Learning to Lament in a culture of denial Week 2: Anger at God
א יכ ה How!? How the Lord in his anger has humiliated daughter Zion! Lam 2:1
1 22 three-line verses (66 lines) Acrostic 2 22 three-line verses (66 lines) Acrostic 3 66 one-line verses (66 lines) Acrostic 4 22 two-line verses (44 lines) Acrostic 5 22 one-line verses (22 lines) No pattern
2 Who will heal you? These first two chapters are very similar & are closely related They comment upon each other
1 [Aleph] How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal. 2 [Beth] She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has no one to comfort her; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they have become her enemies. 1
6 [Waw] From daughter Zion has departed all her majesty. 8 [Heth] Jerusalem sinned grievously, so she has become a mockery; all who honored her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness; she herself groans, and turns her face away. 9 [Teth] Her uncleanness was in her skirts; she took no thought of her future; her downfall was appalling, with none to comfort her. O Lord, look at my affliction, for the enemy has triumphed! 17 Jerusalem has become a filthy thing among them. DaughterZion: 1
2 22 three-line verses Acrostic (Aleph Taw) Speakers: Mainly Narrator; Infants & Babies (12a); All who pass by (15b); Enemies (16b); Daughter Zion (20-22)
2 The Narrator declares that it is God who has used the Babylonians to bring about this destruction. He continues to document all of the destruction to the altar, the sanctuary, the walls & gates of the city
2 The accusations change from being directed at Daughter Zion to the LORD. 1 [Aleph] How the Lord in his anger has humiliated daughter Zion! He has thrown down from heaven to earth the splendour of Israel; he has not remembered his footstool in the day of his anger.
2 [Beth] The Lord has destroyed without mercy all the dwellings of Jacob; in his wrath he has broken down the strongholds of daughter Judah; he has brought down to the ground in dishonour the kingdom and its rulers. 3 [Gimel] He has cut down in fierce anger all the might of Israel; he has withdrawn his right hand from them in the face of the enemy; he has burned like a flaming fire in Jacob, consuming all around. 2
5 The Lord has become like an enemy; he has destroyed Israel. He has destroyed all its palaces, laid in ruins its strongholds, and multiplied in daughter Judah mourning and lamentation. 6 He has broken down his booth like a garden, he has destroyed his tabernacle; the Lord has abolished in Zion festival and sabbath, and in his fierce indignation has spurned king and priest. 2
2 But then something happens 11 My eyes are spent with weeping; my stomach churns; my bile is poured out on the ground because of the destruction of my people, because infants and babes faint in the streets of the city.
2 11 The emotional distance of the narrator now disappears. He now enters into her story; into her world of pain and affliction. He is no longer a disconnected reporter
2 13 What can I say for you, to what compare you, O daughter Jerusalem? To what can I liken you, that I may comfort you, O virgin daughter Zion? For vast as the sea is your ruin; who can heal you?
2 The narrator now confronts the totality of her suffering even though he reaches the limits of language and the inability of his words to bear witness to it. Yet, just by witnessing to it, he transforms her pain. He now sees and knows that it is unspeakable and incomparable.
2 In verses 20-22, Daughter Zion speaks again but only a few lines, her energy is all spent. 20 Look, O Lord, and consider! To whom have you done this? Should women eat their offspring, the children they have borne?
Chapter 2 is full of unbridled anger at God. This poem springs from anger. Yet it is a prayer that we can imitate.
It creates a rhetoric of fury, a swirling language of pain, distrust, and betrayal, both divine and human. Kathleen O Connor Nothing about human life is inappropriate for divine attention.
Daughter Zion does not ask for restoration, the cessation of pain, reversal of fortune, or even for the return of her beloved children. She asks only that Yahweh see, attend to, recognise her suffering She asks for a witness and that God be that witness. Kathleen O Connor