Book of Lamentations
[2] The tone is bleak: God does not speak, the degree of suffering is presented as overwhelming, and expectations of future redemption are minimal.
Chapter 4 laments the ruin and desolation of the city and temple, but traces it to the people's sins.
In some Greek copies, and in the Latin Vulgate, Syriac, and Arabic versions, the last chapter is headed "The Prayer of Jeremiah".
[6] It reflects the view, traceable to Sumerian literature of a thousand years earlier, that the destruction of the holy city was a punishment by God for the communal sin of its people.
[3][8] Beginning with the reality of disaster, Lamentations concludes with the bitter possibility that God may have finally rejected Israel (5:22).
The poet acknowledges that this suffering is a just punishment, still God is held to have had choice over whether to act in this way and at this time.
[13] In both cases their mapping of the 22 Hebrew letters into the Latin alphabet's 26 uses 'A' to 'V' (omitting W, X, Y and Z), thus lacking the "A to Z" sense of completeness.
[3][8] One clue pointing to multiple authors is that the gender and situation of the first-person witness changes – the narration is feminine in the first and second lamentation, and masculine in the third, while the fourth and fifth are eyewitness reports of Jerusalem's destruction;[21] conversely, the similarities of style, vocabulary, and theological outlook, as well as the uniform historical setting, are arguments for one author.
[22] The book's language fits an Exilic date (586–520 BCE), and the poems probably originated from Judeans who remained in the land.
[20] The fact that the acrostics of chapters 2–4 follow the pe-ayin order of the pre-exilic Paleo-Hebrew alphabet/script further supports the position that they are not postexilic compositions.
[3][8] Because Second Isaiah, whose work is dated to 550–538 BCE, seems to have known at least parts of Lamentations, the book was probably in circulation by the mid-6th century, but the exact time, place, and reason for its composition are unknown.
[3] In Western Christianity, readings (often chanted) and choral settings of extracts from the book are used in the Lenten religious service known as Tenebrae (Latin for 'darkness').
In the Coptic Orthodox Church, the book's third chapter is chanted on the 12th hour of the Good Friday service, which commemorates the burial of Jesus.
