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50-446: Some motifs of a traditional Mesopotamian "city lament" are evident in the book, such as mourning the desertion of the city by God, its destruction, and the ultimate return of the divinity; others "parallel the funeral dirge in which the bereaved bewails... and... addresses the [dead]". The tone is bleak: God does not speak, the degree of suffering is presented as overwhelming, and expectations of future redemption are minimal. Nonetheless,

100-455: A majuscule script commonly used from the 3rd to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes. Tironian notes were a shorthand system consisting of thousands of signs. New Roman cursive script, also known as minuscule cursive, was in use from the 3rd century to the 7th century, and uses letter forms that are more recognizable to modern eyes; ⟨a⟩ , ⟨b⟩ , ⟨d⟩ , and ⟨e⟩ had taken

150-578: A more familiar shape, and the other letters were proportionate to each other. This script evolved into a variety of regional medieval scripts (for example, the Merovingian , Visigothic and Benevantan scripts), to be later supplanted by the Carolingian minuscule . It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter ⟨ W ⟩ (originally a ligature of two ⟨ V ⟩ s)

200-507: A rebuilding, nor give praise for such a prospect. Much of the postexilic scroll of Isaiah concerns the destroyed and restored city of Jerusalem. Laments can also be found in the Book of Jeremiah , the Book of Ezekiel and Psalm 137 . Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet , also known as the Roman alphabet , is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write

250-692: A recollection of God's past goodness, but although this justifies a cry to God to act in deliverance, there is no guarantee that he will. Repentance will not persuade God to be gracious, since he is free to give or withhold grace as he chooses. In the end, the possibility is that God has finally rejected his people and may not again deliver them. Nevertheless, it also affirms confidence that the mercies of Yahweh (the God of Israel) never end, but are new every morning ( 3:22–33 ). Lamentations consists of five distinct (and non-chronological) poems, corresponding to its five chapters. Two of its defining characteristic features are

300-558: Is a poetic elegy for a lost or fallen city. This literary genre, from around 2000 BCE onwards, was particularly prevalent in the Mesopotamian region of the Ancient Near East . The Bible's Book of Lamentations concerning Jerusalem around 586 BCE, contains some elements of a city lament. In the five known Mesopotamian City Laments, the lament is written in voice of the city's tutelary goddess . The destruction of

350-600: Is also a translation into Koine Greek known as the Septuagint , made in the last few centuries BCE. The Septuagint translation added an introductory line before the first stanza: Extant ancient manuscripts of the Septuagint version include Codex Vaticanus (4th century), Codex Sinaiticus (4th century), Codex Alexandrinus (5th century) and Codex Marchalianus (6th century). Book of Baruch ( Catholic and Eastern Orthodox ) City Lament A City Lament

400-602: Is generically similar to the Sumerian laments of the early 2nd millennium BCE (e.g., " Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur ," " Lament for Sumer and Ur ," " Nippur Lament "), the Sumerian laments (that we have) were recited on the occasion of the rebuilding of a temple, so their story has a happy ending, whereas the book of Lamentations was written before the return/rebuilding, and thus contains only lamentations and pleas to God with no response or resolution. Beginning with

450-563: Is standardised as the ISO basic Latin alphabet . The term Latin alphabet may refer to either the alphabet used to write Latin (as described in this article) or other alphabets based on the Latin script , which is the basic set of letters common to the various alphabets descended from the classical Latin alphabet, such as the English alphabet . These Latin-script alphabets may discard letters, like

500-579: Is today transcribed Lūciī a fīliī was written ⟨ lv́ciꟾ·a·fꟾliꟾ ⟩ in the inscription depicted. Some letters have more than one form in epigraphy . Latinists have treated some of them especially such as ⟨ Ꟶ ⟩ , a variant of ⟨H⟩ found in Roman Gaul . The primary mark of punctuation was the interpunct , which was used as a word divider , though it fell out of use after 200 AD. Old Roman cursive script, also called majuscule cursive and capitalis cursive,

