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The Old Testament cannot pin God down to a single soteriologe ; it can only
speak of God's saving acts within a whole series of events, and that
necessarily involves some kind of verbal exchange between
God and man. This latter includes both the cry of man in distress
and the response of praise which the saved make to God.
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The Role of the Lament in the Theology of the Old Testament
Interpretation
dead are designated by different words and cannot be mistaken for each
other· Another and more important distinction is that in the Old Testa
ment only the lament of affliction is directed toward God. The lament
of the dead on the other hand is a secular form, as David's lament over
Saul and Jonathan for example indicates (II Sam. ι ).
3) The ngnificance of the lament in the Old Testament is apparent
in the way the pentateuchal narrative opens the Book of Exodus with a
cry of distress over the oppression in Egypt : " . . . then we cried to the
Lord" (Deut. 26:7). The cry to God out of deep anguish accompanies
Israel through every stage of her history. In his redaction of the Book
of Judges, the Deuteronomist says: ". . . they were in sore straits. But
when they cried to the Lord . . ." (2 : isf.)· And thus it happened over
and over again in times of distress, up to the great catastrophe of the
exile, times in which the laments of the Book of Lamentations and many
others (as, e.g., Ps. 89 or Isa. 63-64), up to and including IV Ezra,
brought before God the distress and suffering of the nation.
But in a like manner the distress and suffering of the individual is
expressed in the personal laments that pervade the whole of the Old
Testament. Psalm 130 begins: "Out of the depths I cry to thee, O
Lord!" And Psalm 113 speaks of the God addressed in such laments:
". . . who is seated on high, who looks far down [into the depths]." All
the psalms of lament in the Psalter revolve around this cry out of the
depths, and the psalms of praise declare that God has heard it. The
Book of Job is a mighty fugue based on the cry of lamentation; it alone
indicates the underlying significance that the lament had in Israel for
talk of God, that is, for theology.4
In order for us to see just how many of the texts of the Old Testament
were lament texts, we must start with the fact that all the psalms of
lament in the Psalter (and in Lamentations) constitute only a portion of
the laments contained in the Old Testament. We are able to discern
three stages in the history of the lament: the short laments of the early
period (e.g., Gen. 25: 22; 27:46; Judges 15:18; 21:2), the rythmically
structured laments of the psalms, and the laments of the prose prayers
of the later period (Ezra 9; Neh. 9 ) . These three stages of the lament
can be found throughout all the writings of the Old Testament. The
short laments of the early period are preserved only in narrative accounts.
4. Westermann, Der Aufbau der Buches Hiob, BhTh, 23 ( 1956).
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The Role of the Lament in the Theology of the Old Testament
Interpretation
human affliction, oppression, anxiety, pain, and peril are given voice in
the lament, and thus it becomes an appeal to the only court that can
alter their plight.
4) At this point we must draw attention to the difference between this
usage and that of Christian tradition in the West. In both the Old and
New Testament the lament is a very natural part of human life; in the
Psalter it is an important and inescapable component of worship and
of the language of worship. In the Old Testament there is not a single
line which would forbid lamentation or which would express the idea
that lamentation had no place in a healthy and good relationship with
God. But I also know of no text in the New Testament which would
prevent the Christian from lamenting or which would express the idea
that faith in Christ excluded lamentation from man's relationship with
God. Certainly in the Gospels the actions of Jesus of Nazareth are
characterized by the compassion he evidenced for those who implored
him to help them in their need. The cry of distress with which the
afflicted besought him ("Oh, Thou Son of David, have mercy on me")
is never rebuffed by Jesus. In the passion story the lament of the ancient
people of God (Ps. 22) is placed on the lips of Jesus. Only in the
paraenetic sections of the New Testament letters does the admonition
to bear suffering with patience and humble self-resignation start to gain
the upper hand. It would be a worthwhile task to ascertain how it
happened that in Western Christendom the lament has been totally
excluded from man's relationship with God, with the result that it has
completely disappeared above all from prayer and worship. We must
ask whether this exclusion is actually based on the message of the New
Testament or whether it is in part attributable to the influence of Greek
thought, since it is so thoroughly consistent with the ethic of Stoicism.
II
1 ) The psalms of lament in the Psalter stand at the center of the history
of the lament of the nation and the lament of the individual. They can
be distinguished from the earlier, very short laments (as encountered
in the partriarchal narratives and in the historical accounts) and from
the later prose prayers by their characteristic form—a form which
evolved out of the worship tradition of psalms of lament. They are poems
and songs alike and have a fixed structure, one that obviously permitted
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Interpretation
(since he appears before God with his lament) would have to confess
his sins. There are even a number of laments which contain a protesta-
tion of innocence. From this we can conclude with certainty that
wherever we meet a confession of sin, consciousness of a specific offense
is presupposed. This differs with the Pauline doctrine which says that
sinfulness is a part of man's condition and that the confession of sin is
therefore a part of every approach to God. From the standpoint of
the Pauline doctrine there can be no lament without a confession of sin;
if a lamenter appears before God, he appears as one who is guilty.18
But the lament is not a constituent part of Christian prayer, and we
can say that in a certain sense the confession of sin has become the
Christianized form of the lament : "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima
culpa!55 The result of this is that both in Christian dogmatics and in
Christian worship suffering as opposed to sin has receded far into the
background: Jesus Christ's work of salvation has to do with the for-
giveness of sins and with eternal life; it does not deal however with ending
human suffering. Here we see the real reason why the lament has been
dropped from Christian prayer. The believing Christian should bear
his suffering patiently; he should not complain about it to God. The
"sufferings of this world" are unimportant and insignificant. What is
important is the guilt of sin. The impression thus given is that although
Jesus of Nazareth actively cared for those who suffered and took pity
on those who mourned, the crucified and resurrected Lord in contrast
was concerned with sin and not at all with suffering.19
We must now ask whether Paul and Pauline oriented theology has not
understood the work of Christ in a onesided manner. It is not to be
denied that Jesus of Nazareth understood what he was doing for the
men of his time as something he was doing for those who suffered. It
is not to be denied that he heard and accepted their lament. There is
no passage in the Gospels which suggests that Jesus saw his task to be one
18. For this reason the early church and the reformers had a preference for the "seven
penitential psalms" (Pss. 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143), especially for Ps. 51 (see the article
"Busspsalmen" in RGG, 3 : cols. 15381. [1959]). It is extremely odd that preference for these
psalms has lasted for centuries without anyone having ever asked why, among such a large
number of psalms, there are in fact so few psalms of repentance.
19. That thought is now beginning to be given to this point is indicated by a book review
by Dorothée Solle, "Gott und das Leiden. Ein Buchbericht zu neuer theologischer Literatur,"
in Wissenschaft und Praxis in Kirche und Gesellschaft, 62 (173), 358-372. Note, e.g., the state-
ment, "Hedinger begins with the phenomenon of the repressed lament" (p. 268).
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Interpretation
which believes that the suffering and dying was for them.24
However, it makes a considerable difference whether we take the
Servant Songs as isolated texts, relate them to the Christ event and then
describe them as prophetic sayings which were fulfilled in Christ, or
whether we understand them as the end of a path that leads through
the whole Old Testament. Looked upon in the latter way, the Servant
Songs belong within the narrow sphere of the history of the mediator
which runs from Moses, to Elijah and Jeremiah, to the Suffering Servant
of Isaiah; they belong within the wider sphere of the history of the
lament as the language of suffering experienced by the people of God.
In the narrow sphere, the Suffering Servant belongs within the history
of the mediators who had to suffer in their office; the Servant stands in
that history of the end of the prophetic period and thus close to the
laments of Jeremiah. In the wider sphere, the Suffering Servant belongs
within the history of the afflicted who in their laments laid their suffering
before God that he might take it away.
8) In conclusion we must draw attention to a very important phe-
nomenon: the lament of God. The Book of Isaiah (and thus the entire
collection of prophetic books) begins with God's lament over the rebel-
lion of his people : "Sons have I reared and brought up, but they have
rebelled against me!" (Isa. 1:2-3). The same lament recurs in the
Book of Jeremiah (8:5-7) : "Why then has this people turned away in
perpetual backsliding?" In order to show the unnaturalness of their
rebellion, both laments are followed by a reference to the behavior of
animals ("An ox knows its owner . . ."; "the stork in the heavens knows
her times"). When the redactors placed such laments as these at the
beginning of the prophetic books, they obviously wanted to say that the
compassion of God does not suddenly depart when he intervenes against
the people he saved from slavery as their judge.
The lament of God becomes exceedingly more bitter however when-
ever it concerns a judgment which God himself must bring upon
his people. This is true of the laments in the Book of Hosea. H. W.
24. The suggestion that the words of a king mediating on behalf of his people can also be
discerned in the Servant Songs, especially in 42:1-4, would require extensive comment. The
king is representative of the people in a different way, and the suffering of a kingly mediator is
something essentially different than the suffering of a messenger of God. Its meaning and
significance can only be explained against the background of the whole phenomenon of the
sacral kingship. In this regard, see my forthcoming article, "Sacral Kingship," in the Encyclo-
pedia Britannica.
25. On this verse and 4:4-15; 5:101.; 11:8, see Hosea. Dodekapropheten; Biblischer
1
Kommentar (Neukirchen, Neukirchener Verlag, 1957)? Ρ· I5 ·
26. On the suffering of God, see Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung (München,
Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1951, 1957 e ); Eng.: Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Reginald H.
Fuller (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1962); Kazö Kitamori, Die Theologie des
Schmerzes Gottes (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1972); Japanese, 1946; Eng.: The
Theology of the Pain of God (Richmond, Va., John Knox Press, 1965) ; Jürgen Moltmann,
Der gekreuzigte Gott (München, Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1972); Ulrich Hedinger, Wider die
Versöhnung Gottes mit dem Elend (Zürich, EVZ-Verlag, 1972) ; and also see ftn. 19.