Lamentations

Lamentations. By Adele Berlin. Old Testament Library. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002, xxvi + 135 pp., $39.95.

Observing that "a commentary need not be encyclopedic" (p. ix), Adele Berlin has eschewed such a goal and in so doing has produced an extremely manageable and readable commentary on the literary techniques and message of Lamentations. Berlin, with her extensive background in literary study of the Hebrew Bible, provides a literary reading of Lamentations, which in turn elucidates the ancient religious world behind the text.

Berlin sets out the priorities for her study in her introduction. She only briefly treats the insoluble traditional critical questions like authorship and date, and gives her attention to those areas that most inform her literary reading of the book, including characteristics of the poetry in Lamentations, feminist and sociological perspectives on the personae in the book (particularly the contrasting portrayals of suffering women and men and the various leadership and familial terms mentioned in the book), the role of mourning in ancient Israelite religion as illuminating the movement of Lamentations, the theology of destruction and exile in the book as based on the concept of purity and the Davidic covenant, and the genre of the book in light of comparable literature both within the Hebrew Bible and Sumerian literature.

In the commentary proper, Berlin gives a new translation for each poem with notes that explain her rendering of more problematic portions of the Hebrew. This is followed by a lucid exposition of each poem both as a whole and with respect to particulars. Although she views the book as a compilation of five originally independent poems, throughout her commentary she presents a sustained argument that the book as a whole is a "perpetual lament commemorating unconsolable mourning" over the "utter meltdown of life" in the wake of the fall of Jerusalem, an event the poet longs for God to notice (pp. 10, 125).

Notable in Berlin's treatment is her assessment of the feminine imagery for Zion, in which she rejects the extreme feminist view that the imagery is degrading to women and instead concludes that the imagery lends to the view that "no suffering is worse than that of an abused woman" (p. 9). Also noteworthy is the role she gives to the Israelite "paradigm of purity" in her exposition of the theology behind the book. This is played out on a large scale in her understanding of the destruction and exile as being a necessary "purging" of Israel's moral impurity by God rather than an indication of God's abandonment of his people, and on a smaller scale in her objection to seeing a reference to ritual menstrual impurity in 1:9 in favor of interpreting the verse as metaphorically representing Israel's moral impurity-whoredom.

Overall, Berlin provides a readable and insightful exposition of Lamentations that includes an uncommon attention to the pervasive metaphors in the book. Scholars, clergy, and students alike will find in her commentary a noteworthy contribution to the study of Lamentations.

John A. Cook

Trinity International University, Deerfield, IL

Copyright Evangelical Theological Society Mar 2004
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