Before introducing the question of authorship, we have still to examine briefly the two remaining poems — ^tbe third and the fifth. The former agrees with the three elegies already considered in the technical respect of its alphabetic structure, and more particularly with the second and fourth (in the order of the chapters), inasmuch as the same two initial letters are transposed. It is, again, connected with the first and second by the sub- division of each of its verses into three lines. It difPers, however, from all the other elegies in its peculiar exaggeration of the alphabetic form, since it not merely distinguishes a single verse by one of the Hebrew letters, but a whole triplet of verses. This evidently hampers the poet in the expression of his thoughts ; — the third is the least rhythmical and the least poetical of all the Lamentations. In contents, too, it differs to a remarkable degree from the other elegies. Instead of describing the calamities of the nation, the writer points, or seems to point, to himself. " I am the man that hath seen affliction," he begins, and he continues to speak of himself as the great sufferer except in vers. 22 — 47, where he passes into a description of the cironmstanoes of the nation, and only refers to himself as a member of the community ("Let us search and try our ways," etc.). His account of his own Bufferings reminds us, by its highly coloured phraseology, of certain of the psalms which purport to be the utterances of an individual, but which contain many phrases which are hyperbolical in the mouth of an individual Israelite. In the case of this third Lamentation, as well as in that of this important group of psalms, we seem irresistibly driven to the inference that the writer (whether Jeremiah or another) adopts the rdle of a poetical representative of the Israelitish people, or at any rate of the pious believers who formed the kernel of that people.* This accounts for the curious alternation in ch. iii. of expressions which point to an individual Israelite with those which distinctly refer to the people, and for the seemingly extravagant character of the former, and also for the fondness which the author betrays for the great poem of Job, the hero of which is, in the inten- tion of the writer (to be carefully distinguished from the intention of the traditional narrative), obviously a type of the righteous man in affliction.' Compare, for instance, ch. iii. 4 with Job xvi. 9, 10 ; ch. iii. 7, 9 with Job
' ' The Prophecies of leaiah,' by the present writer, 2nd edit,, voL ii. pp. 188—190. • Ibid., pp. 245—247.
INTKODUOTION TO
zix. 8 ; oh. iii. 8 with Job zzx. 20 ; oh. iii. 10 with Job z. 16 ; oh. iii 12, 13 with Job vii. 20 and xvi. 12, 13 ; oh. iii. 14, 63 with Job zzz. 9.
And if the writer of cb. iii. at one point does fall ont of his assnmed r6le, this too has to some extent a parallel in Job, for both Job and his friends now and then " fall into langaage whioh implies that Job is not an indi- vidnal, but plurality of persons." Neither poet was able to keep np the personification, or representative symbol, with entire consistency.
Before passing on to the second of the elegies reserved, we may, it wonld seem, draw one definite inference from the preceding data, viz. that the third chapter of Lamentations is not by the author of ch. i., ii., iv. A similar resnlt is obtained by an examination of the elegy which forms the fifth chapter. Taming to the Hebrew text, we are at once met by the fact that, nnlike the companion elegies, it is not alphabetical, i.e. it does not make each of its verses begin with one of the Hebrew letters. Still, there is an approximation to the alphabetic form ; the number of its verses (which are two-lined) is the same as that of the Hebrew letters, viz. twenty-two (comp. Ps. xxxiii., xxxviii., oiii.). It seems as if the close observance of the canons of alphabetic versification were too great a restriction for the writer of this elegy, jnst as some of the greatest English sonneteers have felt the laws of the Italian sonnet confine their freedom of thought and expression unduly. The treatment of the subject is slightly varied in this elegy, which is little more than an enumeration of the insults heaped upon the Jews by their enemies. The poet speaks near the end of the elegy (ver. 20) as if this sad state of things had already continued a long time, from which it has generally been inferred that the poem was composed rather later than the rest of the collection. We must remember, bowerer, that, as J. H. Newman says —
"... time is not a common property: But what is long is short, and swift is slow. And near is distant, as received and grasped By this mind and by tliat, and every one ~t standard of his own ohionology."
C The Dream of Geiontias,' p. S8.)
To aztreme grief, a few years might appear an age, and the short, simple sentences of which the poem consists have the ring of such genuine feeling, neither diluted by reflection nor overlaid by rhetoric, that we may well be reluctant to assume a very late date. They may conceivably have been improvised in the midst of persecution by one of the scanty remnant which remained in Judah even after the third deportation of exiles. Some of the writer's friends have sought refuge in Egypt (i.e. on the north-east frontier of Egypt, whither Jeremiah himself was carried by force, see Jer. xlii., zliv.) ; others have submitted to Assyria (a conventional term for the great Meaopotamian empwe) ; the remainder of them are tyrannised over by upstarts of servile origin, such as many a modem Turkish pasha, placed over the land of Judah by the Babylonian suzerain. Yet so mnch relaxed are the bands of order, that savage, nomad tribes can ventnre to
THE LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH.
plunder them of their crusts of bread. Worse than all, Jerusalem is in ruins and uninhabited, and seems to have been so for an age, bj the " pathetic fallacy " explained above.
We have seen that the fifth elegy in the collection can hardly be the work of the Prophet Jeremiah, who was probably already in Egypt when the poem was written. But we have also seen that, both in form and in contents, it differs from the other elegies, and we may now add that, lin- guistically, there is almost as little to connect it with its companions as with the Book of Jeremiah. The question, however, still remains whether at least some part of the Book of Lamentations (viz. either ch. i., iL, It., or oh iii. alone) may not be the composition of that gifted prophet.