THE BOOK OF LAMENTATIONS (Part V)
Theological Bites
The book of Lamentations can be classified with the wisdom literature of the Bible. I contend that the lamentations are a work of Prophet Jeremiah after the fall of Jerusalem. The tragedy of Judah as the last part of God’s Israel was very devastating to all the Jews especially the most religious of all like the prophets of Israel. The book is poetic in nature and not prose and the poems in this book are about nothing but lamenting.
The Mesopotamian Lament Rituals
One of the important things to understand about the ancient world from which the Bible is born is there cultural perspective to life and its eventualities. In our world emotions are exclusively a spontaneity business, however, in the ancient world, there was a time for both what is good and what is evil (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8). This was not just an abrupt time that influenced an occasion as it normally is in our world, but rather, a prepared and organized occasion. While the law stated that though shalt not kill (Deuteronomy 5:17), there was an acceptable time and an arrangement to kill (Deuteronomy 13:10; 21:21). Today when we talk about lamenting and mourning we don’t think of organized functions purposely to do that.
However, in the ancient world, mourning and lamenting went beyond spontaneous emotional outbursts to actually organized ceremonies of mourning and lamenting. The book of lamentation resonates with the existing culture of a corporate and communal ritual of lamenting whenever there was a tragedy that befell a community. According to scholars, there are three major reasons why such communal lament could be organized. Mark E. Cohen in his book The Canonical Lamentations of Ancient Mesopotamia (2 vols. Potomac, Md.: Capital Decisions Ltd., 1988). Gives us the first one, “it contributed to socially acceptable the face of catastrophe. “The Communal laments (and city lament in particular) appear to have functioned in ancient societies as a way of actual cohesion in the midst it contributed. Contributed to not merely personal expressions face of, but of catastrophe religiously sanctioned, city laments of expressing grief.
The performance of a lament fulfilled several important functions in a community.” Xuan Huong Thi Pham, (Mourning in the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible (JSOTSup 302; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999); gives the Second reason for the lament when he emphasizes “it was a way of elevating the voices of survivors before the world and before heaven.” Third, “a lament performance provided some sense of completion of the tragic event—a way for individuals and communities to move forward after tragedy. (Margaret W. Green, “The Uruk Lament,”)
After a serious tragedy like a natural disaster, enemy troops, an epidemic, battle defeats, mass deaths or the death of a high profile individual, the community organized such an occasion of Lament. Communal laments by their very nature concern the preservation of a group. Preservation of the group was crucial for such eventuality predicament caused social relations fractures and community fragmentations. According to Giffone, this “Fragmentation involves the breakup of social, religious and family structures, indiscriminate destruction of all classes and groups of people, and the death, destitution, flight or captivity of the whole populace.” For a community to suffer such evil resulted in both individual and corporate review of who their god is his power and intentions. It was through these organized laments that the community reviewed and evaluated what had befallen them, how it was, what it meant in relation to their belief and behavior system and what the future holds, therefore.
Jeremiah’s Organised Poetic Lament
While Jeremiah did not have the opportunity to mobilize the community to mourn and lament the fall of Judah; he lamented with a few concerned individuals then. He and other concerned individuals were not willing to take this tragedy for granted and pretend like it all had nothing to do with their theological beliefs and theocratic system of governance. They had to organize a public lament in which they addressed what had happened to them, the possible reasons and the way forward, therefore. It these laments of Jeremiah and other destitute remnants of the 578BC Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem that is going to serve even in the future worship services of Israel after the decree of Cyrus to return and rebuild the temple.
Jeremiah (whoever laments) therefore, is not mourning the material loss of the community, but a fracture and fragment from the original center that held everything together for peace and tranquillity. The laments, therefore, are not emotional pains where people mourn the loss of things and people but the laments are a post-mortem and an investigation of what went wrong in the system and the ramifications of that henceforth.
Lamentations as a Soliloquy
One of the similarities the book of the lamentation has with the large part of the book of Job is that God is silent. In the book of Lamentations as they lament God is silent. In fact, it is one of the books where God doesn’t say anything. In Lamentations God does not speak. It is a series of poems soliloquized by the prophet and that is other speakers are made. The beauty of poetic literature is that from 2 to five speakers are possible to be represented in one actual speaker. In Lamentation through one poet (Jeremiah) we have four speakers who independently have a worldview on the matter at hand and liberally communicate in the same. We have, The narrator (Lam 1:1-9, 10-11, 17; 2:1-20; 3:48-66; 4:1-16, 21-22), the personified city – Daughter Zion (1:9, 11-16, 18-22; 2:20-22), the community (3:42-47; 4:17-20; 5:1-22), and “the man”, a persona who appears in chapter 3 and is an intentionally gendered voice different from that of both the narrator and the feminine city (3:1-41).
Elizabeth C. Boase, (The Fulfilment of Doom) argues that “Each of these personae speaks, voicing different aspects of the suffering, longing, and hope experienced in the Jerusalem community in the wake of the destruction. There is no attempt to merge the variety of views expressed by the personae. The multiple viewpoints sit alongside each other, leaving a sense of unresolved tension and rhetorical confusion.”
It is amazing to note that the poet of Lamentation does not create a divine character to be part of the speakers on the matter. The theological question to ask is why? Why does the lamenting poet of Lamentation intend not to bring God on the speaking platform? There are two possible answers here; the first is, God is the subject and therefore the subject cannot talk about itself. Therefore in Lamentations, the calamities that have happened and all the tragic events that the nation has suffered are not the subjects but God is. The second reason as shared by Elizabeth Boase is; “Although God is the subject of much of the speech, the divine silence means that no one description of God is authoritative, or in fact, has more authority than any other. The audience engages with a multiplicity of viewpoints concerning God, but, in the absence of the divine voice, is not constrained to privileging one over another.”
In addition to this, I would add that if the poet and all those Lamenting the national pain attribute all this to a fractured and fragmented relationship with God, then only God knows where things went wrong and no man can ably explain why the nation has suffered all it has suffered.
The ideology is that Judah is suffering because it offended their God, however, while they understand they offended God culminating in all the woes they are suffering (majorly the exile), it is only God who can tell what exactly the offense was that led to such consequences. The speeches of the speakers therefore in Lamentations and the silence of God, therefore, are complimentary all work together towards a response to the desperate WHY-questions of the Jews in pain.
So the book of Lamentation is a soliloquy by the prophet and an inquisitive lament not just on what has happened to them but on God’s position and intention in all this. Next, we will look at the assumptions about God’s position in all this, through the poems.
God bless you I invoke TRUTH, WISDOM, and FAITH (2Tim 2:7)
Priest TIM WHITE (+256-775 822833 for further inquiries)
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