Review in: Interpretation
2003 57: 428
Review door: Nancy
C. LeeGevonden op: http://int.sagepub.com/content/57/4/428.full.pdf+html
Lamentations: A Commentary
by Adele Berlin Old Testament Library. Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2002.
135 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-664-21849-0.
LAMENTATIONS IS RECEIVING renewed attention after some
neglect. In practice, people of faith are often unfamiliar with its content,
despite its longstanding use to commemorate the destruction of the Temple on
the ninth day of the month of Ab in Jewish tradition and its reading during
some Christian services of Holy Week. Yet perhaps the voices in Lamentations,
their agony and unrelenting honesty, are finally finding resonance in present
contexts of human suffering around the world.
New commentaries
on Lamentations are emerging in major biblical series, including this excellent
contribution. Berlin brings to it her noted expertise in poetic and literary
analysis, as well as ancient Near Eastern studies. Her well-versed scholarly
translation is complemented by a pragmatic and empathetic commentary that opens
a large window on the troubled world of Lamentations. Berlin's approach—though
primarily literary— eschews mere aestheticism in order to "discover the
religious worldview that informs the imagery of the book" (p. ix). Her
skill in translating the poetic artistry brings that world to life: "[t]he
mournings and mutterings of my assailants are against me all day long. When
they sit and when they rise, look, I am their tune" (Lam 3:62-63). Also,
"[t]hose used to feasting on delicacies starved in the streets. Those
reared in crimson huddled in garbage dumps" (Lam 4:5).
Berlin's sensitivity to
socio-political layers of meaning is also apparent. For example, the NRSV
reads, "All her people groan as they search for bread; they trade their
treasures for food to revive their strength" (Lam 1:11). Interpreters
suggest that the "treasures" may include "children," sold
as slaves for food for the parents' survival. Berlin, however, suggests that
in a besieged
city, human beings had little value as a commodity to be sold Rather the
desperate parents, who can no longer feed their children, are forced to give
them away for the good of the children, to "sustain their life" (p.
56).
Berlin notes that
this horrible choice, of relinquishing one's children in hopes that they would
survive, happened in the Holocaust. It is witnessed in many contexts of war
around the world today.
The
substantial introduction includes well-organized discussions of: gender and
suffering, theology of destruction and exile as God's punishment, the mourning
context, purity, and broken ancient Near Eastern treaties. Berlin also
illumines language in Lamentations that echoes the curse language of
Deuteronomy 28.
Berlin notes the twentieth-century debate about whether
Lamentations is influenced more by the funeral dirge genre or by the communal
lament genre and concludes, with recent interpreters, that both are at play and
one need not choose between them. However, she proposes that Lamentations
"constitutes a new, post-586 type of lament" that she calls "the
Jerusalem lament," which is also reflected in Psalms 44, 74, and 79 (p.
25). Berlin asks us to consider more deeply the relation between such laments
and "Zion songs," for "the Jerusalem laments ... are the songs
for the lost Zion" (p. 26).
Berlin
suggests that each chapter of Lamentations points to overarching themes. In
chapter one, mourning, shame, and suffering are borne by the city personified
as a woman—first as a widow absent her divine spouse, then as a betrayed lover,
and finally as a bereaved mother. But because Jerusalem is also said to have
committed transgressions, she evokes both pity and revulsion. The anger of God
and the anger of the poet for God's harshness are central to chapter two. The
primary theme of chapter three is exile; of chapter four, degradation; of
chapter five, prayer. Berlin pays close attention to how the poet in chapter
four illustrates degradation by the use of brilliant colors that describe the
life that once was and is to be erased and replaced by the dullness and
blackness of famine and death in the devastated city.
Berlin's commentary provides a great deal of interpretative
and theological insight with its modern literary approach. One wishes, however,
for more exploration of traditional oral poetic practices of
composition/performance in light of Lamentations' multiple "voices"
in a mourning context. Is it self-evident that modern literary categories can
be so easily applied to ancient poetic literature? One finds a modern literary
approach, but one does not find exploration of the ancient poetic singer's
traditional practice of oral composition/ performance and discussion of how
such "voices" are brought together by a scribe/redactor. One does not
find an explanation as to why modern literary categories can be so easily
applied to ancient poetry. In her commnetary on Lamentations 3, Berlin states,
"... there is no reason to conclude that an actual survivor wrote the
chapter"(p. 6). But, again, one wishes for greater acknowledgment that
real people who survived might have composed versions of these poems.
Finally, Berlin suggests that chapter one's refrain,
"there is no comforter for her [Jerusalem]," is "a call to God
to be Zion's comforter" (p. 48). At the close of her commentary, Berlin
poignantly notes that the book ends
on a note of despair and a
feeling of permanent rejection. The last chapter, and with it the book as a
whole, fail to provide the comfort that has been sought throughout it. The book
thereby remains a perpetual lament commemorating unconsolable mourning (p.
125).
As
those familiar with lament psalms and suffering itself realize, some lamenters
move to praise and some are left waiting for a divine answer. So too with
interpreters of Lamentations through the centuries—some leave the agonized text
hanging on its last desperate note; others desire to answer it with a positive,
hopeful response, such as Second Isaiah. So Berlin offers, as a final word in
her commentary: "In Jewish tradition the custom in public recitation is to
repeat the penultimate verse when a book ends on a negative note . .. so as not
to conclude on a note of despair" (p. 126). Ironically, this is to lament
yet again: "Take us back, Lord, to yourself; O let us come back. Make us
again as we were before" (Lam 5:21; p. 115).
Nancy C. Lee
ELMHURST COLLEGE
ELMHURST, ILLINOIS
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