It is noteworthy that in chaps, it, iii., and iv. the letter Pe (£) precedes 'Ayin QJ), contrary to the ancient and established order common to the Hebrew alphabet with its Greek and Latin derivatives, in which 0 stands for JZ. The sense shows that this irregularity is not due to a transposition of the original order of the verses, while the fact that the same transposition occurs three times makes it plain that the deviation from the common order is not due to want of skill to make the acrostic perfect, but rests on a variation in the order of the alphabet as used by the author. Thus it has not unnaturally been argued by Thenius that chap, i., which takes the alphabet in the common order, must have a different author from chaps ii.-iv.; but it is quite as probable that in chap, i., as Ewald suggests in the 2d ed. of his Dichter, p. 326, ver. 16 originally followed ver. 17, and was transposed to reduce the acrostic to the usual form. In the other chapters the sense forbade such transposition.

The subject of the five dirges is not the death of an individual; they refer to a national calamity—the widowhood of Jerusalem and the overthrow of the Judaean state by the Chaldaeans. But the examples of Amos v. 1, 2, Jer. ix. 19 [18], Ezek. xix., show that they are not less properly called dirges on that account; the lamentations of Israel over the desolation of Zion, the agonies of the last desperate struggle and the extinction of national existence, appropriately took a form modelled on the death-wail sung by “cunning women” (Jerem. ix. 17) and poets “skilful of lamentation” (Amos v. 16) at the wake (⅛^) of the illustrious dead. Among the Hebrews, as among other primitive peoples, this type of poetry was much cultivated, and reached great artistic perfection at an early date, as appears from David’s elegy on Sauland Jonathan; and as it was practised by persons of special skill, whose services were engaged by the relatives of the dead, it naturally assumed a certain formal and even artificial character. This accounts for the use in our book of the elaborate acrostic form, which to our minds seems little suited for such composition. We are not to think of these dirges as an unstudied effusion of natural feeling, but as carefully elaborated poems in which every element of pity and terror which the subject supplied is brought forward with conscious art to stir the minds of the hearers. It is far from improbable that the Lamentations were originally composed, as Ewald suggests, for a solemn act of mourning in which the captive or fugitive Israelites united, and we know that they ultimately took their place in the ritual of the great day of mourning, the 9th of Ab, when the synagogue still celebrates the fall of the temple. The fast or weeping of the fifth month (Ab) was already an old usage in the time of Zechariah (vii. 3), and it is quite possible that the ritual use of the book of Lamentations goes back to the early days of this ancient custom, Such considerations meet the difficulty which has sometimes been felt in supposing a single author to have written a whole series of elegies on the fall of Jerusalem. In a solemn and formal ceremony of mourning the repetition of the same theme in successive songs of lamentation is only natural. These observations do not of course prove the unity of the book, but they add force to the arguments for unity derived from the plan and language of the whole, and urged by critics, like Ewald and Nägelsbach, who are not influenced by the tradition which makes Jeremiah the author. The evidence for unity of authorship, it may be at once observed, applies most forcibly to the first four chapters, which are also connected by their acrostic form, and especially by the peculiarity in the order of the alphabet already alluded to as still found in chaps, ii,, iii., and iv., and perhaps at one time found even in chap. i.

