APTS - BIB508 - 2006

1. APTS - BIB508 - 2006 The Book of Lamentations

2. Name In Hebrew manuscripts and printed editions the book is normally given the title hk'yae, from the opening word of chs. i, ii, iv, hk'yae Ah, how!, the characteristic opening of the funerral dirge. But according to Rabbinic references such as the Talmud passage bab. Baba Batra 15a, the older name was rather tAnyqi funeral dirge. This corresponds to the title given to the book in the Greek, Latin and English translations - qrh/voi, lamentationes, Lamentations . . . ." [Eissfeldt]

3. Texts: Qumran "Four manuscripts - together witnessing to all five chapters of Lamentations - were found in the caves at Qumran. Cave 3, famous for the idiosyncratic Copper Scroll, preserved one manuscript (3QLam). A somewhat variant version of the book was unearthed in Cave 4 (4QLam). Finally, the relatively meager cache of twenty-five fragmentary manuscripts found in Cave 5 produced remnants of two scrolls of Lamentations (5QLama and 5QLamb)."

4. Text: MT & Others "The text of Lamentations is fairly well preserved, although there are a few irregularities in lexical or syntactic usage (1:14; 2:6; 3:22; 4:9)." [Berlin] Greek text has been identified as a kaige-recension, so it has been corrected to a proto-Masoretic Text.

5. Canon & Order 1. At Qumran, noncanonical poems allude to lamentations. 2. In the Jewish threefold scripture order, Lamentations is found in the Kethubim, but the exact placement varies: Chronological – Lamentations after those labeled as written by Solomon, but before the postexilic Daniel and Esther. Megillot – [Ruth, Song of Songs, Qoheleth, Lamentations, Esther] Megillot – order of festival – [Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Qoheleth, Esther]

6. Authorship "Although one very ancient tradition ascribes Lamentations to Jeremiah, practically unanimous modern critical opinion holds the book to be anonymous. Before examining the issue, it is in place to observe that the authorship is not decisively important for understanding these poems of lament, because their author, whoever he was, expresses the historical experience of a community more than the personal experiences or opinions of one individual, and, as emphasized by Lanahan (1974), assumes a variety of personae, or speaking voices." [Hillers]

7. Content & Context: Destruction "Chapter 1 focuses on Jerusalem, the destroyed city, pictured in her mourning, her shame, and her desolation. The tone is one of despair, depression, degradation, shame, and guilt. The destruction is complete and the reader stands among the ruins." [Berlin]

8. Content & Context: Destruction "Chapter 2 takes the reader back to the moment of destruction, with all its physical and theological force. The picture is full of anger and fury - God's anger at the city and the poet's anger at God. The chapter focuses on God, the perpetrator of the destruction. The anger of God overshadows the guilt of Jerusalem."

9. Content & Context: Destruction "Chapter 3 portrays the process of the exile, with its alternating moods of despair and hope. The speaker is a lone male, a Joblike figure trying to come to terms with what has happened. His view is personal but at the same time representative of the people."

10. Content & Context: Destruction "Chapter 4 focuses on the people, reliving the siege and the suffering that accompanied it - the toll it took on the inhabitants of the city. The chapter paints a picture of utter degradation."

11. Content & Context: Destruction "Chapter 5 is the prayer of the Judean remnant, weakened and impoverished, deprived of king and temple, pleading with God not to abandon them forever, hoping that the former relationship between God and Israel will be renewed."

12. Poetry: Acrostics "All five poems in Lamentations are formally related in some way to the alphabet. This is least noticeable in chap. 5, which conforms to the alphabet only in having 22 lines, one for each letter in the Hebrew alphabet. In chaps. 1 and 2 each stanza has three lines, and the initial word of the first stanza begins with the first letter of the alphabet, the second stanza begins with a word starting with the second letter, and so on through the alphabet. Chapter 4 follows the same scheme but has two-line stanzas. The most elaborate acrostic is chap. 3, with three-line stanzas in which each line begins with the appropriate letter. . . ." [Hillers]

13. Poetry: Acrostics "In the MT, the order of the letters in chaps. 2, 3 and 4 is different from the usual Hebrew order; pe comes before 'ayin." This has also been found for chap. 1 in 4QLam!

14. Poetry: Acrostics "It is perhaps a sublime literary touch that the poems of this book, which express the inexpressible, sue such a formal and rigid style, whose controlling structural device is the very letters that signify and give shape to language. The world order of Lamentations has been disrupted; no order exists any longer in the real world. But as if to counteract this chaos, the poet has constructed his own linguistic order that marks out graphically for us by the orderly progression of the letters of the alphabet."

15. Poetry: Aural Effect Qinah Meter: Although, beginning with Budde, Old Testament scholars have argued that there is a 3:2 meter that represents a "dirge," but those scholars that deny "meter" to Hebrew poetry use terms like "rhythm" or syntactic development. "Other aural effects include the repetition of words and the use of key words, the patterning of words and sounds, and plays on words and on sounds." [Berlin]

16. Poetry: Grammar "We do not always know when the poet of Lamentations was speaking of past suffering or of suffering yet to come. In many instances, both past and future signify the ongoing present. the suffering in Lamentations is timeless, and the expression of this timelessness seems to have been one of the poet's goals." [Berlin]

17. Theology: History "N. Gottwald described the key to understanding the book's theology to lie in the tension between the Deuteronomic faith in a doctrine of retribution and reward, and the historical reality of adversity. However, most scholars doubt whether this is the tension of the book, particularly since the writer acknowledges that the judgment of the city was deserved." [Childs]

18. Theology: History "B. Albrektson saw the tension to lie between specific religious concepts, such as the inviolability of Jerusalem, and the historical realities of Jerusalem's destruction. Although Albrektson has made a good case for the presence of the Zion tradition, the issue is not resolved to what extent such an alleged tension actually lay at the centre of the book's concern." [Childs]

19. Theology: Suffering & Mourning "The poet's purpose in dwelling on suffering is . . . to make God see the suffering of his people, with the hope that this will provoked a response from him." [Berlin] "The first and most central theme of Lamentations is mourning. . . . Mourning is not only a set of customs relating to death, it is an abstract religious concept that had an important place in Israelite cultic thought." [Berlin]

20. Theology: Destruction & Exile "Destruction, according to the covenant, is a sign neither of God's abandonment of Israel and the cancellation of His obligations to the people, nor of God's eclipse by competing powers in the cosmos. The Destruction is to be taken, rather, as a deserved and necessary punishment for sin. . . . As a chastisement, the Destruction becomes an expression of God's continuing concern for Israel, since the suffering of the Destruction expiates the sins that provoked it and allows a penitent remnant to survive in a rehabilitated and restored relationship with God." [Mintz]

21. Theology: Purity & Purification "Wrongful acts could cause the pollution of the nation and of the land of Israel, which could also not be "cured" by ritual. There was therefore an ultimate expectation of catastrophic results for the whole people, the "purging" of the land by destruction and exile. Pollution was thus thought to be one of the determinants of Israel's history, and the concepts of pollution and purgation provided a paradigm by which Israel could understand and survive the destruction of the Temple." [Frymer-Kensky]