You Feel Terrible!
You lost the big game. You dropped your tray of spaghetti in the cafeteria. You got permanent black marker all over your new jeans. If this kind of thing happened to you every day, you’d feel terrible and you’d be in the right mood for this book.
Lamentations is a book of five poems. They are called “dirges” because they express how awful the Jews felt after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and God’s temple. It was terrible for the Jews to look back and realize what happened was their own fault.
Sorry Doesn’t Make It Go Away
• Lesson learned too late. Report in Lamentations 1:18–22
Suffering Can’t Quench Hope
• See Lamentations 3:19–24
“How Long” Is Up to God
• Hard lesson learned, report in Lamentations 5:1–22
Preview
• Lamentations means “funeral songs.”
• These poems are probably written in Babylon by Jeremiah.
• Each poem is an acrostic: the first word in each verse begins with one of the 22 consonants of the Hebrew alphabet.
While the Jews are captives in Babylon, Buddha is born in Asia. • Confucius is born in China. • In Peru natives weave brightly colored textiles. • Frankincense and myrrh are exported from southern Arabia.