Deuteronomy 1:1 – 3:22
Man of Constant Sorrow
The biblical book of Lamentations recounts in painful detail the events leading up to the fall of the Jerusalem Temple, including the gruesome account of the inhabitants’ starvation during the great siege that preceded the Temple’s destruction.
The vivid narration of these events is so moving that it is easy to miss a remarkable structural feature of Lamentations. Four out of five of its chapters are exactly 22 verses long. Chapter 3, by contrast, consists of 66 verses—all of them short and choppy, markedly different in style from the verses of the other chapters. What is more, at a crucial point the speakers change. In chapters 1 and 2, the focus is a woman, “Daughter Zion” (bat tziyon). She is a kind of female embodiment of the Jewish people, a widow weeping bitterly; jeered by her enemies, she has no comforter. By contrast, the focus (and speaker) of chapter 3 is an unidentified man. Who is he—and why the switch?
Age-old tradition holds that Lamentations was written by the prophet Jeremiah. After all, Jeremiah was alive during and after these sad events; who could be a more likely source of these stirring lines than the great prophet? And indeed, the Wisdom of Ben Sira (a Jewish work composed in the early second century BCE) asserts that Lamentations was composed “by the hand of Jeremiah” (Sir 49:6), as do other, slightly later writers. If Jeremiah did indeed compose the whole book, then presumably he had spoken in the name of Daughter Zion in the first two chapters, but in chapter 3 he dropped the mask and began speaking on his own behalf, “I am the man who has seen affliction…” (Lam 3:1).
Still, some modern commentators have expressed doubts about this attribution. After all, if Jeremiah was the author, why doesn’t the book say so somewhere? Indeed, why do other biblical books, although they speak of Jeremiah in connection with Jerusalem’s fall, stop short of identifying Jeremiah as the author of Lamentations? Some scholars have therefore offered other suggestions for the author of Lamentations. It is the work of an anonymous “frustrated soldier” who survived the siege of Jerusalem, or one of the Temple singers exiled to Babylon, or perhaps a specific known individual, such as Jehoiachin, Zedekiah, or the high priest Seraiah. None of these proposals seems particularly persuasive. More to the point, they fail to answer the question of why the book suddenly switches its focus from Daughter Zion to this unidentified male.
The answer may lie in a particular word used in the opening words of chapter 3, “I am the man who has known affliction.” The word usually translated as “man” here, gever, has an interesting nuance in biblical Hebrew. A gever is not the usual opposite of “woman” (the usual opposite of ishah is ish). Rather, a gever is a strong man; a gibbor ḥayil is a “mighty warrior” (Jud 11:1, 1 Sam 9:1, and freq.). This seems to be the whole point of biblical verses that say things like, “Happy is the gever who (nevertheless) takes his refuge in Him” (Ps 34:9) or Jeremiah’s own, “Accursed is the gever who puts his trust in man and makes mere humans his strength… Blessed is the gever who puts his trust in the Lord.” Being a gever thus carries with it the temptation to rely solely on his own strength.
The gever who speaks in Lamentations 3 is thus someone who has been chastened. Events have taught him the limits of his own power. So it is altogether appropriate for the speaker of this chapter to identify himself as a gever. An old man or woman, or even “Daughter Zion,” would hardly be as fitting. The gever, more than anyone, has had to learn the lesson of Jerusalem’s downfall. As he goes on to ask (Lam 3:39): “What should a survivor, a gever, bemoan? His own sins!”
Shabbat shalom!
