Lamentations Introduction

 

 

 

 

Lamentations  Introduction

 

July 29, 2025

 

This book's theme is about the sorrow and grief of the great city of Jerusalem, but also about hope.  The destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BC.  The author is unknown, but all Scripture is God breath, you will find that in 2 Timothy 3:16,17, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable  for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work."

 

Lamentations was most likely written to be prayed or sung in worship services devoted to asking God’s forgiveness. Such services began as early as the months after the temple’s destruction in 586 B.C. (Jer. 41:4-5). They continued after the temple was rebuilt during Zechariah’s time (c. 520 B.C.; see Zech. 7:3-5; 8:19). In later years, Lamentations was read and sung as part of annual observances marking the temple’s destruction.  (Taken from the English Standard Version Bible)

Zechariah 7:3-5, “saying to the priests of the house of the Lord of hosts and the prophets, 'Should I weep and abstain in the fifth month, as I have done for so many years?”

Then the word of the Lord of hosts came to me:  “Say to all the people of the land and the priests, ‘When you fasted and mourned in the fifth month and in the seventh, for these seventy years, was it for me that you fasted?”

Zechariah 8:19,  “Thus says the Lord of hosts: The fast of the fourth month and the fast of the fifth and the fast of the seventh and the fast of the tenth shall be to the house of Judah seasons of joy and gladness and cheerful feasts. Therefore, love truth and peace.”

 

From our Back Porch,

 

Bob Rice