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The City Sits Alone: An Alphabet of Grief and Sorrow Poured Out to God | Lamentations 1–2
Episode Overview
Today we begin Lamentations, reading chapters 1 and 2. The poems are acrostics—each stanza starting with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet—and that structure is doing real work. When grief threatens to become formless, the alphabet gives it banks to run between. This is sorrow that has been shaped and carried deliberately, not sorrow that has been tidied up.
Jerusalem is pictured as a widow sitting alone in a city that was once crowded, deserted by the friends and allies she trusted. The poet refuses every easy comfort. The second poem goes further and harder, naming God…
The skinny
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