The first elegy commences with a picture of the distress of Zion during and after the siege (i. 1-11), Jerusalem, or the people of Judah, being figured as a widowed and dishonoured princess. Then in the latter half of the poem she herself takes up the lamentation, describes her grievous sorrow, confesses the righteousness of Jehovah’s anger, and invokes retribution on her enemies. In the second chapter the desolation of the city and the horrors of the siege are again rehearsed and made more bitter by allusion to the joy of the enemies of Israel. The cause of the calamity is national sin, which false prophets failed to denounce while repentance was still possible, and now no hope remains save in tears and supplication to stir the compassion of Jehovah for the terrible fate of his people. The third elegy takes a personal turn, and describes the affliction of the individual Israelite or of the nation under the type of a single individual under the sense of Jehovah’s just but terrible indignation. But even this affliction is a wholesome discipline. It draws the heart of the singer nearer to his God in penitent self-examination, sustained by trust in Jehovah’s unfailing mercy, which shows itself in the continued preservation of His people through all their woes. From the lowest pit the voice of faith calls to the Redeemer, and hears a voice that says, “Fear not.” Jehovah will yet plead the cause of His people, and so in the closing verses the accents of humble entreaty pass into a tone of confident appeal for just vengeance against the oppressor. In the fourth acrostic the bitter sorrow again bursts forth in passionate wailing. The images of horror imprinted on the poet’s soul during the last months of Jerusalem’s death-struggle and in the flight that followed are painted with more ghastly detail than in the previous chapters, and the climax is reached when the singer describes the capture of the king, “the breath of our nostrils, the anointed of Jehovah, of whom, we said, ‘ Under his shadow we shall live among the nations.’” The cup of Israel’s sorrow is filled up. The very completeness of the calamity is a proof that the iniquity of Zion has met with full recompense. The day of captivity is over, and the wrath of Jehovah is now ready to pass from His people to visit the sins of Edom, the most merciless of its foes.

Thus far there is both unity and progress in the thought.

Behind the division into four acrostics lies a larger grouping in three sections, each of which begins with the elegiac Π□'K, followed by a representation in increasing detail of the great calamity, and passes on through the thought of Jehovah’s righteousness to hope, which, as in Psalm cxxxvii., finds its characteristic culmination and point of rest in the assurance of righteous vengeance. The central section (chaps, ii. and iii.) is the most subdued in tone, and sounds the profoundest depths of religious feeling, while the opening section presents the theme in its broadest unity, under the form of personification, and is balanced in chap. iv. by the surging flood of an anguish which pours itself forth all the more unreservedly that it contains the seeds of hope.

The fifth chapter, which takes the form of a prayer, does not follow the scheme common to the three foregoing sections. The elegy proper must begin with the utterance of grief for its own sake. Here on the contrary the first words are a petition, and the picture of Israel’s woes comes in to support the prayer. The point of rest too is changed, and the chapter closes under the sense of continued wrath. The centre of the singer’s feeling no longer lies in the recollection of the last days of Jerusalem, but in the long continuance of a divine indignation which seems to lay a measureless interval between the present afflicted state of Israel and those happy days of old which are so fresh in the recollection of the poet in the first four chapters. The details too are drawn less from one crowning misfortune than from a continued state of bondage to the servants of the foreign tyrant (ver. 8), and a continued series of insults and miseries. And with this goes a change in the consciousness of sin: “Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities” (ver. 7; compare Zech. i. 2-6, and similar complaints in very late psalms). These differences, combined with the absence of the acrostic form, suggest that the chapter may be a later addition. It may be noted also that in ver. 6 the community which joins in the prayer has humiliating relations to Assyria (Syria ?) on the one hand and to Egypt on the other, which seems to imply that it dwells in Palestine,—a situation to which the complaint that strangers possess its land and houses, that the weak remnant of Israel is in constant danger from Bedouin incursions (ver. 9), and the picture of the foxes that walk among the rains of Zion, may also point. Moreover, the fact that the book has five parts, like the Psalter and the Pentateuch, makes it Λ ’ ery conceivable that it received its present form after the Pentateuch was complete, that is, after the time of Ezra. The linguistic arguments for the unity of the book (most fully stated by Nägelsbach, p. xvi.) seem to break down as regards chap. v.

