Lamentations1chapter 1

Each of the first four chapters of this book is an alphabet poem: twenty-two verses, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, in order. That is a deliberate structure for grief that would otherwise have no shape — an A to Z of loss, and a way for people to learn it by heart and say it together.

The city is pictured as a widow sitting on the ground. Sitting in the dust, head covered, was the recognised posture of mourning, held for days while friends came and sat in silence. A widow in that society had no legal standing of her own and depended on the mercy of relatives, which is exactly the point of the image.

The most concrete detail is the roads. The roads to Zion mourn because none come to the appointed feasts. Three times a year the country emptied into Jerusalem for the pilgrim festivals; the highways would have been crowded with families walking up in company. Now they are empty and the gates are desolate.

Poems mourning a destroyed city were a known form in that part of the world — Mesopotamian scribes had composed laments over the fall of Ur and other cities centuries earlier, in which the city's goddess weeps over the ruin. This book uses the familiar form and changes the content: there is no capricious god here, only a city that says the LORD is in the right, for I have rebelled against his word.