Lamentations reaches our own home: grief, companionship, and mercies “new every morning” (Lamentations 3:22–23). Paired artistic depiction and likening.
CFM-08 · Jeremiah 30–52 and Lamentations
Lamentations 1–5: the funeral song for Jerusalem, five poems built on the alphabet, Zion sitting in the dust, a man in a pit, and the one time the Lord’s voice is remembered
Lamentations closes with two verses that pull against each other.
"Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old. But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us." (Lamentations 5:21–22)
A prayer, and then despair. That’s the last word in the book.
It was hard enough that when Lamentations is read aloud in the synagogue on the anniversary of the temple’s fall, the reader goes back and repeats verse 21 so the reading won’t end on verse 22. "The verse is repeated at the conclusion of the reading to end on a hopeful note." (Tradition, "Lamentations’ End")
So Lamentations leaves us with a question it doesn’t answer: has the Lord forgotten us?
The answer is in another book. It was written more than a century before the question was asked.
The funeral song
The Babylonians burned the temple "in the fifth month" of Zedekiah’s last year (2 Kings 25:8–9; Jeremiah 52:12–13). Lamentations is what Jerusalem sang over the ashes.
"How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow!" (1:1)
It’s built on the alphabet. In chapters 1, 2, and 4, each verse starts with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, in order. Chapter 3 gives each letter three verses. Chapter 5 keeps the length but lets go of the letters. The Church’s Scripture Helps for this week note it too.
Grief from A to Z, and then a fifth poem that can’t keep the pattern anymore.
Jewish and Christian tradition has long credited Jeremiah with the book. The text itself doesn’t name an author.
"None to comfort her"
One phrase keeps coming back in chapter 1:
- "among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her" (1:2)
- "she had no comforter" (1:9)
- "the comforter that should relieve my soul is far from me" (1:16)
- "Zion spreadeth forth her hands, and there is none to comfort her" (1:17)
- "there is none to comfort me" (1:21)
Again and again: no one to comfort her.
Now open Isaiah to the turn of his book:
"Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned." (Isaiah 40:1–2)
And again: "I, even I, am he that comforteth you" (Isaiah 51:12). And at the end of the redemption: "the LORD hath comforted his people, he hath redeemed Jerusalem" (52:9).
Isaiah even asks Lamentations’ own question back. Speaking to a ruined Jerusalem, the Lord says, "These two things are come unto thee… desolation, and destruction, and the famine, and the sword: by whom shall I comfort thee?" (51:19). And He answers it: "I, even I."
Lamentations keeps saying there is none to comfort her. Isaiah, writing more than a century earlier, has the Lord say, "Comfort ye, comfort ye." We read Isaiah 40 as the answer to Lamentations 1.
Zion in the dust
If you’ve studied Isaiah with us, you know he names God’s people in pairs, and Zion and Jerusalem names the Lord’s covenant people at their best. Lamentations uses that same pair, and every time, Zion and Jerusalem are on the ground:
"The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground, and keep silence: they have cast up dust upon their heads; they have girded themselves with sackcloth: the virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads to the ground." (Lamentations 2:10)
Isaiah saw that picture before it happened, and he wrote the answer in the same pair:
"Shake thyself from the dust; arise, and sit down, O Jerusalem: loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion." (Isaiah 52:2)
Lamentations has Zion and Jerusalem sitting in the dust. Isaiah tells Zion and Jerusalem to shake it off and rise. We read it as the answer, written first.
Three verses later, Lamentations asks it outright, in the same pair: "what shall I liken to thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? what shall I equal to thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of Zion? for thy breach is great like the sea: who can heal thee?" (2:13). Jeremiah’s book of hope already had the answer: "I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the LORD" (Jeremiah 30:17).
Reading Zion/Jerusalem, Jacob/Israel and Babylon/Chaldea as levels on a ladder to heaven comes from Avraham Gileadi’s ladder framework in his flagship book, Isaiah Decoded: Ascending the Ladder to Heaven. Ken calls it the decoder ring itself, the codex for Isaiah. If Isaiah has ever felt sealed to you, start there. Our research adds "Briars and Thorns" as a separate rung of its own.
The man in the pit
Chapter 3 changes voice. "I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath" (3:1). It’s one man now, not the city.
And near the end of the chapter, he tells us where he is:
"They have cut off my life in the dungeon, and cast a stone upon me. Waters flowed over mine head; then I said, I am cut off. I called upon thy name, O LORD, out of the low dungeon." (3:53–55)
The word for "dungeon" is the Hebrew bor: a pit, a cistern. (Bible Hub interlinear, Lamentations 3:53.) It’s the same word used when they lowered Jeremiah "into the dungeon" where "there was no water, but mire" (Jeremiah 38:6). The text doesn’t name the man in chapter 3. Tradition hears Jeremiah in his cistern, and so do we.
And then the most surprising lines in the book:
"Thou hast heard my voice… Thou drewest near in the day that I called upon thee: thou saidst, Fear not. O Lord, thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul; thou hast redeemed my life." (3:56–58)
The Church’s Scripture Helps point out that "Lamentations does not contain any responses from the Lord." That’s true of the book’s present tense: the Lord never speaks into the ruins. But once, from the pit, a man remembers that He did: "Thou saidst, Fear not."
