Lamentations
Lamentations is grief given form: five poems mourning Jerusalem's destruction in 586 BC, four of them acrostics that walk sorrow through the alphabet, as if pain itself needed ordering to be survivable. The city sits like a widow; children faint in the streets; the poet's own eyes fail with weeping. Nothing is airbrushed, and God's hand in the judgment is squarely faced. Yet at the book's exact center stands its defiant hope: the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies are new every morning. Lamentations teaches God's people how to weep honestly and hope anyway.
Anonymous; tradition ascribes it to Jeremiah, an eyewitness of the fall.
Shortly after Jerusalem's destruction in 586 BC.
Survivors of Jerusalem's fall, mourning amid the ruins.
To voice grief over Jerusalem's destruction while confessing God's justice and clinging to his unfailing mercy.