The Lamentations of Jeremiah is a book with which the old Tenebree Office for Holy Week gave many people at least a nodding acquaintance. Not infrequently, however, the much admired musical settings tended to detract from the attention given to the words themselves, a fact noticed by Mendelssohn, who remarked that the most powerful music was usually expended on the mere rubrics, the alephs beths, and incipits. That Lamentations does repay, both for theological and for literary content, a careful study, will I hope emerge from this article. But before we speak of content, we should say a word or two about the structure and authorship of the book.

The book consists of five poems, corresponding to its five chapters of which the first four are abecedarian in structure (which is to say that each stanza begins with a fresh letter of the Hebrew alphabet and each line of the stanza begins with the same letter as the first line)