550-491: The New American Bible Revised Edition . Lamentations has traditionally been ascribed to Jeremiah . The ascription of authorship to Jeremiah derives from the impetus to ascribe all biblical books to inspired biblical authors, and Jeremiah being a prophet at the time who prophesied its demise was an obvious choice. Additionally in 2 Chronicles 35:25 Jeremiah is said to have composed a lament on

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600-529: The African reference alphabet . Although Latin did not use diacritical marks, signs of truncation of words (often placed above or at the end of the truncated word) were very common. Furthermore, abbreviations or smaller overlapping letters were often used. This was due to the fact that if the text was engraved on stone, the number of letters to be written was reduced, while if it was written on paper or parchment, it saved precious space. This habit continued even in

650-411: The Latin language . Largely unaltered excepting several letters splitting—i.e. ⟨J⟩ from ⟨I⟩ , and ⟨U⟩ from ⟨V⟩ —additions such as ⟨W⟩ , and extensions such as letters with diacritics , it forms the Latin script that is used to write most languages of modern Europe , Africa , America and Oceania . Its basic modern inventory

700-753: The Rotokas alphabet , or add new letters, like the Danish and Norwegian alphabets. Letter shapes have evolved over the centuries, including the development in Medieval Latin of lower-case , forms which did not exist in the Classical period alphabet. The Latin alphabet evolved from the visually similar Etruscan alphabet , which evolved from the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet , which

750-594: The age of colonialism and Christian evangelism , the Latin script spread beyond Europe , coming into use for writing indigenous American , Australian , Austronesian , Austroasiatic and African languages . More recently, linguists have also tended to prefer the Latin script or the International Phonetic Alphabet (itself largely based on the Latin script) when transcribing or creating written standards for non-European languages, such as

800-553: The 22 Hebrew letters into the Latin alphabet 's 26 uses 'A' to 'V' (omitting W, X, Y and Z), thus lacking the "A to Z" sense of completeness. Unlike standard alphabetical order, in the middle chapters of Lamentations, the letter pe (the 17th letter) comes before ayin (the 16th). In the first chapter, the Masoretic text uses the standard modern alphabetical order; however, in the Dead Sea Scrolls version of

850-495: The Mesopotamian laments are in the voice of the city's tutelary goddess, Lamentations, with its monotheistic background, is instead tenderly addressed as "Daughter Jerusalem" and "Daughter Zion". Like its Mesopotamian predecessors, it personifies the city, grieves over its destruction by God, and prays that calamity will overtake its destroyers. Unlike them, God does not weep over the destroyed sanctuary, nor does it portray

900-831: The Middle Ages. Hundreds of symbols and abbreviations exist, varying from century to century. It is generally believed that the Latin alphabet used by the Romans was derived from the Old Italic alphabet used by the Etruscans . That alphabet was derived from the Euboean alphabet used by the Cumae , which in turn was derived from the Phoenician alphabet . Latin included 21 different characters. The letter ⟨C⟩

950-549: The Romans did not use the traditional ( Semitic -derived) names as in Greek: the names of the plosives were formed by adding /eː/ to their sound (except for ⟨K⟩ and ⟨Q⟩ , which needed different vowels to be distinguished from ⟨C⟩ ) and the names of the continuants consisted as a rule either of the bare sound, or the sound preceded by /e/ . The letter ⟨Y⟩ when introduced

1000-527: The alphabet. From then on, ⟨G⟩ represented the voiced plosive /ɡ/ , while ⟨C⟩ was generally reserved for the voiceless plosive /k/ . The letter ⟨K⟩ was used only rarely, in a small number of words such as Kalendae , often interchangeably with ⟨C⟩ . After the Roman conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters ⟨Y⟩ and ⟨Z⟩ (or readopted, in

1050-558: The alphabetic acrostic and its qinah meter. However, few English translations capture either of these; even fewer attempt to capture both. The first four chapters are written as acrostics . Chapters 1, 2, and 4 each have 22 verses, corresponding to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet , the first lines beginning with the first letter of the alphabet, the second with the second letter, and so on. Chapter 3 has 66 verses, so that each letter begins three lines. The fifth poem, corresponding to

