Context No. 60 of 4322 · Lamentations
Context · Reflection
Lamentations 3:1-16: in context
1I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. 2He has led me and caused me to walk in darkness, and not in light. 3Surely he turns his hand against me again and again all day long. 4He has made my flesh and my skin old. He has broken my bones. 5He has built against me, and surrounded me with bitterness and hardship. 6He has made me dwell in dark places, as those who have been long dead. 7He has walled me about, so that I can’t go out. He has made my chain heavy. 8Yes, when I cry, and call for help, he shuts out my prayer. 9He has walled up my ways with cut stone. He has made my paths crooked. 10He is to me as a bear lying in wait, as a lion in hiding. 11He has turned away my path, and pulled me in pieces. He has made me desolate. 12He has bent his bow, and set me as a mark for the arrow. 13He has caused the shafts of his quiver to enter into my kidneys. 14I have become a derision to all my people, and their song all day long. 15He has filled me with bitterness. He has stuffed me with wormwood. 16He has also broken my teeth with gravel. He has covered me with ashes.
Lamentations is five poems written over the ruins of Jerusalem after Babylon destroyed it in 587 BC. The book is built with severe formal discipline. Chapters one, two, and four run through the Hebrew alphabet, one letter per stanza. Chapter three, this one, does it three times over, three lines for every letter, sixty-six verses of controlled grief. Chapter five abandons the pattern altogether.
This passage is the opening of the tightest chapter, and it is unrelenting. I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath. He drove me into darkness. He broke my bones, walled me in, made my chains heavy. Even when I cry out, he shuts out my prayer. He is a bear lying in wait, a lion in hiding. The speaker never doubts who is responsible, and the pronoun is always he.
The alphabet is doing something underneath. A person in this much pain is given the strictest possible form to say it in, marching from the first letter to the last. Grief this size has a container built for it, and the container is part of the prayer. In twenty more verses this same chapter will say his mercies are new every morning, but it has to go through here first. What am I trying to feel my way past, that might need a shape to be said in before it can be said at all?
Sources
- The acrostic structure of Lamentations: chapters 1, 2, and 4 run the Hebrew alphabet once, chapter 3 three times, chapter 5 not at all
- Lamentations 3:22-23: his mercies are new every morning, twenty verses further into this same poem
- The destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC, the event the book laments