under Gedaliah, the Hebrew historical
records suddenly become silent. This silence is due to the fact that there
was little of external interest to record. The real history of this tragic
half-century is the record of the anguish and doubts and hopes in the
hearts of the scattered remnants of the race. The little book of
Lamentations expresses dramatically and pathetically the thoughts of the
people as they meditated upon the series of calamities which gathered
about the great catastrophe of 586 B.C. Like the ancient Torah, or five
books of the Law, it contains a quintet of poems. These are very similar
in theme and form to many of the psalms of the Psalter. In the first four
the characteristic five-beat measure, by which the deep emotions,
especially that of sorrow, were expressed, is consistently employed. Each
of these four is also an acrostic, that is, each succeeding line or group
of lines begins with a succeeding letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This
acrostic form was probably adopted in order to aid the memory, and
suggests that from the first these poems were written to be used in
public. Even so the Jews of Jerusalem to-day chant them on each of their
sabbaths beside the foundation walls of the great platform on which once
stood their ruined temple. Although the artificial character of these
poems tends to check the free expression of thought and feeling, it is
possible to trace in them a logical progress and to feel the influence of
the strong emotions that inspired them.

III. Authorship and Date of the Book. In theme and literary form these
poems are so strikingly similar to Jeremiah's later sermons that it was
almost inevitable that tradition should attribute them to the great
prophet of Judah's decline. This tradition, to which is due the position
of the book of Lamentations in the Greek and English Bibles, cannot be
traced earlier than the Greek period. The evidence within the poems
themselves strongly indicates that they were not written by Jeremiah. It
is almost inconceivable that he would subject his poetic genius to the
rigid limitations of the acrostic structure. Moreover, he would never have
spoken of the weak Zedekiah, whose vacillating policy he condemned, in the
terms of high esteem which appear in Lamentations 4:20. These poems also
reflect the popular interpretation of the great national calamity, rather
than Jeremiah's searching analysis of fundamental causes. A careful study
of Lamentations show