That memory is the hinge of the book.
"His compassions fail not"
It comes in the middle of chapter 3, the middle chapter of the book:
"This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him." (3:21–24)
Then the line our whole Isaiah project is built on:
"The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him." (3:25)
The Hebrew for "seeketh" is darash. (Bible Hub interlinear, Lamentations 3.) It’s the word Jeremiah used in his letter to the captives: "ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart" (Jeremiah 29:13). It means to tread a path again and again to ask. Even in the ruins, the seeker is the one the Lord is good to.
"It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD." (3:26)
"For the Lord will not cast off for ever: But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies." (3:31–32)
"Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the LORD." (3:40)
Who did this to Jerusalem
Lamentations doesn’t spare the leaders. That’s Jeremiah’s whole first lesson, coming back in the ruins:
- "her prophets also find no vision from the LORD" (2:9)
- "Thy prophets have seen vain and foolish things for thee: and they have not discovered thine iniquity, to turn away thy captivity" (2:14). They never told the people the truth that could have saved them.
- "For the sins of her prophets, and the iniquities of her priests, that have shed the blood of the just in the midst of her" (4:13)
And the king: "The breath of our nostrils, the anointed of the LORD, was taken in their pits" (4:20). Zedekiah, David’s heir, caught like an animal.
But Lamentations also refuses to blame only the leaders. "The LORD is righteous; for I have rebelled against his commandment" (1:18). And in chapter 5 the people try the excuse anyway: "Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities" (5:7). Jeremiah answered that one in the book of hope: "they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity" (Jeremiah 31:29–30).
"Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?"
"Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow." (1:12)
Christians have heard Jesus in that verse for centuries. Handel set it in Messiah, among the Passion movements of Part Two, as a tenor aria citing Lamentations 1:12 (American Bach Soloists, Messiah libretto). And at the cross, Matthew tells us, "they that passed by reviled him, wagging their heads" (Matthew 27:39).
We hear in it Jerusalem’s sorrow, and the sorrow of the One who wept over Jerusalem.
This isn’t a history lesson
It would be easy to read Lamentations as a sad song about a city that fell twenty-six centuries ago. Nephi wouldn’t let us: "I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning" (1 Nephi 19:23).
So liken it. Jeremiah’s Judah and Jerusalem were the Lord’s covenant people and the city where His house stood. In the latter days, we read that address as ours. The pattern points to us, and we’ll lay out the whole case in its own article.
Read that way, Lamentations is a warning written to the people who have the house. It’s what it sounds like when a covenant people trusts the building instead of the Lord of the building. The Lord told Joseph Smith where His reckoning in the last days would start: "upon my house shall it begin, and from my house shall it go forth, saith the Lord; First among those among you… who have professed to know my name and have not known me" (D&C 112:25–26).
Elder Quentin L. Cook read Lamentations the same way, as a word to us. In 2013 he taught: "Our challenge is to avoid bondage of any kind, help the Lord gather His elect, and sacrifice for the rising generation." And: "We must always remember that we do not save ourselves" (Lamentations of Jeremiah: Beware of Bondage).
Lamentations doesn’t have to be our song. It’s in the book so it doesn’t have to be.
The answer Isaiah gave first
Go back to the question the book ends on:
"Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time?" (Lamentations 5:20)
Now Isaiah:
"But Zion said, The LORD hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me. Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me." (Isaiah 49:14–16)
Same two words, forget and forsake. Lamentations asks whether the Lord has forsaken and forgotten them. Isaiah had already put the question in Zion’s mouth, and answered it: I will not forget thee. I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.
The answer, as we read it, was on the scroll more than a century before Jerusalem burned.
And Lamentations itself, one verse earlier, already knew where to look: "Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation" (5:19). Even chapter 4 ends with a promise: "The punishment of thine iniquity is accomplished, O daughter of Zion; he will no more carry thee away into captivity" (4:22). It sounds like Isaiah’s opening: "her warfare is accomplished."
Where this lands
Lamentations is honest about what it feels like when the house is gone, the leaders have failed, and heaven is quiet. It doesn’t pretend. It lets you grieve.
But it also leaves three things in the ashes for anyone who will search:
- A memory. "Thou drewest near in the day that I called upon thee: thou saidst, Fear not" (3:57).
- A morning. "His compassions fail not. They are new every morning" (3:22–23).
- A posture. "It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD" (3:26).
And the book’s last prayer is answered in two other places: in Jeremiah 31, where Ephraim prays "turn thou me, and I shall be turned" and the Lord answers "I will surely have mercy upon him" (31:18, 20), and in Isaiah, who had the Lord’s answer written before the question was ever asked.
We don’t save ourselves. The One whose palms carry our names does, and He brings us home to the Father.
I know what it’s like to pray and hear nothing back for a while. I also know what it’s like to look back and realize He drew near the day I called. His compassions don’t fail. They really are new every morning. And He has not forgotten any of us. He can’t. Our names are engraven on His hands.
"The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him." — Lamentations 3:25
Ken Krogue is a co-founder of The Covenant Project and has been deeply searching Isaiah for more than ten years. He writes with two AI research partners, Orson (Claude) and Nathan (ChatGPT), and approves every word.
Search alongside this article: Seven Ways People Read Isaiah · The Rest of the Book: Jeremiah & Lamentations.
