1Remember, O LORD, what has happened to us;
look, and see our disgrace.
2Our inheritance has been turned over to aliens,
our homes to foreigners.
3We have become orphans and fatherless,
our mothers like widows.
4We must buy the water we drink;
our wood can be had only at a price.
5Those who pursue us are at our heels;
we are weary and find no rest.
6We submitted to Egypt and Assyria
to get enough bread.
7Our fathers sinned and are no more,
and we bear their punishment.
8Slaves rule over us,
and there is none to free us from their hands.
9We get our bread at the risk of our lives
because of the sword in the desert.
10Our skin is hot as an oven,
feverish from hunger.
11Women have been ravished in Zion,
and virgins in the towns of Judah.
12Princes have been hung up by their hands;
elders are shown no respect.
13Young men toil at the millstones;
boys stagger under loads of wood.
14The elders are gone from the city gate;
the young men have stopped their music.
15Joy is gone from our hearts;
our dancing has turned to mourning.
16The crown has fallen from our head.
Woe to us, for we have sinned!
17Because of this our hearts are faint,
because of these things our eyes grow dim
18for Mount Zion, which lies desolate,
with jackals prowling over it.
19You, O LORD, reign forever;
your throne endures from generation to generation.
20Why do you always forget us?
Why do you forsake us so long?
21Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may return;
renew our days as of old
22unless you have utterly rejected us
and are angry with us beyond measure.
Original Meaning
THE FINAL CHAPTER of Lamentations is a corporate lament, a mournful address to God, seeking his recognition of his people’s sufferings and reminding him of the continuing effects of these sufferings on them. The text is not arranged as an acrostic in the ways that the first four chapters are, but the number of verses is twenty-two, the same as chapters 1–2 and 4. Perhaps the use of twenty-two verses is a final reminder that this communal response to the suffering of Judah and Jerusalem moves once more, like the previous chapters, from beginning to end.
The dominant voice in this chapter is first-person plural. There are pleas to God (5:1, 20–21), descriptions of dire circumstances and their ongoing oppressiveness (5:2–18), confession of sin (5:16), and affirmation of God’s majesty (5:19). Verse 1 calls on God to remember what has happened to the people, and verse 20 comes back to the matter of what God knows or remembers by asking: “Why do you always forget us?” Between 5:1 and 5:20, only verse 19 does not describe the people’s circumstances. In content there is little new from the previous chapters but much that remains poignant about the fall of Jerusalem and its effects on Judah.
The tone, indeed the very grammar, of the chapter with its challenge for God to remember and its plea for God to restore invites conversation between the people and God.1 In some ways this tone is a primary function of Lamentations as a poetic collection, but it is especially characteristic of the concluding chapter. By conversation is meant much more than the exchange of pleasantries or of recent news. A corporate call to God typically comes in the context of worship, and the topic of conversation here—the very possibility of an ongoing relationship between Judah and God—is best approached through prayer and confession.
There are formal parallels (the constituent parts) and common concerns with Psalm 44, a corporate lament/complaint. In 44:24 God is asked: “Why do you … forget our misery and oppression?”2 In 44:1–8 God is extolled.3 One function of the psalm’s initial praise of God is to remind both God and people that he has been their Protector and Redeemer in the past. In 44:20–22 the people note that they have not “forgotten” God, implying that perhaps God has forgotten them. A few verses later (44:23–24), they utter the plea for God to rouse himself from sleep.4 We are dealing here with metaphor and rhetoric. Psalm 44 does not, however, understand the devastation on God’s people (whatever it was) as the consequence of sinfulness and faithlessness. On the contrary, that devastation comes from the evildoers as a result of the people’s attempt to be faithful to God (44:17–18, 22).5
The poet of Lamentations 5 offers a catalogue of characters whose lives have been shattered by the loss of Jerusalem. Women were assaulted, princes and elders abused, and men of various ages in calamity (5:11–14). Corporately the joy is gone from the people’s hearts (5:15). The voices of the text sound weary, resigned, and accusatory.
One acknowledgment is that it was futile to seek aid from Egypt and Assyria (5:6). This was a familiar prophetic charge that God’s people looked too quickly for deliverance from a neighbor,6 and the poet confirms its truthfulness.
The last verse both raises a question and provides an implied answer. There is no doubt in the mind of the poet that God has rejected and judged his people. But has God irrevocably and utterly rejected them, and is his anger beyond measure and without appeasement? No final answer can come solely from the side of the people, for they are not capable of restoring themselves to God. An answer, nevertheless, is intimated, even though only God can bring it to pass. It is intimated in the confession of God’s daily mercy (3:22–24), in the claim that Judah’s exile will not be forever (4:22), and in the request for God to restore the people to himself (5:21).