According to a tradition which passed unquestioned among Jews and Christians till recent times, the author of the whole book is the prophet Jeremiah. To estimate the value of this tradition, we must trace it back as far as possible. A note prefixed to the Septuagint translation says that, “after Israel was taken captive and Jerusalem laid waste, Jeremiah sat down and wept, and sang this elegy over Jerusalem.” This note may very possibly have stood in the Hebrew copy of the translator, but it certainly cannot be regarded as part of the original text, and it does not bring the tradition within three hundred years of the age of Jeremiah. Another argument bearing on the authority of the tradition has regard to the original place of the book in the Old Testament canon. In Hebrew Bibles the Lamentations stand among the Hagiographa, forming one of the five Megilloth or small books written on separate rolls for liturgical use on separate occasions. In the common order of printed Hebrew Bibles the book stands third among the Megilloth, because in the order of the ecclesiastical year the solemnity of the 9th of Ab was the third annual occasion at which a Megillah was used (see Canticles, vol. v. p. 32). In the Septuagint and Syriac, on the other hand, the Lamentations are attached to the book of Jeremiah, Baruch intervening in the former version; and it has been often supposed that this was the older arrangement,—that is, that even in Hebrew copies the book originally formed an appendix to Jeremiah, and was afterwards separated for liturgical reasons. The argument for this view turns on the fact that side by side with the Talmudic enumeration of twenty-four Old Testament books, agreeably to the present Hebrew arrangement, there was another enumeration which gave twenty-two books, taking Ruth with Judges and Lamentations with Jeremiah (Jerome, Prol. Calf This seems to be the reckoning adopted by Josephus, but the evidence that it had an established place among the Jews of Palestine at or even after his time is scanty and precarious. At any rate the artificial scheme which accommodates the number of sacred books to the number of the twenty-two Hebrew letters is one that can hardly be original. It first appears about the time of the labours of the rabbins in the last days of the Jewish state to give final form to the canon.

Here then there is nothing to carry us beyond the evidence of the Septuagint, and Nδldeke has pointed out that there is some reason to suspect that the Septuagint translation of Lamentations is not by the same hand with that of Jeremiah, which goes to prove that even in the Greek the two books (which are in fact separated by the Apocryphal Baruch) were not originally one. Certainly the book of Lamentations has not shared the very peculiar history of the text of Jeremiah, the Greek of the former agreeing with the Hebrew so closely as to make it probable that the text was early established by frequent liturgical use, while the prophecies underwent many variations in transmission. There is, however, one piece of evidence in the Hebrew canon itself which ancient writers accepted as connecting the name of Jeremiah with our book. In 2 Chron. xxxv. 25 we read that Jeremiah pronounced a dirge over Josiah, and that the death of Josiah was still referred to according to stated usage in the dirges used by singing men and women in the author’s day, and collected in a volume of ∏irp—the ordinary Jewish name of our book. Josephus says that the dirge of Jeremiah on this occasion was extant in his days (Ant., x. 5, 1), and no doubt means by this the canonical Lamentations. Jerome on'Zech. xii. 11 understands the passage in Chronicles in the same sense; but modern writers have generally assumed that, as our book was certainly written after the fall of Jerusalem, the dirges alluded to in Chronicles must be a separate collection. This, however, is far from clear. The TT)Γp of the Chronicler had, according to his statement, acquired a fixed and statutory place in Israel, and were connected with the name of a prophet. In other words, they were canonical as far as any book outside the Pentateuch could be so called at that age. Moreover, the allusion to the king, the anointed of Jehovah, in Lam. iv. 20, though it really applies to Zedekiah, speaks of him with a warm sympathy which later ages would not feel for any king later than Josiah. The Chronicler in particular recognizes only thoroughly good kings (of whom Josiah was the last), and kings altogether bad, for whom he had nothing but condemnation, and with whom he certainly could not imagine a prophet to sympathize. It thus seems highly probable that in the time of the Chronicles, that is, about the close of the Persian period, the book of Lamentations had a recognized liturgical use in the hands of a guild of singers, and was already connected with the name of Jeremiah, though the passage in Chronicles does not make it apparent that the whole official collection of dirges was ascribed to him. But even this testimony is some two centuries and a half later than the events which the book of Lamentations bewails, and is connected with an undoubted error, though a natural one, as to the reference of the book. We cannot therefore feel sure that the tradition current in the guild of singers was authentic and continuous; the general subject of the Lamentations, and particularly the obvious applicability to the personal circumstances of Jeremiah of such passages as iii. 14, 55 (comp. Jer. xx. 7; xxxviii,), made it natural or even· inevitable to think of him as author, if any attempt was made to connect the book, as the later Jews sought to connect all books, with some known name. Nor can we lay special weight on the acceptance of the tradition by an author who transfers post-exile Psalms to the Davidic age (1 Chron. xvi. 7 sqf.

