Lamentations Through the Centuries

One of the shortest books in the Bible, Lamentations exercises a disproportionately powerful cultural influence. As an unflinching account of the devastation wreaked by war, it has been called upon again and again by Jews, Christians, and others in their responses to catastrophes as varied as the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, the Great Fire of London, the Holocaust and 9/11. Covering two and a half millennia of liturgy and literature, theology and psychology, art, music and film, this volume explores the astonishing variety of cultural and religious responses to Lamentations , taking in the New Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Yehudah Halevy, John Calvin, and Thomas Tallis, as well as the startling interpretations of Marc Chagall, Cynthia Ozick, Alice Miller, and Zimbabwean junk sculpture. Viewed through this kaleidoscope of sources, the ancient biblical text acquires a vital and resonant new life.  Lamentations Through the Centuries is published within the Wiley–Blackwell Bible Commentaries series. Further information about this innovative reception–history series is available at www.bbibcomm.net

Series Editors’ Preface viii Abbreviations x List of Figures xii Introduction 1 COMMENTARY 26 Afterword 193 Bibliography 196 Author Index 206 Subject Index 209

Paul M. Joyce  holds the Samuel Davidson Chair in Old Testament/ Hebrew Bible at King′s College London. He is the author of Ezekiel: A Commentary (2007), and Divine Initiative and Human Response in Ezekiel (1989), and is co–editor of After Ezekiel: Essays on the Reception of a Difficult Prophet (with Andrew Mein, 2011), and Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honour of Michael D.Goulder (with Stanley E. Porter and David E. Orton, 1994).   Diana Lipton teaches at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Rothberg International School. She has been a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, as well as Reader in Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Revisions of the Night: Politics and Promises in the Patriarchal Dreams of Genesis (1999) and Longing for Egypt and Other Unexpected Biblical Tales (2008), and is co–editor of Feminism and Theology (with Janet Martin Soskice, 2003) and Studies on the Text and Versions of the Hebrew Bible in Honour of Robert Gordon (with Geoffrey Kahn, 2011).