Bridging Contexts
WEARY AND OUTCAST. “With what shall I come before the LORD?” asks the prophet Micah in Micah 6:6. There are occasions when confession of sin and articulations of grief and concern are the order of the day. Lamentations 5 gives a historical voice for one such occasion. It serves as a summary of much of the previous book, yet it can also stand alone as a communal lament to God.
The abiding value of chapter 5 (which is essentially a concluding prayer) is not likely to be found by a modern group trying to match up exactly its problems with those enunciated in the chapter. It is more likely to be discovered through contemplation on the weariness (5:5b) that human failure and fallibility typically produce. It is even more likely to be found when a believing community finds itself not only weary but also feeling outcast, and where there is no longer any joy in the Lord. If there is presence of mind among God’s people on such occasions, some will articulate their feelings and find that God seems absent or judgmental. It may take a long time to discover any or all of the reasons why. But those reasons do exist. Furthermore, the language of biblical lamentation may provide just the kind of resources needed for the articulation of pain and the spiritual discernment to push beyond the spiritual malaise.
Another clue to the application of the chapter’s teaching is the fact that a number of medieval Hebrew manuscripts repeat 5:21 after 5:22, so that the reading or chanting of the book does not end on a down note. A consequence of this reading is to end the book with a recognition that God is able to restore a wayward people (or person) and that there is a history to the issue of divine judgment and restoration.
Contemporary Significance
MEMORY. The congregational voices in Lamentations 5 work on several levels, two of which may be held up for special consideration. One common element is memory. With regard to God’s memory, when the ancient congregation asks God to remember its decrepit state, it does not literally believe that God has forgotten their circumstances. To remember in this instance means to bring to mind again a matter whose import should induce one to act. That is why the call for God to remember in the prayer is immediately connected with a plea for God to see and take notice. The assumption is that once the circumstances are noted, they will induce action on God’s part.
With regard to the people’s memory, the shameful and oppressive nature of what happened at the hands of the Babylonians was kept in memory and thus (it was hoped) became instructional for later generations. The circumstances functioned as a teaching device, explaining why Jerusalem had fallen and warning of the consequences. Lamentations functions to keep a sad and oppressive period alive in memory and influence so that it may not get repeated.
Visitors to the concentration-camp complexes at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland report that plaques have been erected on the rubble of one of the crematoriums. Of all the concentration camps established by the Nazis, Auschwitz seems to evoke the most horror. Each plaque says essentially the same thing, although each is inscribed in a different language. The English plaque reads: “Forever let this place be a cry of despair, a warning to humanity.” The complexes at Auschwitz-Birkenau serve a crucial educational role. No visitor can avoid the feeling of evil that pervades the place, even though the camp has not been used in over half a century.
Despair and hope. One cannot visit that site without experiencing despair and warning. In recent years Polish Catholics have placed crosses near a part of the complex as a witness of their Christian faith and as a sign that Christ too shared the pain of the thousands of Jews and other “undesirables” executed in the gas chambers and burned in the crematoriums. Some Jewish groups have been offended at their witness and have insisted that nothing divert attention from the task of remembering and warning.
Reading the book of Lamentations evokes similar emotions to those expressed on the plaques at Auschwitz. The main reasons are that much of the language of this book is that of despair and that the destruction of Jerusalem had an impact on ancient Jews similar to that of the Holocaust on modern Jews. To be sure, there are clear differences between occasions for the Judean war with Babylon and those for the Second World War, chief among them being Judean responsibility for the disaster in 586 B.C. Judeans of that time brought the tragedy on themselves in ways that European Jews did not bring the Holocaust on themselves. But despair was and remains a common product of both events.
Whatever one makes of the propriety of Polish Catholics erecting crosses at Auschwitz, a Christian interpreter cannot help but read Lamentations in light of the cross and resurrection, since these two teachings are foundational to the gospel. In some ways the destruction of Jerusalem and the downfall of Judah were tantamount to the death of Judah and the people of God. Only a God who raises the dead can speak adequately to that generation.
The book of Lamentations preaches the cross in a historically based typological sense. In doing so, it unmasks the pretense and hypocrisy of humankind in any generation, pushing all who read its despairing poetry to reflect on the meaning and purpose of their own lives. Within the dominant despair of the book are indications that God has spoken a renewing and redeeming Word. In the fullness of time that Word was enfleshed, crucified, and resurrected. Through his Word God is not aloof toward despair, even despair of its own making, but has taken despair into and upon himself through the cross and resurrection of his Son, expending its death-dealing curse and bringing healing and immortality to light.
Calvin’s words to introduce the reading of Lamentations are appropriate also as a conclusion to our own reading: “Though nothing in the land appeared but desolation, and the temple being destroyed, the covenant of God appeared as made void, and thus all hope of salvation had been cut off, yet hope still remained, provided the people sought God in true repentance and faith.”7