Identifying Stanzas in Lamentations

For a number of years, I have been following Joe Carter’s excellent Bible reading plan: Read an entire book of the Bible 20 times. Pick another; read it 20 times. Repeat. I just finished working through Lamentations, which was surprisingly refreshing. As my wife just had a baby, I don’t have time to compose a full interpretive walkthrough just yet. But I’d like to comment briefly on the book’s literary units.

Lamentations seems quite straightforward, with five main poems, matching the five chapters in our English Bibles. This seems all the more straightforward when you learn (perhaps from a commentary or study note) that the first four chapters are all acrostic poems in Hebrew, where each verse (or, in the case of chapter 3, every three verses) starts with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

In fact, my initial take on the book labeled the five chapters with the following headings:

1. Grief
2. Loss
3. Wrestling
4. Shellshock
5. Appeal

But David Dorsey, in his masterpiece The Literary Structure of the Old Testament, makes a compelling case for recognizing an additional structure superimposed over the acrostic structure. Upon reading the entire book in one sitting, day after day, I observed that the poems ebb and flow with periodic shifts in the pronouns. For example, chapter 1 begins in third person (“the city … she … her … Judah … Zion … Jerusalem” — Lam 1:1-11) but shifts to first person exactly halfway through, as the people express their groaning (“I … my … me … my” — Lam 1:12-22).

I hadn’t yet sat down to map out the shifts and consider how they might affect the structure and flow of thought. But I was not surprised when I read Dorsey’s analysis pulling it all together. By collecting the pronoun-shifts into the main stanzas, Dorsey (p.251) identifies 13 sections (perhaps we’d consider them lengthy stanzas?) in the book, which match up in mirror-image pairs:

• she—Zion—is desolate and devastated (Lam 1:1-11)
  • I—Zion—was betrayed and defeated (Lam 1:12-22)
    • he—Yahweh—has caused this in his anger (Lam 2:1-8)
      • they—princes, maidens, nurslings, children, mothers—suffer (Lam 2:9-12)
        • you—Zion—should cry out to God (Lam 2:13-22)
          • he—Yahweh—has afflicted (Lam 3:1-20)
            • CLIMAX: Yahweh’s great love! (Lam 3:21-32)
          • he—Yahweh—afflicts humans (Lam 3:33-39)
        • you—Yahweh—to you I cry out (Lam 3:40-66)
      • they—princes, maidens, nurslings, children, mothers—suffer (Lam 4:1-10)
    • he—Yahweh—has caused this in his anger (Lam 4:11-16)
  • we—the people of Zion—were betrayed and defeated (Lam 4:17-22)
• we—the people of Zion—are desolate and devastated (Lam 5:1-22)

The heartbreaking poetry of Lamentations is quite moving, and it gives us a vocabulary for our own losses and laments. And the book’s structure greatly helps us to recognize the book’s overall message, which is one of profound hope in the midst of the deepest suffering. Even when the king who was supposed to save is himself wrecked (Lam 4:20), the law and the prophets have failed to provide the life and direction you need (Lam 2:9), and the place where God and man are supposed to be able to dwell together in peace is no more (Lam 5:18)—there is a big “but” writ large across time and space:

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of Yahweh never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. (Lam 3:21-22)

The structure gives us every reason to look to the book’s center for the key message, which just might become a hinge for our perspectives on dark situations. As Ryan put it, when he explained why the context of Lamentations 3 matters:

We should remember the steadfast love of the Lord every day, but we need reminders most when we feel it least. When we’re tempted to lose heart, when our souls are cast down, we need to remember what God is really like.

Join the author of Lamentations. Recall the mercies of God throughout history and in your own life. Remember that he is your portion. Wait for him; he will have compassion according to his abundant, steadfast love.