Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robin Parry is commissioning editor for Paternoster. Prior to that he taught A-level Religious Studies and Philosophy at Worcester Sixth Form College. He is married with two daughters. This book is based on his Ph.D. undertaken at the University of Gloucestershire.

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Lamentations

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Abbreviations.....................................................................................xIntroduction......................................................................................1The Two Horizons..................................................................................1Authorship, Date, and Place of Composition........................................................3The Exilic Context of Lamentations................................................................5The Ancient Near Eastern Context of Lamentations..................................................8The Poetry of Lamentations........................................................................9The Structure of Lamentations.....................................................................15The Canonical Locations of Lamentations...........................................................18The Theology of Lamentations in Key Modern Studies................................................19Sin and Punishment in Covenant Context............................................................28Hope in Covenant Context..........................................................................31Present Suffering.................................................................................34Lamentations 1: No Comfort........................................................................35The Narrator Speaks (1:1-11)......................................................................43Lady Zion Speaks (1:12-22)........................................................................56Lamentations 2: Wrath.............................................................................66Structure.........................................................................................71The Narrator Describes God's Destructive Anger Against Zion (2:1-10)..............................73The Narrator Reacts to Zion's Destruction (2:11-19)...............................................79Zion's Prayer of Protest (2:20-22)................................................................84Lamentations 3: Hope..............................................................................86The Suffering, Despair, and Hope of the Valiant Man (3:1-24)......................................96The Valiant Man Offers General Wise Advice on Suffering (3:25-39).................................102The Valiant Man Calls Israel to Repent and Leads a Community Lament (3:40-51).....................115The Valiant Man's Salvation: Past and Future (3:52-66)............................................119Lamentations 4: Siege and Salvation...............................................................128Introduction......................................................................................132The Neglected Children and the Starving Inhabitants (4:1-10)......................................134YHWH Punishes the City and the Sinful "Holy" Men (4:11-16)........................................138Community: Hunted and Caught (4:17-20)............................................................140"Prophetic" Voice: An "Oracle" of Judgment and Salvation (4:21-22)................................142Lamentations 5: Restore Us........................................................................144Theological Horizons of Lamentations..............................................................159Jewish and Christian Liturgical Use of Lamentations and Hermeneutics..............................159Lamentations in the Context of Jeremiah...........................................................161Lamentations in the Context of Isaiah 40-55.......................................................162Lamentations in the Context of the New Testament..................................................168Expanding Contexts: Lamentations and Christian Anti-Semitism......................................174Expanding Contexts: Lamentations and Political Theology...........................................176Lamentations and the Rule of Faith................................................................180Does Christian Interpretation Neutralize Lamentations?............................................191The Anger of God and "The Day of YHWH"............................................................193Theodicy and Divine Suffering.....................................................................201The Place of Lament in Christian Spirituality.....................................................206Lamentations and Ethical Reflection...............................................................228Bibliography......................................................................................237Name Index........................................................................................249Scripture Index...................................................................................251

Introduction

Western cultures are notoriously averse to pain and tragedy. We spend an extraordinary amount of money and effort seeking to insulate ourselves against life's vicissitudes. All kinds of precautions are taken to ensure the maximal safety of the environments we must inhabit — our homes, our workplaces, our schools, our social space, our transport, our public places — and, just in case something does go wrong, we are offered just about every type of insurance one could dream of. We do not want sorrow to knock at our doors and, when it does, we do not know what to do with it. Our default mode is to keep it out of sight and pretend that it is not there.

Unlike our Victorian forebears, we are no longer shy about sex, and we have innumerable ways to speak about sexual intercourse but we are hopelessly lost for words when confronted with grief and death. We don't know what to do, where to look, what to say. Increasingly we lack the social practices, words, and concepts necessary to grasp our pain by the horns and stare it in the face. We have been robbed of a vocabulary of grief, and we suffer for it. The book of Lamentations accosts us by the wayside as a stranger who offers us an unasked-for, unwanted, and yet priceless gift — the poetry of pain. We would be wise to pay attention.

Lamentations, like the personified Lady Jerusalem within its pages, often sits alone within the landscape of the Christian Bible calling out to those readers who pass by to take notice but, as with Lady Jerusalem, there is no one to comfort. Lamentations is one of those Old Testament books that have never really attained a place of prominence in Christian spirituality and reflection. This means that when attempting to think theologically about the book one does not have the rich heritage of Christian theological interpretation to draw on that one finds with books such as Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, or Isaiah. Perhaps this is to be expected because Lamentations is only twice alluded to in the New Testament, while a book such as Isaiah seems omnipresent. So when one comes to read Lamentations theologically as a Christian, one has to start with a comparatively slender thread of prior reflection as a guide.

When we reflect theologically on Lamentations, issues of method require some comment. First of all, Lamentations was not written to present a theology. As Adele Berlin notes, "the book does not construct a theology of its own, nor does it present in any systematic way the standard theology of its time. It assumes the `theology of...