Lamentations 1 Lamentations 1:1 How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! She has become like a widow who was once great among the nations. The princess among the provinces has become a vassal. Gendered Lament This chapter, like most in the book, is an extended acrostic based on the twenty- two letters of the alef-bet (Hebrew alphabet). Chapters 1, 2 and 4 have twenty-two verses, oneCOPYRIGHTED for each letter of the alef-bet; the MATERIALfirst word of the first verse begins with alef, the first letter of the alef-bet, the first word of the second verse begins with bet, the second letter, and so forth. Chapter 3, with sixty-six verses, is more elaborate; in that case the first three verses begin with alef, the second three Lamentations Through the Centuries, First Edition. Paul M. Joyce and Diana Lipton. © 2013 Paul M. Joyce and Diana Lipton. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 0001809436.INDDChapter No.: 3 Title 26 Name: Joyce 2/2/2013 6:40:45 PM Comp. by: R. RAMESH Date: 02 Feb 2013 Time: 06:40:45 PM Stage: Proof Page Number: 26 Lamentations 1 27 with bet, and so forth. The personification of Zion as a woman characterizes the first two chapters of the book. It is a feature facilitated by the fact that ir1 (the Hebrew word for city) is feminine, and is a motif shared with some other biblical books (cf. Sawyer 1989 on Isaiah). Parallels to the presentation of Jerusalem as a widowed city are to be found in other ancient Near Eastern lit- erature (Cohen 1973), and there are other affinities with lament material in the ancient world, especially in Mesopotamia (Dobbs-Allsopp 1993). The opening verse of the book of Lamentations powerfully brings together collective catastrophe in history (‘How lonely sits the city that once was full of people!’) with the deepest and most personal of individual human losses (‘like a widow’). In this combination we find a key to the power of this small book to speak to numerous different human situations and conditions. It is common- place to read this first chapter, and the next, as an empathetic account in which the narrator stands in solidarity with the bereaved widow. Such a stance is found as early as the Christian Fathers. In his Funeral Oration on Meletius Gregory of Nyssa (who died as Bishop of Antioch), (born Neocaesarea, Cappadocia, Turkey, c.335; died Nyssa, Turkey, c.395) draws on the first verses of Lamentations for pastoral purposes: ‘You have heard certain mournful and lamenting words of Jeremiah, with which he bewailed Jerusalem as a deserted city, and how among other expressions of passionate grief he added this, “The ways of Zion do mourn” [Lam 1:4]. These words were uttered then, but now they have been realized. For when the news of our calamity shall have been spread abroad, then will the ways be full of mourning crowds’ (Wenthe 2009: 276). Gregory encourages his grieving audience to identify with tragic Jerusalem. But for many readers in modern times, even when identification with Zion persists, the language used in Lamentations has become seriously problematic. In ‘Hiding Behind the Naked Women in Lamentations: a Recriminative Response’, (1999), Deryn Guest presents a powerful and extensive exploration of the metaphor of Zion as a woman, informed by the exposure of the ‘ pornoprophetic’ nature of much biblical literature by feminist critics such as Exum (1995) and Weems (1995). Guest pieces together (‘re-members’) the pic- ture of Zion, isolated and without comfort (Lam 1:2, 16, 17, 21), exposed to humiliating nakedness (Lam 1:8), and robbed of her former dignity (Lam 2:15). Like many other interpreters, Guest finds reference to rape, not only in Lam 5:11 but also in this opening passage, in Lam 1:10: ‘The foe has laid hands on all her precious things; she has even seen the nations invade her sanctuary’ (see further on Lam 1:10, and also on Lam 1:8–9, 15–16; 2:21–2; 4:13–15). Zion is 1 We have chosen to keep Hebrew words to a minimum in this volume and, where they are required, to transliterate them in the manner that we think makes them most accessible to non-Hebrew readers (and thus not according to scholarly conventions). 