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1100-506: The author repeatedly makes clear that the city, and even the author himself, have profusely sinned against God, justifying God's wrath. In doing so, the author does not blame God but rather presents God as righteous, just, and sometimes even merciful. The book consists of five separate poems. In the first chapter, the city sits as a desolate weeping widow overcome with miseries. In chapter 2, these miseries are described in connection with national sins and acts of God. Chapter 3 speaks of hope for

1150-693: The book are used in the Lenten religious service known as Tenebrae ( Latin for 'darkness'). In the Church of England , readings are used at Morning and Evening Prayer on the Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week , and at Evening Prayer on Good Friday . In the Coptic Orthodox Church , the book's third chapter is chanted on the 12th hour of the Good Friday service, which commemorates

1200-461: The book's chapters was written by a different poet, and they then were joined to form the book. One clue pointing to multiple authors is that the gender and situation of the first-person witness changes – the narration is feminine in the first and second lamentation, and masculine in the third, while the fourth and fifth are eyewitness reports of Jerusalem's destruction; conversely, the similarities of style, vocabulary, and theological outlook, as well as

1250-542: The burial of Jesus. Many of the oldest surviving manuscripts are from centuries after the period of authorship. In Hebrew , the Leningrad Codex (1008) is a Masoretic Text version. Since 1947 the whole book is missing from Aleppo Codex . Fragments containing parts of this book in Hebrew were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls , i.e., 4Q111 (30‑1 BCE), 3Q3 (30 BCE–50 CE), 5Q6 (50 CE), and 5Q7 (30 BCE‑50 CE). There

1300-489: The city of Ur is a Sumerian lament composed around the time of the fall of Ur to the Elamites and the end of the city's third dynasty around 2000 BCE. The Lament for Sumer and Ur concerns the events of 2004 BCE, during the last year of King Ibbi-Sin 's reign, when Ur fell to an army from the east. The Sumerians decided that such a catastrophic event could only be explained through divine intervention and wrote in

1350-475: The city, the mass killing of its inhabitants, and the loss of its central temple are vividly described. Special attention is given to the divine sphere, where the gods order the destruction of the city, the city patron gods implore against this, but in vain. The patron gods are exiled to live as deportees in foreign cites, lamenting their devastated shrine. Subsequently, they return from exile and renew their former existence. The Lament for Ur , or Lamentation over

1400-421: The death of King Josiah , but there is no reference to Josiah in the book of Lamentations and no reason to connect it to Jeremiah. However, the modern consensus amongst scholars is that Jeremiah did not write Lamentations; like most ancient literature, the author or authors remain anonymous. Scholars are divided over whether the book is the work of one or multiple authors. According to the latter position, each of

1450-599: The exact time, place, and reason for its composition are unknown. Lamentations is recited annually by Jews on the fast day of Tisha B'Av ("Ninth of Av") (July–August), mourning the destruction of both the First Temple (by the Babylonians in 586 BCE) and the Second Temple (by the Romans in 70 CE). In many manuscripts and for Synagogue use, Lamentations 5:21 is repeated after verse 22, so that

1500-581: The fifth chapter, is not acrostic but still has 22 lines. Although some claim that purpose or function of the acrostic form is unknown, it is frequently thought that a complete alphabetical order expresses a principle of completeness, from alef (first letter) to tav (22nd letter); the English equivalent would be "from A to Z". English translations that attempt to capture this acrostic nature are few in number. They include those by Ronald Knox and by David R. Slavitt . In both cases their mapping of

1550-534: The fragmentation of political power, the style of writing changed and varied greatly throughout the Middle Ages, even after the invention of the printing press . Early deviations from the classical forms were the uncial script , a development of the Old Roman cursive , and various so-called minuscule scripts that developed from New Roman cursive , of which the insular script developed by Irish literati and derivations of this, such as Carolingian minuscule were

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1600-478: The lament that the gods, "An, Enlil, Enki and Ninmah decided [Ur's] fate". The Lament for Eridu . Unlike Ur or Akkad we don't have a good idea of how Eridu actually fell, or when other than in the Early Dynastic period. The Sumerian King List simply says "Then Eridug fell and the kingship was taken to Bad-tibira". This lament also describes how the loss of favor with the gods led to its fall. There

1650-426: The last chapter is headed "The Prayer of Jeremiah". