Lamentations is a collection of five poems of deep grief written after the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of Babylon. Through heartrending weeping, the book expresses the suffering of God's people, sincere repentance, and the hope that rises again even in the midst of ruin. It is a work that teaches us that pain can become prayer.
The book was written around 586 BC, shortly after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of Solomon's Temple by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Jewish and Christian tradition attributes its authorship to the prophet Jeremiah, known as "the weeping prophet," who was a direct witness to that national catastrophe. In Hebrew, the book is called "Ekhah," meaning "How!", the first word of the text, a cry of astonishment at such devastation. A fascinating fact is that four of its five chapters are written as alphabetic acrostics, where each verse begins with a consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, a poetic structure that reflects a total and ordered grief, from A to Z.