The Pulpit Commentary — Lamentations — Section 4

already been softened by time. To assert, with Dean Plumptre, that the born poet "accepts the discipline of a self-imposed law just in prop1Yrtion to the vehemence of his emotions,'' ie incapable of proof from modern Euro- pean poetry, and, if possible, still more opposed to the facts of Hebrew literature Some of the examples which the dean adduces are merely the rhetorical exercises of poets learning their craft ; others merely concessions to the taste which every now and then prevails for superfine elaboration in every branch of art; others, again (and these few examples are alone in point), the attempts of tho artists to help Nature to recover her balance, when the recovery has already begun and emotion has already lost its over- whelming vehemence. Members of the much-suffering Jewish race have many a time, since the Lamentations were written, had recourse for comfort to similar styles of composition, and verified the words of a great French critic, " When the passion is sincere, even the most artificial form 11,,SSumes something of beauty." Before we conclude, let us briefly review our position. The first, second, and fourth chapters of Lamentations may conceivably be by the same author; and though .that author is certainly not Jeremiah, yet he is probably acquainted, whether by the ear or by the eye, with the prophecies of Jere- miah. He was contemporary with the fall of J ernsalem, and indited these elegies not long after for a liturgical purpose. It is, however, equally possible that they are the work of different authors, belonging to the same circle or school of literary craftsmen. About the same time, or a little later, the fifth and last seems to have been written, and very certainly not by the author 0£ any of the foregoing Lamentations. The date of the third elegy may have been as early as that of the others, or it may have been written at some later time ;-the personification of the people is thought by many critics to be a characteristic of those quiet literary men among the Jewish exiles in BabyIon, to one of whom they attribute most if not all of the second part of the Book of Isaiah. In any case the author of the third Lamentation must have been acquainted with the other elegies ( except the fifth), as there is a general similarity in the diction of the first four chapters of the book.1 There seems, in fact, to have been a peculiar and fixed vocabulary, traditional in this school of elegiac poets, just as there has been in other schools of writers. Jeremiah was probably the favourite book of these poets (next to the Psalter, so far as this book was in existence); and so, if a title must be given by way of defining the authorship, we might, perhaps, style the entire book, on the analogy of a portion of the Psalter, " The Book of the Lamentations of the sons of Jeremiah." The elegies on which we have been engaged were the forerunners of a large body of synagogue poetry; many of the kinoth (as one large class of the post-canonical as well as the five canonical elegies were called) were suggested by passages of the Book of Lamentations. Most of them, indeed, 1 See the third section of the Introduction to Nu.egelsbaoh's • Commentary on Lamenta- tions,' nppeucled to the same writer's •Jeremiah' in Lanbc's Old Testament series (tro.n8latcd). z viii lNTRODUC'l'ION TO TilE LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH.