Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament

An International Journal of Nordic Theology

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Lamenting Loss: A New Understanding of Trauma

in Lam 1

Jeremiah W. Cataldo

To cite this article: Jeremiah W. Cataldo (2020) Lamenting Loss: A New Understanding
of Trauma in Lam 1, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 34:1, 51-73, DOI:
10.1080/09018328.2020.1801927

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09018328.2020.1801927

Published online: 24 Aug 2020.

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Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 2020
Vol. 34, No. 1, 51-73, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09018328.2020.1801927

Lamenting Loss: A New Understanding of

Trauma in Lam 1

Jeremiah W. Cataldo
Frederik Meijer Honors College, Grand Valley State University,
Allendale, MI, USA
121 Niemeyer Learning and Living Center
Allendale, MI 49401
cataldoj@gvsu.edu

ABSTRACT: This article experiments with the applicability of modern trau-

ma studies in applied interpretations of Lamentations. Using theories from
Kai Erickson, Cathy Caruth, Ruth Leys, and more, this work will propose that
Lamentations as a literary creation in response to trauma assumes the exist-
ence of its community beyond the trauma in which it was born.

Key words: Lamentations, Bible, Trauma, Yehud, Biblical Criticism

The torrent of emotions that pours out of Lamentations often sweeps its read-
ers into conclusions that its sole purpose is tragic loss. But does the “flow”
end there? Does the book overwhelm us with despondent waters only to point
to the negative spaces of Zion and Jerusalem? As though we were swept
away only to be reminded of the place where we just were? Does it express a
frozen state of melancholia, as Hugh Pyper suggests, or does it expose expec-
tations for a (re)turn to stability?1 In somewhat formal terms, the answer to
that can be found by applying critical analyses that expose cultural motiva-
tions behind metaphors and literary structuring in the unified collection of
poems that moves its audience from one place to another. In less formal ones,
how we talk about grief is based on how we see the state of our tomorrow—
and that implies an expectation of a tomorrow, or in more psychological
terms, an intention of “readjusting” and “reinvesting.”2 That Lamentations
can be read this way finds support in the modern context: there is a trend of
using Lamentations as a model for expressing grief while readjusting to a
changed perspective and reinvesting oneself into one’s community. 3 Such
critical approaches include assessment of how metaphors and structures link,

1. Hugh S. Pyper, “Reading Lamentations,” JSOT 95 (2001), pp. 56-57, 64.

2. Deryn Guest, “Hiding Behind the Naked Women in Lamentations: A Recrimin-
ative Response,” BI 7, no. 4 (1999), p. 45.
3. Tiffany Houck-Loomis, “Good God?!? Lamentations as a Model for Mourning the
Loss of the Good God,” Journal of Religion and Health 51, no. 3 (2012), pp. 701-
708.

© 2020 The Editors of the Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament

52 Jeremiah W. Cataldo

in terms of meaning, individual and collective bodies through shared narra-

tives. Toward that end, this study focuses on exploring Lamentations as a
ritualizing text, which means that as a text its intent was to provide structured
expression for the identity of a group in response to a collectively internal-
ized trauma.4 In this, it is an experimental reading of Lamentations that looks
for new methods of increasing academic understanding of the role the text
may have filled.
There are some scholars who have come close to the point that I am mak-
ing. Adele Berlin, for instance, argued that Lamentations was written to
commemorate the building of the second Jerusalem temple—one ritualistical-
ly “walked” through grief in order to appreciate the return to stability that the
temple symbolized.5 That theory of (structural) movement as a basis for un-
derstanding the past with an eye on the future has also been argued by Elie
Assis and Marvin Sweeney independently. Where Sweeney focused on the
five chapters as dirges working together in daisy-chained units, Assis argued
for a more intentional, concentric structuring in Lamentations, based on close
connections between Lam 1 and 5, and 2 and 4.6 For Assis, the whole of the
book (chs. 1-5) brings its audience from disobedience, to exile, to the possi-
bility and expectation of hope. Of that process and structure, he wrote, “The
object is to uproot [despair] from the surviving people. The transition from
despair to hope occurs in chap. 3. Subsequently, in chaps. 4 and 5 the author
of the book returns the reader and the lamenter to the same situations de-
scribed in chaps. 1 and 2. This time, however, there is moderate hope, which
is most succinctly addressed by allowing the lamenter to direct the grievance
to God in prayer.”7
Note also Delbert Hillers, who touched upon the idea that Lamentations
looked to a more stabilized future when he wrote,
From near despair, this [everyman] wins through to confidence that God’s
mercy is not at an end, and that his final, inmost will for man is not suffering.

4. I am drawing from C. Bell’s scholarship on ritual throughout Ritual: Perspectives

and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). It is also important to
remember that Lamentations has become a ritual text in Judaism and Christianity.
Jews, for example, cite the text during Tisha b’Av to commemorate Jewish tragedies,
including the fall of the second Jerusalem temple in 70 CE.
5. Adele Berlin, Lamentations: A Commentary, Kindle., The Old Testament Library
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), pp. ix-x.
6. Elie Assis, “The Unity of the Book of Lamentations,” CBQ 71, no. 2 (2009), pp.
306-329, 328-29. Marvin A. Sweeney, Tanak: A Theological and Critical Introduc-
tion to the Jewish Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), pp. 433-438. See also K.
O’Connor (“Lamentations,” in WBC, ed. Carol Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe [Lou-
isville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998], p. 188), who makes a similar argument
that the other four chapters create around chapter 3.
7. Assis, “Unity,” p. 329.
 Lamenting Loss 53

From this beginning of hope the individual turns to call the nation to penitent
waiting for God’s mercy.8
Lamentations expresses traumatic grief. That much is true, but no analysis
should end there. I propose that the entirety of Lamentations—including its
structural layout, metaphors, and themes—is an attempt to reframe trauma as
something that fits within the categorical meaning systems of the communi-
ty.9 Rather than leaving it to be only something that disrupts the sociopolitical
stability of the community, trauma becomes something that can be articulated
within the cultural language of the community.10 After all, why explain a
traumatic experience if it were the end of the story? Lamentations ritualizes
the experience not for the sake of grief alone. It ritualizes the experience and
brings its audience to the threshold of a possible return to sociopolitical sta-
bility. In that function, similar to the function of the balags and ersemmas of
Mesopotamian tradition, as some scholars argue, discussed below, Lamenta-
tions mourns the loss of Jerusalem but for the purpose of collective remem-
bering.11
A Word on Dating and Other Things
Arguments for Jeremianic authorship of the book are no longer in vogue. 12
Instead, scholars have been looking for exilic connections between Lamenta-
tions and other works, such as Ezekiel, 2nd Isaiah, Psalms, and still even Jer-
emiah.13 Yet as Hillers once wrote, “[T]he book evinces no acquaintance with
or special interest in the plight of exiles in Babylon or Egypt.”14 Compare that

8. Delbert Hillers, Lamentations (The Anchor Bible; New York: Doubleday & Com-
pany, Inc., 1972), p. xvi.
9. Hillers, for instance, concludes that Lam 1, and the remainder of the book, seems
to have been intended for congregational worship (ibid., p. 17).
10. Note, for instance, the studies of Cathy Caruth, Trauma Exploration in Memory
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Idem, Unclaimed Experience:
Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
Caruth argues that an experience does not produce a traumatic effect but remember-
ing and retelling it to “make sense” of its impact upon identity.
11. Was feminization of the city based on adopting literary motifs of the Mesopota-
mian balags and ersemmas, in which the city’s goddess wept over its destruction (cf.
F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, “The Syntagma of Bat Followed by a Geographical Name in
the Hebrew Bible: A Reconsideration of Its Meaning and Grammar,” CBQ 57, no. 3
(1995), pp. 451-470, 461-463)? Possibly, but the fluidity with which the city is both
victim and adulteress may suggest that there was no direct correlation between
Lamentations and the Mesopotamian city-laments.
12. O’Connor, “Lamentations,” p. 187.
13. Hillers, Lamentations, xxii. The argument is repeated by Lena Sofia Tiemeyer,
“Geography and Textual Allusions: Interpreting Isaiah XL-LV and Lamentations as
Judahite Texts,” VT 57, no. 3 (2007), pp. 367-85, though with a more focused at-
tempt to classify both Isaiah and Lamentations as “Judahite” texts.
14. Hillers, Lamentations, p. xxiii.
54 Jeremiah W. Cataldo

with Kathleen O’Connor’s argument that the setting of Lamentations is the

remnant community in postexilic Jerusalem.15
To be sure, what looks like literary borrowing between Lamentations and
other Mesopotamian literatures, such as the balags and ersemmas, would
seem to confirm that Lamentations was written after Babylonian literary cul-
ture could influence the Judean one. Yet above all, such arguments miss the
fundamental point this article attempts to capture, which is more informed by
trauma studies than it is historical-traditional ones: texts that are written to
tell a traumatic story are done so after an event in order to make sense of not
the event itself but how it can be categorized within the collective psyche.
One need only look to the breadth of modern trauma theorists to see that, but
take note of Cathy Caruth, Kai Erikson, Ruth Leys, Harry Triandis, and
Elleke Boehmer, and more; all of whom are cited in this article. Properly
understood within the framework of trauma theory, it matters not whether
Lamentations was written 10 years after the Judeans were displaced by the
Babylonian Empire or 70. Did it represent a community in Babylonia or one
of immigrant Judeans in Yehud? As a possibly ritualizing text, that aspect is
almost irrelevant, because we can assume that a community in either location,
if it were responsible for Lamentations, was hoping for the same thing: the
ability to understand what had happened and what it meant for the future. 16
As Carey Walsh put so eloquently, “The trauma of exile would likely have
had a searing effect on those living after it, with religious texts acting as both
salve and goad for a people’s renewed identity construction.”17 What mat-
ters—and this article looks here with a focus on Lam 1—is why Lamentations
was written beyond the assumed reality of an exile. One could look in the text
for that reason, without consulting external studies on human behavior and
motivation. Many scholarly studies of Lamentations have done that, and I
find most of them to be uninspiring, if not tautological.
Let me restate my position for the sake of clarity: it is not so much that the
dating of Lamentations doesn’t matter as a whole, but that because we can
safely assume its writing after the displacement of Judeans by the Babylonian
Empire scholarly focus should be on why the text was written and what it
hopes to accomplish. Then might scholars be better informed to isolate a spe-
cific date, armed with an adequate understanding of human social-
psychology regarding trauma. In that endeavor, they must also pay closer

15. O’Connor, “Lamentations,” p. 187.

16. L. Tiemeyer’s argument that Isaiah 40-55 are Judahite texts written within the
same setting as Lamentations makes the same assumption (cf. “Geography and Tex-
tual Allusions,” pp. 377-379). Her argument rests entirely upon what the agenda of
the writings s, what it hope to achieve. To read Lamentations, for instance, in that
way is only possible if it is seen as a text trying to make sense of trauma while creat-
ing space for the possibility of a future in which the traumatic event becomes reduced
to a categorizable aspect of the cultural narrative.
17. Carey Walsh, “The Metaprophetic God of Jonah,” in Ian D. Wilson and Diana V.
Edelman (eds.), History, Memory, Hebrew Scriptures: A Festschrift for Ehud Ben
Zvi, ed. (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2015), p. 262.
 Lamenting Loss 55

attention to how trauma theorists define “trauma.” David Carr’s tentative

work on violence in the Bible, for instance, while he cites Caruth, doesn’t go
far enough and still only defines “trauma” as “an overwhelming experience,
haunting experience of disaster.”18 That is part of it, as Caruth and others
show, but trauma is not the event itself.19 Rather than the direct impact of
injury, trauma is better understood as the residual state or condition produced
by an event. It is what happens in and to the individual or group psyche af-
terward. As Kai Erikson writes, “Our memory repeats to us what we haven’t
yet come to terms with, what still haunts us.”20 There are the truths of trauma:
the past is empty because its devils are here.21
Psychologists and psychoanalysts do not engage trauma victims to fix an
event; they help victims reframe how they remember and experience the
memories and their retellings of a past event. For them, trauma is not the
“end of the line.” It is a stage that must be navigated as the individual or
group “moves forward.” “It is the incomprehensible act of surviving—of
waking into life—that repeats and bears witness to what remains ungrasped
within the encounter with death.”22 If Lamentations is accepted as a text deal-
ing with trauma, that aspect must be considered fully. Lamentations is not a
response to an event but to a trauma. It is unfortunate that so many biblical
scholars view the biblical texts as ends in themselves—a relic perhaps of
canonization’s influence upon the Academy. Hillers, for example, is caught
here, despite his insight into Lamentations as beneficial for its immediate
community beyond the direct events of exile: “Lamentations is so complete
and honest and eloquent an expression of grief that even centuries after the
events which inspired it, it is still able to provide those in mute despair with
words to speak.”23 The idea that Lamentations becomes a universal, diachron-
ic, complete expression of grief and coping with it, cannot be argued without
presupposing Lamentations as a biblical book.
In that spirit, this article reads Lamentations as a cultural, collective-
minded response to trauma. It accepts that texts written in response to group
trauma were socially meaningless unless they were intended for public con-
sumption, which given the nature and tone of Lamentations would strongly
suggest a ritual-like activity. Was it connected to a rebuilding in Jerusalem,
as Diana Edelman argues below? Perhaps, but my point is to emphasize the
need for a more careful understanding of the link (and intersection) between

18. David M. Carr, Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2014), p. 7.
19. Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in
Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 1-11; Kai Erikson,
“Notes on Trauma and Community,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy
Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 185.
20. Erikson, “Notes,” p. 184.
21. Borrowed from Shakespeare with some changes.
22. Cathy Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History: (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2013), p. 6.
23. Hillers, Lamentations, p. xvi.
56 Jeremiah W. Cataldo

Lamentations, trauma, and ritual. In fulfilling the purpose of this article, I

will also attempt to decenter some of the symbolisms of Lamentations that so
many scholars have tended to romanticize. The intensity of the text’s re-
sponse to trauma is best understood when the symbolisms and metaphors are
so potent that they make their readers cringe through exposed shame.24 Put
baldly, we are called to stop hiding behind our own “skirts” and expose what
lay beneath them.
Jerusalem and Zion as Dominant Shared Symbols
[T]rauma shared can serve as a source of communality in the same way that
common languages and common backgrounds can. There is a spiritual kin-
ship there, a sense of identity, even when feelings of affection are deadened
and the ability to care are numbed.25
As a whole, Lamentations focuses on the city of Jerusalem and on Mt Zion,
both of which typify the once dominant shared symbols of the now defeated
nation. The author’s, or poet’s, intent appears to be constructive in centraliz-
ing shared symbols that can take on the force of collective will.26 Let us not
forget that Lamentations was very well-formed poetry, which would imply
that it was not hastily written “in the moment” of an event. It reflects thought
and intent driven by an underlying, long-term purpose. What those are, I ar-
gue, are best revealed in reading the text as an intentional literary creation
within the framework of trauma—using the definition of “trauma” given by
trauma scholars. The very fact that creation happened in light of destruction
too often gets overlooked by scholars for what it implies: creation implies the
expectation of a tomorrow. Might we not, for parallel, recall, vayhi-’ereb
vayhi-boqer yom ’echad?
Consequently, dominant shared symbols reinforce in a ritualizing man-
ner—the laments were likely intended for collective expression—not only the
trauma that the community or its previous generation had experienced but
also in what goal or ideal it should cast its hope. If that claim sounds odd to
the ears of biblical scholars it is less so to those who study trauma. As Erik-
son writes, “[T]raumatic conditions are not like the other troubles to which
flesh is heir. They move to the centers of one’s being and, in doing so, give
victims the feeling that they have been set apart and made special.”27 This

24. The need to come to a greater appreciation of the cringe-worthy nature of Lamen-
tations is touched upon H. Pyper, who quotes N. Seidman, a modern Jewish writer, as
saying, “Whatever the Babylonians did to turn Jerusalem the city to rubble, it is the
Jewish poet, I can’t help feeling, who rips the bride Jerusalem’s jeweled veil from
her forehead, stripping her embroidered robes to flash us a glimpse of her genitals:
‘ervatah’ translated by the squeamish or modest translator as her nakedness” (“Read-
ing Lamentations,” p. 55).
25. Erikson, “Notes,” p. 186.
26. H. Triandis explains this aspect of shared symoblization in “Cross-Cultural Stud-
ies of Individualism and Collectivism,” Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1989 37
(1990), pp. 41-133, 42.
27. Erikson, “Notes,” p. 186.
 Lamenting Loss 57

difference, Erikson goes on to say, becomes the animating breath and the
appeal of a shared symbol around which a community rallies and defines
itself.28
Was there Melancholia in Symbolic Intent?
In his work on Lamentations, Tod Linafelt claimed that Lamentations should
be read as collectively expressing melancholia rather than mourning.29 In
addressing Linafelt’s argument, Pyper recognizes the same fundamental mo-
tivation behind writing a text, such as Lamentations, that I am proposing, that
the intensity and type of emotion, when seen in terms of social-psychology,
expects the possibility of moving past it.30 For my part, such a proposal ac-
cepts that the emotional and psychological force of trauma is both centripetal
and centrifugal.31 Both Linafelt and Pyper invoke as a model Freud’s theory
on melancholia to capture the meaning in Lamentations. While I would not
agree that Freud’s theory on melancholia alone accomplishes that goal with
its emphasis upon self-abnegation of the ego, his position that melancholia
expects the possibility, which might be denied to the melancholic, of a return
to a “normal” position is correct—that is an aspect, however, that Linafelt
and Pyper seem to omit.32 For Freud, the unconscious work of melancholia is
marked by a struggle between the ego, its retreat from the libidinal position,
and the loss of a cherished object (person, ideal, value, city, etc.).33 Certainly
those elements are there in Lamentations, and the text is replete with symbol-
ism and imagery that capture aspects of the male libido. But there is more to
Freud’s theory. As Caruth posits, once we recognize how for Freud the two
strands of nightmare and play are intertwined, “we can begin to understand
Freud’s enigmatic move in the theory of trauma from the drive for death to
the drive for life, from the reformulating of life around the witness to death to
the possibility of witnessing and making history in creative acts of life.”34
Nightmare is the remembering of a trauma, play the (re)turn to seeing oneself
in a world outside the grotesque restrictions of nightmare. The general posi-
tion of trauma theorists, who continue to engage the echoes of Freud, and the
work of whom maintains that individuals and communities face and engage

28. Ibid., pp. 186-187.

29. Tod Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the
Afterlife of a Biblical Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp.141–
143.
30. Cf. Pyper, “Reading Lamentations,” p. 5.
31. Erikson, “Notes,” p. 186.
32. For Freud at the time he wrote this, the “normal” position was the libidinal one.
For my purpose here, I would emphasize the aspects that are attributes of that posi-
tion: the willingness to engage in productive, creative, stable, community-buiding
activities with others. See his “Mourning and Melancholia” reproduced in Thierry
Bokanowski, Leticia Glocer Fiorini, and Sergio Lewkowicz, eds., On Freud’s
“Mourning and Melancholia” (London: Karnac Books, 2009), pp. 43-65.
33. Ibid., pp. 61-63.
34. Caruth, Literature, p. 5.
58 Jeremiah W. Cataldo

traumas in various ways in order to categorize trauma within the torn-but-

being-amended fabric of identity, better accounts for the why and the intent of
Lamentations in social-psychological terms.
Internal and Collective Expressions of Trauma
Collective expressions of grief can be ritualizing—a sequence of activities
with an intended goal that includes reinforcing the identity of community.
That, after all, was the fundamental basis of Robert Harrison’s work on death
and funeral practices.35 Funerals are not about the event of death but consti-
tute rituals through which the experience of death by the living may be cate-
gorized and its impact upon the community and the individual be given
meaning. When I say, then, that Lamentations likely held a ritualizing pur-
pose, I am starting with that assumption. To be clear, ritual is not strictly
religious or theological, nor is it only formal, invariable, or governed by
rules.36 It is defined by its cultural context and purpose. With respect to
Lamentations, that is the “why” of my focus in this article. Collective expres-
sion offers an activity that facilitates bonding in the presence of trauma—
even among individuals who were not members of the same community be-
fore the trauma.37 That does not mean, as Erikson also points out, that calami-
ty or a traumatic event itself strengthens the bonds of individuals but that the
shared experience and its remembering, in various and profound ways, be-
comes a type of common culture, a source of kinship, at the heart of a shared
identity.38 When it is remembered and repeated, such as Lamentations does, it
takes on the function of a ritualizing act or behavior that reinforces the “kin-
ship,” or bond, of the group.
As a general activity, ritual crosses boundaries between certainty and am-
biguity by fabricating categories through which to understand a chaotic or
anomic experience.39 By standardizing expressions of a dominant narrative it
avoids the overwhelming possibilities of, to borrow from the lyrics of Tracy
Chapman, the “fiction in the space between.”40 The distance between the
cause, or event, of sociopolitical dismantling and the reestablishment of soci-
opolitical order is bridged through ritual, which facilitates group cohesion
against the anomy of always diverse individual stories and recreations. As
Erikson writes, “It is the community that offers a cushion for the pain, the
community that offers a context for intimacy, the community that serves as the
repository for binding traditions.”41 Hope within the community is found in
its ability to identify and reinforce behaviors and activities facilitating cohe-

35. Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2005).
36. Bell, Ritual, 81-82.
37. Erikson, “Notes,” 187-188.
38. Ibid., 190.
39. Cf. Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller, Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Expe-
rience, and Ambiguity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 9, 67.
40. Tracy Chapman, “Telling Stories” (New York: Elektra, 2000).
41. Erikson, “Notes,” p. 188.
 Lamenting Loss 59

sion, in remapping the boundaries between the trauma of chaos and the atten-
uating power of order. Or, as Sweeney put it,
The five dirges take the reader or the liturgy through the expression of mourn-
ing and suffering from the standpoint of the personified city of Jerusalem,
through the expression of the city’s representative, and finally through the
people to culminate in appeals for restoration. The book may be characterized
as a mourning liturgy for the restoration of the Temple.42
One can propose, then, that in a ritualizing way, Lamentations agonizes over
the loss of Jerusalem and Zion as central sociopolitical symbols, but that it
facilitates mourning not as an end-goal in itself but as an attitude and behav-
ior that focuses collective hope in a restored future. As Erikson writes,
“Trauma can surely be called pathological in the sense that it induces discom-
fort and pain, but the imageries that accompany the pain have a sense all their
own.”43 That sense, or meaning, for Lamentations is conveyed in the type and
utilization of the metaphors chosen, as well as the structural movement from
one poem to the next. Ritualizing a notational expression—i.e., “notational”
as defining its subject according to broadly understood categories—of the
chaos of a traumatic event provided a mechanism for dispelling the ambiguity
it left in its wake.44 Or from an alternative angle: in expressing its grief in
literary and ritualistic form, the community expressed its changed identity
and gave meaning and definition to past events, while also setting expecta-
tions for its future.45 As a sociological genre, ritual expects the opportunity to
effect an eventual outcome.46 And, as a collective dialogue, Lamentations
“provides a model for continuing the relationship between YHWH and the
nation.”47 It is a public confession, which is itself a type of ritual,48 that inter-

42. Sweeney, Tanak, p. 434, emphasis mine.

43. Erikson, “Notes,” p. 198.
44. Cf. Seligman and Weller, Rethinking Pluralism, p. 67.
45. That is at the heart of the arguments of both Tod Linafelt (, Surviving Lamenta-
tions, 1-34) and Carleen Mandolfo (Daughter Zion Talks Back to the Prophets: A
Dialogic Theology of the Book of Lamentations [Atlanta: Society of Biblical Litera-
ture, 2007], pp. 55-77).
46. With that expectation in mind, Hillers posits that Jer 41,5 narrates a type of pub-
lic mourning ritual over the destruction of Jerusalem the type with which Lamenta-
tions could have been connected (cf. Lamentations, xl). And further, “Presumably
continuing this ancient practice, later Jewish usage assigns Lamentations a place in
the public mourning on the 9th of Ab, the fifth month, which falls in July or August
according to the modern calendar” (xli). Note also Sweeney: “Tisha b’Av commemo-
rates the all of both Solomon’s Temple and the Second Temple as well as other catas-
trophes in Jewish history, such as the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 by King
Ferdinand and Queen Isabella and the Chimielnitzki massacres in Poland and
Ukraine in 1648” (Tanak, pp. 433-434).
47. Ibid., p. 438.
48. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Kindle. (New York: Pan-
theon Books, 1978), location 807.
60 Jeremiah W. Cataldo

prets the exilic events as the actions of Yahweh, as well as the possibility,
even if without certainty, of a restored relationship.
Influences of the Past upon the Symbolisms of the Present
Based in part on the work of Samuel Kramer, who identified similarities be-
tween Ningul weeping over her city and personified Zion, a number of schol-
ars have argued that Mesopotamian city-laments, especially in the form of
balags and ersemmas, provided a literary pattern for Lamentations.49 Phillipe
Guillaume, for example, writes, “The notion of inconsolable mourning de-
feats the point of mourning. Why mourn if no morning is expected to dawn?
Mesopotamian city-laments anticipated the restoration of cities and they were
probably composed on the eve of their restoration.”50 The possible parallel
suggests that one should not as an interpretive strategy neglect reading expec-
tations of “restoration,” or expectations of sociopolitical stability, behind the
ritualized expression of grief in Lamentations.51 Even if a direct influence is
improbable, as Hillers maintains, the parallel nature of the literatures is rea-
son enough to look for similar expectations.52
Diana Edelman is also among those who find a structural parallel between
Mesopotamian city-laments and Lamentations in the form of five standard
thematic elements: destruction, assignment of responsibility for the destruc-
tion, abandonment of the city, restoration, return of the god, and presentation
of a prayer.53 Similar elements can be found also Lamentations, though with
the prayer (Lam 5,1-22) preceding and calling for restoration (cf. vv. 20-21).
As a literary parallel, the structural similarities—which themselves speak to a
form of ritualization—suggest a common purpose in expression.54 That, for

49. As noted in Dianne Bergant, “The Challenge of Hermeneutics: Lamentations 1:

1-11: A Test Case,” CBQ 64 (2002), pp. 1-11, 8. But see also S. N. Kramer’s elabo-
ration on the metaphor of a weeping goddess in “The Weeping Goddess : Sumerian
Prototypes of the Mater Dolorosa,” The Biblical Archaeologist 46, no. 2 (1983), pp.
69-80, 71-78. See also Dobbs-Allsopp, “The Syntagma of Bat Followed by a Geo-
graphical Name in the Hebrew Bible.”, 451-470; F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep, O
Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City-Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible (Rome:
Editrice Pontifico Istituto Biblico, 1993); Diana Edelman, “The ‘Empty Land’ as
Motif in City-Laments,” in G. J. Brooke and Thomas C. Römer (eds.), Ancient and
Modern Scriptural Historiography (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007), pp.
127-150; Philippe Guillaume, “Lamentations 5: The Seventh Acrostic,” JHS 9
(2009), pp. 1-6.
50. Ibid., p. 5.
51. See also Sweeney, Tanak, p. 437.
52. Hillers, Lamentations, pp. xxviii-xxx. Note also Edelman’s remarks that while
there is a lack of evidence of Sumerian/Old-Babylonian lament types being copied in
the Neo-Babylonian period “Nebuchadnezzar’s inscription provides crucial evidence
for a transition between the city-lament genre and the royal account of the destruction
and restoration of a city” (“Empty Land.”, pp. 133-134).
53. Ibid., p. 129.
54. Cf. Edelman’s discussion of city-laments, BALAG-laments, and ER-SHEMMA
laments as incorporated elements in rituals (ibid., pp. 130-131).
 Lamenting Loss 61

instance, is why she suggests that Lamentations was written, or recited, on

the eve before work on rebuilding the temple began (which she dates to 515
BCE).55 While her dating of the temple dedication is not without its challeng-
es, it is possible to link Lamentations to rebuilding activities in Jerusalem (of
the temple, or possibly even the city’s walls), though with a diminished level
of specificity, as a ritualized way of “remembering” the past as a foil against
which to express hope for the future. Along the lines of, let us avoid a repeat
of the events of the past by maintaining our fidelity. Mesopotamian city-
laments, which were written during times of political transition or the found-
ing of new dynasties, invokes restoration in the aftermath of suffering. 56 If
Lamentations finds its parallel there, then it too should have some sense of
what restoration would look like.
Yet if dependence upon Mesopotamian literary tradition alone is uncon-
vincing, and I count myself among those not entirely convinced, a focus on
the social-psychoanalytical aspects of trauma may offer a more compelling
argument for understanding the “why” of Lamentations.57 The two are not
unrelated. Lamentations laments but, as I am arguing here, it does so for a
constructive purpose that can be clarified through methods and perspectives
borrowed from trauma studies. Take, for instance, the conclusion made by
Elleke Boehmer in response to problems of cohesion within local African
territories (geophysical space, symbolic leadership, unified collective identi-
ty) that gained independence within the last century.
In consequence … writers acting out of both disillusionment and cynicism
have come round to concentrating on the imaginative as opposed to the actual
status of the nation. The constructedness of the nation is now engaged as an
issue and, in certain more recent writings, as a source of invention. Writers
investigate metaphor, symbol, dream and fetish as signifiers of a national re-
ality or as constituents of a sense of national being, rather than as literal
truth.58
The foundation of Boehmer’s conclusion rests on an assumed commonality
across cultures, that every social group, including the individuals who consti-
tute those groups, pursues a stable or equalized state of social reality.59 With-
in the Bible, for example, the various visions and promises of restoration are

55. Ibid., p. 128 n. 5.

56. Sweeney, Tanak, p. 437.
57. Incidentally, a focus on the social-psychological aspects of trauma is better suited
for understanding the qina form, which also could have been borrowed from Meso-
potamian tradition, as Sweeney (ibid., p. 434) notes.
58 Elleke Boehmer, Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial
Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 140-141.
59. A sustained argument in support of this fundamental drive within human com-
munities is made in Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological
Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), pp. 3-28.
62 Jeremiah W. Cataldo

exactly that, the pursuit of an idealized, stable sociopolitical reality.60 That

reinforces, though it does not unequivocally prove, an argument that the em-
phasis of Lamentations was less upon the events that preceded the trauma and
more upon an attempt to shape collective conversation about the (ideal) pa-
rameters of a stable sociopolitical body—but that argument finds further sup-
port in the methods and vocabularies from trauma studies cited above. As a
text whose possible (or likely) ritualized engagement creates a shared experi-
ence as the basis for a constructed “national” identity, Lamentations need not
be focused on any literal truth as much as with establishing the basis for a
collective sociopolitical identity.
Therefore, Berlin’s conclusion about Lamentations goes only halfway by
stopping at the obvious: “the most central theme of Lamentations is mourn-
ing.”61 Mourning is a central theme only for the purpose it serves: directing
the community’s focus upon the possibility of and the expected behaviors for
a (re)constructed (national) identity. Erhard Gerstenberger was close to but
still short of the same conclusion as mine when he wrote: “Now, in Lamenta-
tions, the congregation recovers its self-esteem, argues for God’s solidarity,
leniency, and active support.”62 In that, Lamentations might find further simi-
larity with Mesopotamian city-laments, in an implied expectation that the city
would be restored.63 It embodies that same essential sense, for parallel, that
Dostoevsky identified when he wrote in Crime and Punishment, “The darker
the night, the brighter the stars. The deeper the grief, the closer is God.” Grief
is a moment; the expression of grief a passage into a changed understanding.
The Politics of Trauma
Assis argues that the different poems reflecting different historical periods
should not be read as evidence of multiple authorship. Rather, different his-
torical events were invoked by the author to generate different emotional
responses.64 A similar argument was made by Lena Tiemeyer about Isa 40-55
in her argument that the text was written by the same community as Lamenta-

60. For further reference on the background to the correlation made between restora-
tion and sociopolitical stability as fundamental to monotheism, see the argument
made by Jeremiah W. Cataldo, Biblical Terror: Why Law and Restoration in the
Bible Depend Upon Fear (New York: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2016), pp. 17-21.
61. Adele Berlin, “On Writing a Commentary on Lamentations,” in Lamentations in
Ancient and Contemporary Cultural Contexts, vol. 43 (SBL Symposium; Atlanta:
Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), p. 8.
62. Erhard S. Gerstenberger, “Elusive Lamentations: What Are They About?” Int.
67, no. 2 (2013). P. 126, emphasis mine.
63. Contra Bergant, “The Challenge of Hermeneutics,” p. 9, who claims that theme
or motif is absent in Lamentations. But in making that claim, she clearly misses the
concentric structuring of Lamentations, proposed by Assis, that symbolically moves
the reader into and out of the destruction of the city and the prayer in Lam 5 for
Yahweh to restore the city.
64. Assis, “Unity,” p. 307.
 Lamenting Loss 63

tions.65 For her, different “theologies,” or foci more generally, may not nec-
essarily indicate multiple authorship. Instead, they may reflect an author that
“changed his mind” due to changing historical social or political circum-
stances.66 On the combined point of Assis-Tiemeyer, I would agree. Too of-
ten, scholars get caught over arguments of authorship operating under the
assumption that a single author maintains a single agenda or perspective
throughout his or her writings. And such arguments are made overlooking the
fact that we ourselves change and adapt our writings and perspectives to our
own research and circumstances. It is as though we are afraid to deal with the
humanity of the ancient world, as if doing so would expose our own social
and political insecurities.
Because of that human element, Lamentations is also, I would argue, in its
autotelic function a political document, or expression, along the lines of ex-
pressing symbol and metaphor as constitutive of a “national” identity in a
performative sense.67 In saying that, I am presupposing that individuals are
political agents, who can choose one of two options: either to engage socio-
political structures and systems or to retreat from, which includes ignoring,
them.68 Either way, the resulting statement expressed in action is political.
Individuals who behave politically do so as an extension of the group, or
collective, guided by the “soul” of the community expressed through its sym-
bolisms and regulated behaviors, among other things. So even though
Lamentations on its face is an articulation of a collective trauma, it can still
be associated with the political responsibilities of the individual as a member
of the collective. In addition, individuals are unavoidably influenced by the
dominant collective psyche to which they belong.69 This can be seen, for

65. Tiemeyer, “Geography and Textual Allusions.”

66. Ibid., p. 369.
67. I am borrowing the theoretical framework from Boehmer, Stories of Women, p.
141. Note further: “The nation is a space in which the people and the state entity
collude in generating and exchanging the significations of power, while narrative at
once reflects on, and participates in, this process” (ibid.). Kwok Pui-Lan describes
the Bible as a whole as much more than a religious document. It is a political one
“written, collected, and redacted by male colonial elites in their attempts to rewrite
and reconcile with history and to reconceptualize both individual and collective iden-
tities under the shadow of empires” (Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theolo-
gy [Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005], pp. 8-9).
68. As M. Young, for instance, writes, “While it is not possible to trace how each
person’s actions produce specific effects on others, because there are too many medi-
ating actions and events, we have obligations to those who condition and enable our
own actions, as they do on us” (“Responsibility and Global Labor Justice,” The Jour-
nal of Political Philosophy 12, no. 4 [2004], p. 371).
69. A point that E. Gerstenberger also noted, “But the collective dimension also
comes to the fore through the individual sufferer: ‘I am one who has seen affliction
under the rod of God’s wrath …’ (Lam 3:1). Every one of the afflicted communities
testifies to the common ordeal. The language is stereotyped, not specific to one ex-
clusive situation, a truism for all laments and complaints, as well as for other prayers
and liturgical pieces” (“Elusive Lamentations.”, p. 124).
64 Jeremiah W. Cataldo

instance, in studies of prejudice, of nationalism, of emotional groupism or

mob orientation, and more.
As one method of expressing trauma, autotelic narratives or responses to
crises are often meant to reinforce the importance and boundaries of the
group.70 Emotions themselves are not autotelic, but the things that groups and
individuals produce to alleviate emotional and psychological distress are.71
Certainly, Lamentations contains emotional responses, but, to restate the
point, emotions, contra David Reimer, are not what drive the text.72 Those
contained within the book are responses accessible by a broad range in audi-
ence to the loss of a desired object: nation, national identity, and sociopoliti-
cal autonomy. And in that, Lamentations reminds its audience what the col-
lective’s desire (and desired object) should be.73 The “concentric structure” of
the book, as Assis describes it, was meant to take the reader to the verge of a
possible change in fortune through a historical remembrance of the destruc-
tion of Judah/Jerusalem and back out again.74 The darker the night, the
brighter the stars. This process creates an intersection in Lamentations be-
tween the individual, as a political agent, and the collective, as the (desired)
sociopolitical body. It seeks there the cultural memories, prejudices, aspira-
tions, and other forms of boundary maintenance and collective comfort in
Lam 1 that become narratively ritualized in the search for the return of the
desired object. Toward that same conclusion, Gerstenberger remarked,
No matter what exact relationship may have existed between historical
events, authors, and audiences, texts like Lamentations are never mere horror
fiction or mythological imagination, but preserve in some way or another col-
lective memories of “real,” man-made catastrophes. Such lamenting discours-
es, furthermore, should be considered as therapeutic means to overcome his-
torical trauma, most probably in some ceremonial, commemorative prac-
tice.75

70. Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After, Kindle (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 2007).
71. Note, for example, “The idea that one or other emotion can be autotelic implies
that the way to understand joy or happiness is that they are elicited or ‘triggered’ by
what we call the object, but the object is nothing more than a stimulus or tripwire for
an inbuilt behavioral-physiological response. We might put it that in this account the
object of the emotion is turned into the trigger or ‘releaser’ of the reaction, with the
result that the response is purged of instrumentality” (ibid., location 3611).
72. D. Reimer argues that the poems represent stages in the grief process (“Good
Grief? A Psychological Reading of Lamentations,” ZAW 114 [2002], 542-559). That
conclusion, however, assumes that the poems were written only to express grief
without any other larger purpose.
73. As Hillers (Lamentations, pp. 26-27) put it, “The book of Lamentations is notable
in that it several times ([1:12] and 2:1, 21, 22) refers to the day of Yahweh’s wrath as
past. … (The author still looks for a future ‘day’ of vengeance on the enemy, howev-
er; see vs. 21).”
74. Assis, “Unity,” p. 310.
75. Gerstenberger, “Elusive Lamentations,” p. 122, emphasis mine.
 Lamenting Loss 65

True, Lamentations is poetry, and literary analyses of poetic devices (meter,

strophes, alliteration, etc.) are important for understanding it as poetry. But
poetry as a response to trauma is also helpful for understanding the diverse
ways in which a trauma cannot be assimilated into the collective identity. 76
Lamentations redefines defeat and exile and through its structural movement
creates the space for hope in a stabilized future. One might imagine a Greek-
style chorus chanting the words from Isaiah, “nachamu, nachamu ’ammi’”
(40,1) while working through the progression of Lamentations.77 To be clear,
this line of reasoning draws upon Caruth’s theory that an experience itself is
not that which produces a traumatic effect. Remembrance and retelling ar-
ticulate trauma when they link the past event with present memory and cir-
cumstances in ways shaped by concerns for the future.78 That is even more
relevant for a national or cultural trauma in which the self-preservationist
tendencies of a society tend to emphasize strategies of, or the need for, cohe-
sion in response to catastrophe—a point similar to Boehmer’s, above. Caruth
is also correct that poetry can play an important role in expressions of trauma;
it touches upon collective emotion and exposes the diversity and depth of the
impact of trauma.79 And by emphasizing a shared emotion or trauma, it cre-
ates a common ground for all members of the group, but a common ground
that stands at a distance from the event and is based in the idea of a need for a
collective understanding of it. For instance, as Eyerman put it, “National or
cultural trauma (the difference is minimal at the theoretical level) is also
rooted in an event or a series of events, but not necessarily their direct expe-
rience. Such experience is mediated, through newspapers, radio, or televi-
sion, for example, which involve a spatial as well as temporal distance be-
tween the event and its experience.”80
That said, Lamentations, I argue, is less focused on the past for its source
of trauma and more upon the uncertainty of the future and its possibility of
restoration. Using the language of trauma, Lamentations invokes the need for
a ritualization of difference as the basis for any future—and one might also
say, “restored”—sociopolitical identity of Israel/Judah. But in saying that, I

76. On the general issue, see also the discussion in Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p.
4.
77. Incidentally, Sweeney observes that 2nd Isaiah seems to presuppose Lamenta-
tions (Tanak, p. 434). And Mandolfo writes, “Isaiah 40 … begins God’s response to
Lamentations with an echo of a refrain that runs throughout Lam 1-2: ‘Comfort
(nchm), comfort my people.’ Five times we are told in Lamentations that Zion has no
one to comfort her” (Daughter Zion, 104). And if Tiemeyer is correct, that 2nd Isaiah
and Lamentations stem from the same Judahite community (“Geography and Textual
Allusions”), then the imagined correlation between Isa 40,1 and Lamentations may
have a very real basis.
78. Cf. Caruth, Trauma Exploration; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience.
79. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, pp. 3-4.
80. Ron Eyerman, “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African Ameri-
can Identity,” in Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. (eds.), Cultural Trauma and Collective
Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 62, emphasis mine.
66 Jeremiah W. Cataldo

am not arguing that Lamentations draws from any particular covenant theol-
ogy that scholars often impose in the histories of Israel as the kingdom’s po-
litical motivation.81 Nor do I agree with Bergant that the author has “trans-
ported” the political reality of the city into the realm of theology. 82 Theology
was not a distinct “realm” or discipline of thinking until much later than
when the book was written. Presupposing that “theology” was the motivation
for any ancient author—an anachronistic strategy—is akin to colonizing tex-
tual meaning under the rubric of modern concepts of theology as ideology.
What, then, might the theoretical move that I’m making look like in an analy-
sis of Lam 1 as a case study?
Isolation as a Sociopolitical State: Applying the Lens of Trauma to Lam 1
Human beings are surrounded by layers of trust, radiating out in concentric
circles like the ripples in a pond. The experience of trauma, at its worst, can
mean not only a loss of confidence in the self, but a loss of confidence in the
surrounding tissue of family and community, in the structures of human gov-
ernment, in the larger logics by which humankind lives, in the ways of nature
itself, and often (if this is really the final step in such a succession) in God.83
The opening salvo of Lam 1—“How she dwells in isolation! The city full of
people! She has become a widow! Oh, her greatness has been spread
throughout the nations! The princess! A princess among the provinces! She
has become a forced worker!” (1,1, translation mine, with some added em-
phasis84)—leads its readers, or listeners, into a personification of destruction.
For Hillers, that “processional” is further expressed through the switch be-
tween the first and third person in the chapter (and the book as a whole),
which establishes the personified subject as a symbolic representative of the
community.85 David Bosworth came to a similar conclusion, emphasizing
that the language of personified Zion draws upon and reinforces empathy for
the community as victim.86 As the audience might describe of itself, Zion
dwells in pain and in a state of destruction, sitting in her “filth” while waiting
for (possible) rescue from her masculine lover and oppressor. Here the im-
agery maintains the audience’s initial focus on destruction while also paying
mind to the possibility of relief from that destruction (cf. the invocation of
Yahweh’s attention in 1,18-22).
Within trauma studies, this shift into a focus upon destruction while at-
tempting to make sense of it in light one’s own altered self-identity is con-
sistent with individuals or groups who have faced trauma. Erikson, for in-
stance writes that once such individuals or groups “begin to look around

81. Contra Gerstenberger, “Elusive Lamentations,” p. 131.

82. Bergant, “The Challenge of Hermeneutics,” p. 13.
83. Erikson, “Notes,” pp. 197-198.
84. Hillers also reads sarati bammedinot as “a princess among the provinces” instead
of “over provinces,” as some interpreters have chosen (Lamentations, p. 6).
85. Ibid., pp. 16-17.
86. David A. Bosworth, “Daughter Zion and Weeping in Lamentations 1-2,” JSOT
38, no. 2 (2013), pp. 228.
 Lamenting Loss 67

them, evidence that the world is an unremitting danger seems to appear eve-
rywhere.”87 Focusing the audience’s attention on the symbolism of the city as
a traumatized victim permits a certain flexibility, or fluidity.88 Those who
symbolically enter the city, who engage it through the poem, become both a
testament to the people lost but also to the possibility of the city’s being in-
habited again. It was the loss of its people that caused the city to become a
widow, but the problem with the metaphor is that neither the people nor their
god is dead. Moreover, fluidity and ambiguity should highlight what Caruth
maintains is a fundamental point that must be recognized by those who study
trauma: “The trauma is a repeated suffering of the event, but it is also a con-
tinual leaving of its site. The traumatic reexperiencing of the event thus car-
ries with it what Dori Laub calls the ‘collapse of witnessing,’ the impossibil-
ity of knowing that first constituted it. And by carrying that impossibility of
knowing out of the empirical event itself, trauma opens up and challenges us
a new kind of listening, the witnessing, precisely, of impossibility.”89
Caruth’s point as an interpretive framework offers the basis for interpreting
the metaphor of Zion as a fluid and ambiguous response to the fear of a loss
of witness, the traumatic reexperiencing of conquest coupled with a sense of
uncertainty as to why it happened and how it might be overcome, which is
further emphasized by the fluidity between city and audience, and an implicit
demand that the voice of the traumatized be heard, which implies the space
and possibility of a response by those, including Yahweh, who hear. That
demand also invokes the need for a response in conflicting senses of inno-
cence and guilt, which are highlighted in the fluidity between the metaphors
of widow and whore.
This fluidity in metaphor is why Jewish commentator Rabbi Solomon ben
Isaac (Rashi) wrote that the metaphor to a widow wasn’t complete; God
would return and restore the people. While his intent was primarily a theolog-
ical reading, he too emphasizes that Lamentations directs peoples beyond the
trauma into a posture of hope.90 And Assis observes that “widow” is only
found in Lam 1 and 5.91 Where in Lam 1,1 the widow refers to the city, in
Lam 5,3, the people are “like widows.” For Assis, the metaphor emphasizes
feelings of void and devastation.92 The widow struggles to survive without a
husband and the lack of any other altruistic male. Without Yahweh, the city,
and consequently the people, are left only with the memories of what once
was, and without the means to “fix” the situation. The audience is called to

87. Erikson, “Notes,” p. 195.

88. O’Connor, “Lamentations,” pp. 188–189.
89. Caruth, “Introduction,” p. 10.
90. In the commentary referred to as Rashi on Lamentations.
91. Assis, “Unity,” p. 321.
92. Ibid., p. 321.
68 Jeremiah W. Cataldo

witness and feel, as it participates in the mourning rite as a prelude to an en-

gagement with an experience of trauma.93
While Assis argues that through the movement of the poems in Lamenta-
tions the metaphor of the city as widow becomes replaced by the author with
something more literal. According to his interpretation, the poet replaces the
early nuance because it falls short of being appropriate.94 In making that ar-
gument, however, he misses the intentional fluidity of the metaphor. It is
better to say that widowed “mother” continues to refer to the city in Ch. 5,
which emphasizes a hopeful view of the city while also recognizing its cur-
rent status—a mother might embrace her children once again. Correspond-
ingly, the chapter’s inference of the audience as “sons” (vv. 2-3)—“our inher-
itance has been turned over to strangers…”—could be interpreted as a call to
individuals to look out for a restoration of what was lost. This more hopeful
view that younger generations exist upon which a nation might be raised
contrasts the general description of inverted roles in Lam 5: slaves become
rulers (v. 8); citizens become “black” (v. 1095); women are raped (v. 11);
princes are hung by their hands (v. 12); elders are not respected (v. 12);
young men and boys forced into oppressive work (v. 13); old men no longer
set at the city gate (v. 14). All of these refer to the possible overturning of a
stable sociopolitical normative. Everything is “opposite” of what it should be
because Mt Zion “lies desolate” (v. 18). But there is hope in a reversal of
fortunes, in a return of a stable sociopolitical context: if Yahweh restores
himself to Zion, the people and the city will be restored (v. 21). The starting
point is exile (cf. 1,3) and the ending one restoration (cf. 5,21). As O’Connor
writes, “Daughter Zion insists that if God really saw the plight of her people,
God would do something about it.”96
Widows in a patriarchal society were often entirely dependent upon the
benevolence of others. Unless they had sons to care for them, and because
they typically could not effectively engage in the business world dominated
by men, and because their male “benefactors” had died, widows resided on
the margins of society in a sort of limbo that evoked a limited sympathy. 97
Unless, that is, the widow was a whore, which Lam 1 claims was true of Je-
rusalem (vv. 2, 5, 8-9), then the widow/whore became something detestable.
This framework of “widow,” set up between Chs. 1 and 5, provides a lens
through which to interpret the switch in narrative voice (such as in 5,3) pre-

93. Bergant also describes the opening scene as a mourning rite (“The Challenge of
Hermeneutics”, p. 13).
94. Assis, “Unity,” p. 321.
95. The Hebrew term, tanur, refers to a “fire pot.” The NRSV translates it as “black.”
Presumably, the simile in Lam 5,10 is to the outside of the pot that blackens after use
involving exposure to fire. Thus, the sun burns skin like the fire burns the pot. All
said, however, the speaker does not view this as a positive attribute. That may be a
more subjective attitude if we compare blackness as beauty described in the Song of
Songs (cf. 1,5).
96. O’Connor, “Lamentations,” p. 191.
97. K. O’Connor makes a similar point in ibid., p. 189.
 Lamenting Loss 69

viously discussed. And through the metaphor of the widow as a deserted city,
the past—a city full of people and “husband” in Yahweh—is connected with
the present—a deserted city, which is also a city full of aliens and strangers
as “others” (compare 1,1; 5,2).98 That the gates of Jerusalem are referred to in
each chapter indicates the importance of boundaries—gates symbolize as
well how interaction with insiders is regulated.99 And the feminine metaphor,
as well as those of the “chaotic waters” of menstruation and vaginal mucus,
remind us that it was not uncommon to compare the walled city full of inhab-
itants to a mother or womb, with the god of the city being the patriarch and
husband.100 But the graphic use of feminine metaphor also risks blaming
women for the destruction of the city, or even justifying the abuse of women
by portraying God as an abuser.101 Those are distinct possibilities in interpre-
tation of Lamentations, but to end with either overlooks the fluidity of the
metaphor and the purpose that that fluidity serves. Resisting being pinned
down to any specific meaning and the ease with which it might be spoken of
in graphic terms, the feminine metaphor creates a decentering strategy that
impresses itself upon the “experience” of its audience as it seeks to make
sense of its trauma.
The potency of the metaphor is found in its rather patriarchal correlation
of female actions and uncleanness. The Hebrew term for “uncleanness” (v.
9), which most English translations opt for, is tum’ah. Numbers 5,19 uses the
term to refer to inappropriate sexual activity, and Lam 1,9 makes the idea
more specific by identifying the uncleanness with post-intercourse vaginal
discharge, which is typically comprised of cervical mucus, female ejaculation
fluid, and seminal fluid (in a heterosexual sexual engagement)—the prover-
bial “wet spot” in the post-coitus bed that both partners strategically try to
avoid. With the benefit of modern scientific understanding, in contrast to a
naïve patriarchal one, we know that these fluids are a beneficial and natural
part of the sexual experience. For the ancient audience, the discharge seems
to frequently provoke feelings of cognitive dissonance over the blurred
boundaries for where bodily fluids belong,102 as if the “seed” had been reject-
ed by the “field”—the agrarian metaphor was a common way of referring to a
woman’s sexuality.103 In Lam 1,1-11, the discharge appears to be from multi-

98. Assis, “Unity,” p. 322.

99. See also ibid., p. 324.
100. Bergant, “The Challenge of Hermeneutics,” p. 10.
101. O’Connor, “Lamentations,” p. 189.
102. On this phenomenon, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of
Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Routledge Classics (New York: Routledge, 2006).
103. One might note further that it was a common perception, as expressed in the
Bible, that the male seed was always capable of growth. If a man and a woman
couldn’t have children, it was typically seen as the woman’s fault, as though the
“field” was not “fertile ground.” That, for instance, is why the wives of the ancestral
patriarchs (Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel) were blamed for lack of children and also why
Onan was deemed a “sinner.” He refused to fulfill his role as kinsman redeemer,
which required that he give his seed to his brother’s wife.
70 Jeremiah W. Cataldo

ple lovers, a poetic metaphor that identifies multiple objects of desire apart
from Yahweh.104 The “ejaculatory prayer”105 found in vv. 9, 11 provides a
contrast between a third-person analysis and a first-person protest of the situ-
ation. That contrast demands answers to the implied questions: Was it Yah-
weh’s impotence that led to the destruction of Zion? Or could Yahweh be
(a)roused again to act on behalf of the city and its people?106
Zion became an “impurity” (niddah) among the nations, the Hebrew term
which can be translated as a ceremonial impurity as well as a menstrual im-
purity. With the previous emphasis upon the dirtiness in Daughter Zion’s
skirts, the latter nuance is the more likely. That likeliness is perhaps even
further emphasized by the fact that torah, which would tend to emphasize
ceremony, is mentioned only once in Lamentations (2,9) and that any confes-
sions of sin, which might have been a prominent aspect of ceremonial wor-
ship, are few in the book and seem to reflect specific Deuteronomic catego-
ries of disobedience rather than legalistic impurities.107 The narrative shift to
Zion as speaker in v. 17 highlights a shift toward a thematic focus on Yah-
weh, who in v. 18 is justified in what he has done. Hillers maintains that this
shift appeals to a religious confessional formula, which I maintain would
further support a ritualistic purpose for the chapter if not the whole of Lamen-
tations.108 More than that, as Mandolfo argues, the switch to the first-person
of Daughter Zion in Lam 1-2 challenges conventional interpretations that
Zion’s guilt of whoredom and infanticide tell the whole story.109 Instead, the
switch leads the reader to wonder about what state of future is to come, about
which the following can be said.
As visual imagery, menstruation invokes a sense of contamination, “filth-
iness,” and also calls to mind the boundaries of the city, which also serve as
physical markers of the distinction between member, and the shared collec-
tive identity, and nonmember, as the outsider (compare, for instance, Lev
15,19-31). It also invokes the sense expressed in Lev 20,18, which states that
if a man lays with a menstruating woman and “uncovers her (menstrual)
flow” the two of them will be cut off from their people. The root for “uncov-
er” in that passage also refers to being carried into exile (cf. Jer 20,4; 22,12;
Ezek 39,28). And Ezra-Nehemiah used the term as a reference to the return-
ees in its description of those who constituted the seed of a restored Israel
(cf. Ezra 2,1; Neh 7,6).

104. But Gergerstenberger’s conclusion (cf. “Elusive Lamentations,” p. 130) that the
God of Lamentations is therefore the “marriage God” who dwelt on Mt. Zion and not
the God who liberated Israel out of bondage, or the God of the exiles who were wait-
ing for release from captivity, is wrong in that it fails to see beyond the obvious tone
of the metaphor.
105. Hillers, Lamentations, p. 16.
106. As pointed out by Mandolfo, Daughter Zion, p. 105.
107. See Gerstenberger, “Elusive Lamentations,” p. 130. Gerstenberger offers as
examples, Lam 1,8, 20; 3,42; 4,13.
108. See Hillers, Lamentations, p. 28.
109. Mandolfo, Daughter Zion, p. 101.
 Lamenting Loss 71

It is possible, then, to understand in Lamentations’ metaphor that Daugh-

ter Zion has “menstruated” her people—they went into exile in a “profane”
land—and so also her identity, because she had forsaken Yahweh, who
should be the true object of her desire (cf. Lam 1,17-20). Rebellion (pesha’ in
v. 5) against Yahweh is the reason for the deserted city, which due to her
“cheating” now finds no “fertile” protector or patron deity (Yahweh made
impotent?) to repopulate the city.110 Yet the city, as “Daughter Zion,” is still
referred to in terms of the “fathering” capability, or protection, of Yahweh.
The retainment of that identity implies the possibility of a return to the bene-
fit of that status. The thematic-structural movement from Chapter 1, which
contains no prayer to God for salvation, to Chapter 5, which calls for restora-
tion, would support that.111 And within that larger concentric structure, where
Chapter 2 describes destruction, where Chapter 4 does so also, it ends with
the belief that misfortune will fall upon others, or even “others,” as marginal
outsiders.112
To say, then, that Yahweh should be the object of the city’s desire is not a
reference to the simplistic notion of desire, which describes something that
makes an individual feel good. Rather, desire should be read in the sense that
Deleuze and Guattari mean when they write, “desire produces reality, or stat-
ed another way, desiring-production is one and the same thing as social pro-
duction.”113 In that sense, desire leads the way out of trauma. Yahweh repre-
sents a stable and prosperous sociopolitical world in Israel/Judah, an idea that
can be seen in almost the entirety of the Hebrew Bible. But he also represents
its negative, the power that can overturn that reality. The blessings and curses
in Deuteronomy (28,1-68), for instance, make that point clearly: dedicated
focus on Yahweh results in positive sociopolitical and economic gains,
whereas a lack of that results in negative, destructive, destabilizing conse-
quences. Incidentally, Deut 28,57 describes women’s afterbirth and children
as food for those that have disobeyed—but things that the woman “eats in
secrecy.” And in fact, Lam 4,10 describes mothers boiling their own children
for food during a time Yahweh describes as the “destruction of my people.”
The hands of “compassionate” women will do this, which implies the loss of
a shared focus in desiring-production as desire becomes limited solely to the

110. Bosworth’s attempt (cf. “Daughter Zion and Weeping in Lamentations 1-2,” p.
223) to vindicate Zion from some elements of culpability by emphasizing the meta-
phorical aspect of a suffering mother, as has been a trend in recent studies of Lamen-
tations (also noted by Mandolfo, Daughter Zion, p. 84), is problematic in that it cen-
tralizes victimization.
111. See also Assis, “Unity,” p. 311. Note also, in particular: “The key phrase in
chap. 1, ’yn mnchm, does not appear in chap. 5 even once. The common subject of
the two poems highlights their different viewpoints. In chap. 1, they feeling of des-
pair is dominant, whereas in chap. 5, despite the hardship and the deep sorrow, there
is hope expressed in prayer to God” (ibid.).
112. Ibid., p. 311.
113. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 30.
72 Jeremiah W. Cataldo

individual’s need to eat and not a collective desire for Yahweh or kingdom.
Disruption of the dominant normative order, in which “desiring-production”
symbolized by Yahweh resulted in a productive sociopolitical body that
“knew itself,” in turn resulted in an anomic world in which uncleanness was
consumed, as was even the future, the “seed,” of the sociopolitical body it-
self. That is also what O’Connor meant when she wrote concerning Lamenta-
tions, “Though the poets may have been aware of women’s pain during these
sad events, that is not their chief concern in reporting them. Their primary
interest is to show how devastated is a people whose children cannot sur-
vive.”114 And that, the subject of children as future, is the point where an
emphasis upon desire production might move an audience in response to
trauma.
The people and city are brought closer in 2,2, in which Adonai in his fury
destroys the fortifications of “Daughter Judah.” The imagery there is military
and political, in which the material necessities of maintaining a distinction
between the (political) insider and outsider are torn down, and the boundaries
blurred as foreign peoples enter Judah and cast out, or exile, the kingdom’s
citizens. The association of boundaries between insider and outsider lost with
sexual indiscretion is also there in 1,9-10. Verse 9 describes the post-coitus
discharge in Jerusalem’s skirts as a preface to the events in v. 10, where it
describes the city’s enemies touching all of her “desirable things” (machmad)
and “invading” her, which invokes the phallic imagery of war as an assertion
of power. Perhaps the use of machmad was a play off the use of the term in
Song of Songs 5,16, which described the Beloved’s body as sexually desira-
ble.115 In that sense, the entrance of the nations (goyim) into her “sacred plac-
es” reads similar to sexual violation, which results in the uncleanness in the
city’s “skirts.”116 It’s certainly possible to interpret as a manifestation of de-
sire a sense of nationalism and protectionism in Lamentations, especially if
we accept Erikson’s suggestion that trauma has a social dimension that en-
courages a common language and strong feelings of kinship.117 That would
also correlate with Boehmer’s description, above, of the use of narratives and
other responses to trauma and a lack of social cohesion. Nationalism empha-
sized through ethnic, or other culturally determined concept, purity can be a
way of preserving or guarding against downfall, affliction, and decay.
Lamentations seems to point to that need in what seemed to be a lack of so-
cial cohesion: the city, which as the home of the throne and the national tem-
ple symbolized the kingdom, had lost its status: its people had been exiled, its
king taken away, and its god no longer seemed to be present. “The wariness

114. O’Connor, “Lamentations,” p. 190.

115. Note that when machmad is linked with keli (cf. 2 Chron 36,19) it is used to
describe the “precious vessels” of temple worship. In the case of Lam 1,9-10, how-
ever, keli is not linked with machmad.
116. D. Guest also sees this passage as rape (see “Hiding Behind the Naked Women
in Lamentations,” p. 416).
117. Erikson, “Notes,” p. 186.
 Lamenting Loss 73

and numbness and slowness of feeling shared by traumatized people every-

where may mean that relating to others comes hard and at a very heavy
price…”118
Lamentations doesn’t provide its readers with a completed resolution—a
fait accompli. But that, as trauma theory shows us, is not the point of creative
expressions that deal with trauma as their subject matter. Instead, Lamenta-
tions creates the space for a conversation, a dialogic context that expects rec-
onciliation and the resumption of life. In saying that I am drawing from Laub,
who writes that responses, including “witnessing,” to the trauma of the Holo-
caust when the involved agents are committed to truth in a dialogic context
allows for reconciliation that makes the resumption of life possible.119 Testi-
monies and conversations that occur here do not efface the Holocaust nor
deny it. Rather, they are part of a dialogic process of “exploration and recon-
ciliation.”120 Perhaps Lamentations should be read in that sense, that it is a
call to witness and reconciliation. It leaves off with a plea to Yahweh to re-
store the deserted city. Individuals remain in wait for a restored Judah. Yah-
weh remains distant. And maybe that’s a fundamental point in the text: some-
times the greatest loss is the loss of the ability to establish or take part in rela-
tionships. The loss of relationship is the loss of identity, certainly, but it is
also the loss of a communicative strategy that helps one navigate those trou-
blesome forces that bring or threaten instability, affliction, demoralization,
pain, death, despair, anxiety, and fear. But the very possibility of recognizing
assumes the subject has the possibility of reflecting on the subject’s own
trauma from a removed vantage point.
To facilitate that impression, Lamentations leads its readers, or listening
audience, through the emotional experience of exile and destruction. But its
focus isn’t upon those events alone; it creates space for and expectations of
restoration. The motivation behind its writing is most likely found in rebuild-
ing efforts within Yehud, with a specific reference upon Jerusalem as the
capital of a Judean kingdom. As part of a ritualized remembrance, it remind-
ed the community what restoration would look like (in reverse) but also why
the community should take care not to repeat the sins of Jerusalem’s former,
and exiled, inhabitants. Lamentations is a text that conveys trauma, that is
true. But retellings of a traumatic experience, as trauma experts argue, are not
for the benefit of the person engaged in the experience itself. They benefit
those who have gone through such an experience, to whatever degree, and
who have the opportunity to “make sense” and contextualize the experience
within internalized and externalized expressions of identity. Loneliness and
isolation (cf. Lam 1,1) hold power only over those who hope for a “return” to
community. It is for those who in the darkness of night see the stars and at-
tempt to make sense of them.

118. Ibid., p. 186.

119. Dori Laub, “Truth and Testimony,” in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explora-
tions in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 73.
120. Ibid., pp. 73-74.