SOURCE: “History and Poetry in Lamentations,” in Currents in Theology and Mission, Vol. 10, 1983, pp. 155-61.

In the following essay, Hillers explores the reasons behind the lack of historical material in Lamentations and explains that what little of it can be found owes more to literary and religious traditions than to history.

While in Jerusalem several years ago I remarked to a friend, an historian at the Hebrew University, that I was working on a commentary on Lamentations. He expressed great interest, attracted by the possibility of extracting from the series of poems some historical data to flesh out the bare picture of the fall of Jerusalem given in Kings. Encouraged by his suggestion, I dived into the book again and came up almost completely empty. For though Lamentations was written soon after an overpowering historical event, it provides almost no historical information and is related to “history” in...