Book of Lamentations - Additional Historical and Cultural Context

Additional Historical and Cultural Context

Most modern day biblical scholars assert that the Book of Lamentations was written by one or more authors in Judah, shortly after the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 BC; and was penned as a response to Babylonian Exile, the intense suffering of the people of Judah, and the complete and utter destruction of Jerusalem. Werner E. Lemke and Kathleen O’Connor point out “Lamentations is probably the work of a survivor (or survivors) of the nation’s destruction who poured out sorrow, anger and dismay after the city’s traumatic defeat and occupation by the Babylonians."

The theological views that led to its author(s) writing the Book of Lamentations emanated from the cultural and religious attitudes of the people of Judah in the 6th and 7th centuries BC and was probably also influenced by non-biblical sources which originated from the cultural and religious attitudes of Judah's neighbors of differing religions.

The Book of Lamentations reflects the theological and biblical view that what happened to Jerusalem was a deserved punishment; and its destruction was instigated by their god for the communal sins of the people. This theological viewpoint was also widespread among Judah’s neighbors of differing religions who believed the destruction of a particular city could be attributed to the city’s deity who was punishing the city for some communal sin or wrongdoing.

The destruction of cities by foreign invaders, and its resulting catastrophic suffering, unfortunately, was very common in the ancient Near East and, therefore, we can observe examples of the lament form/genre concerning destroyed cities and temples from extra-biblical sources, particularly from early Sumerian Literature dating to the late third and early second millennia BC. For example, from Sumerian Literature we can see the same Genre that we see in the Book of Lamentations of the Funeral Dirge and Lament reflected in the Sumerian Lament: Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur which depicts the destruction of the cities of Sumer and Ur. Yet, as Lemke and O’Connor point out, The Book of Lamentations, while adapting several traditional literary, historical, and cultural Near Eastern elements, is a unique literary composition, scripted to a specific historical situation, in response to an historical catastrophe, addressing the survivors of this catastrophe in a distinctive religious context.