Lamentations 3-5, Proverbs 19

Today, we complete the book of Lamentations, a work of suffering, shame, horror, and defeat, but centered in the middle of the work, we read of Jeremiah’s confident hope in the Lord (that section occurs in today’s reading near the end of chapter 3). As a whole, Lamentations is presented in a series of five poems, of which the first four are acrostics of the Hebrew alphabet, much like Psalm 119, only shorter. The first poem focuses outside the city, the second: inside the city (we covered these in the last episode); the third poem is directed toward God, the fourth poem toward the vanity of human glory, and the fifth poem looks to the future.