemies according to their deeds.