Book of Lamentations Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Kathleen M. O'Connor

Critical Essay by Kathleen M. O'Connor

SOURCE: O'Connor, Kathleen M. “The Book of Lamentations.” In The New Interpreter's Bible: Volume VI, pp. 1013-24. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001.

In the following essay, O'Connor examines the historical setting, authorship, liturgical uses, and literary features of the Book of Lamentations, calling the work “a literary jewel and a rich resource for theological reflection and worship.”

Introduction

Lamentations is a searing book of taut, charged poetry on the subject of unspeakable suffering. The poems emerge from a deep wound, a whirlpool of pain, toward which the images, metaphors, and voices of the poetry can only point. It is, in part, the rawness of the hurt expressed in the book that has gained Lamentations a secure, if marginal, place in the liturgies of Judaism and Christianity. Its stinging cries for help, its voices begging God to see, its protests to God who hides behind a cloud—all create a space where communal and...
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