When we proceed to test the internal probability of the tradition we find it to be surrounded by grave difficulties. The language, as Ewald observes, and Nägelsbach (p. xi. sqf has shown with great completeness, is very remote from that of Jeremiah, and even if we separate out chap, v., in which the features already pointed out make it peculiarly difficult to think of him as author, the standpoint of the book corresponds very imperfectly with that of the prophet. Jeremiah, through all his life, was a man standing by · himself, isolated from his people. At the taking of the city the Chaldaeans themselves acknowledged this and treated him with favour. He was carried into Egypt against his will, still counselling patient submission to the foreign rule, and there he continued in opposition to the mass of the fugitives as decidedly as before. The Lamentations, on the contrary, show us a poet in sympathy with the old life of the nation, whose attitude to the temple services, and especially to the king, is far more popular than Jeremiah’s. Nor could Jeremiah speak of the calamity as involving the cessation of revelation and the silence of prophecy (ii. 9); for the Divine word in his breast was as clear and strong after the catastrophe as before it. The judgment, terrible as it was, had far less painful significance to Jeremiah than to the nation at large (Jer. xxiv. 1 sq., xlii. 9 sqf. To this it may be objected that in chap, iii., where the singer’s complaint takes a more personal turn, Jeremiah himself is pictured in his isolation from Israel at large. A closer examination shows, however, that this interpretation turns on a single word in iii. 14. The addition of a final D, not always written in old times, changes “all my people” into “all peoples,” restores the harmony between iii. 14 and verses 61-63, and makes the singer of chap, iii., as the general argument of the chapter requires, a representative of Israel among the heathen, not an isolated figure among unsympathetic countrymen.

Thus viewed, the Lamentations are the earliest evidence of the great national repentance wrought by the fall of the Jewish state. We have here for the first time a genuine expression of popular feeling fully penetrated by those convictions of Israel’s sin and Jehovah’s righteousness which the people of Judah had long resisted, mocking and persecuting the divine messengers who had sought to force them on the conscience of their countrymen. This cry of deepest anguish from the depths of a nation’s despair, chastened by a sense of sin, and rising at length into an attitude of sublime faith in the confident appeal to the righteousness and love of Jehovah, contains the germ of the new life of the Israel of the restoration, and may be taken as the starting point of a fresh epoch in the Old Testament development. It is not probable that these new thoughts and new hopes found so clear and perfect literary expression in the very first days of the exile. Several passages, especially ii. 14 compared with Ezek. xiii. κ l l ^), appear to indicate acquaintance with the book of Ezekiel, which is, as Nägelsbach points out, another argument against authorship by Jeremiah, and combines with the expression in ii. 9 to point to the time when the study of the written word, so characteristic of the age of the exile, had begun to supply the lack of continuous oral revelation. It is hardly possible to give a more exact determination of the place and time of writing. Ewald argues for an origin among the fugitives in Egypt; but the passages to which he appeals (i. 3; iv. 18 sq∙, v.

4 sq.) do not bear out this conclusion, and our scanty historical knowledge of the period points to the eastern captivity as the more probable seat of the spiritual movement to which the book belongs.

Literature.—The older literature is fully given by Nägelsbach, p. xvii. Among recent commentaries may be noticed those of Kalkar (in Latin), 1836; Ewald in his Dichter, vol. i. pt. ii. (2d ed., 1866); Thenius in Kurzgef. Handb., 1855, who...