0001809436.INDDChapter No.: 3 Title 27 Name: Joyce 2/2/2013 6:40:45 PM Comp. by: R. RAMESH Date: 02 Feb 2013 Time: 06:40:45 PM Stage: Proof Page Number: 27 28 Lamentations Through the Centuries abused, betrayed and bereaved, and it is God who is the agent of the horrors that befall her (v. 5, ‘the Lord has made her suffer for her many transgres- sions’). What is more, Zion blames herself (e.g. Lam 1:20, ‘I have been very rebellious’). In short, she suffers utter humiliation at the hands of an avenging deity and provides the focal point for the guilt and shame of Israel. Guest argues that even if this metaphor was intended as a call to repentance for the commu- nity as a whole, led as it was by men, the female figure provides an easy scape- goat behind which the male community may hide. Another case in which the metaphorical nature of such language about women is at risk of becoming obscured is Ezekiel 23, a text broadly contemporary to Lamentations. In Ezek 23:48 the prophet (or perhaps a redactor not well attuned to the metaphor) declares: ‘Thus will I put an end to lewdness in the land, so that all women may take warning and not commit lewdness as you have done’ (cf. Moughtin- Mumby 2008: 163). ‘The image of Zion/Woman found in Lamentations should be resisted’, Guest contends, ‘because it endorses a stereotypical view of women and sanctions a series of abusing punishments’ (422). Among the stereotypes compounded is that women attract the abuse against them; the opening chapter ‘provides an exposition on the just deserts of wilful provocation’ (423). Guest also exposes the complicity of male commentators with the book’s rhetorical thrust. Biblical studies have often, she says, been so preoccupied with questions of genre and with ancient Near Eastern parallels that one ‘receives the impression that personification is merely a figurative device; it does not relate to any real female physical distress, and therefore there is no sense of its offensive nature’ (421). Such studies ‘erase, mask or simply do not consider the social realities from which the image derives’, claims Guest (426). In such ways, the blame encoded in the text is reinforced in exegesis, with ‘a shared value system between writer and reader’ that is ‘offensive and damaging’ (445). Whereas reception history is often a story of readers finding new meanings in old texts, we also encounter cases, as here, in which original meanings often prove uncongenial or even unacceptable in fresh contexts, as new circum- stances and new sensibilities challenge continuity with the values of the ancient text. At this point, for some, the status of the text comes into question. Guest herself asks what, in the light of all this, can be done with Lamentations and she concludes that, for her at least, it cannot have authority as Scripture: ‘I person- ally opt to stand with those who make a complete stand against the text per se and would advocate the removal of such texts from the biblical canon’ (439). But censoring the Bible so that a smaller canon is retained is not an option that all readers will favor. Some will wish to leave aside the notion of scriptural authority altogether – if the text is valued at all, it is as a classic text rather than 0001809436.INDDChapter No.: 3 Title 28 Name: Joyce 2/2/2013 6:40:45 PM Comp. by: R. RAMESH Date: 02 Feb 2013 Time: 06:40:45 PM Stage: Proof Page Number: 28 Lamentations 1 29 as religious Scripture. But for most of those who retain a relationship with the Bible as Scripture, whether Jewish or Christian, it is important that the whole canon designated within a particular tradition is retained and wrestled with, even if, as in the present case, some features of the text are so troubling that continuity with scriptural tradition comes at times close to breaking point. Naming Necessity According to Jewish tradition, the books of the Hebrew Bible are typically named after a book’s reputed author, such as Ezekiel, after a central character, such as Ruth, or after the first significant word of the book; the book of Genesis, for example, is known in Jewish tradition as Bereishit (‘In the beginning’). The practice of naming a biblical book after its first significant word can present a problem when it comes to translating the Hebrew name into English. The book of Lamentations is an excellent example. ‘Lamentations’ is a translation of the Greek Threni, which means ‘Laments’ and well describes the content of the book, which is indeed a series of laments. On the other hand, the first Hebrew word of the book, eicha,2 is almost untranslatable (though NJPS does well with ‘Alas!’). Robbed of its context, as is almost bound to be the case in a one-word title, the literal translation, ‘How’, does not begin to give a sense of what the book is all about. One solution to the problem of naming Eicha in English emerges from a contribution by David Shatz to Contending with Catastrophe: Jewish Perspectives on September 11th (Broyde 2011), a collection of essays covering Jewish legal, ethical and theological responses to the events of September 2001.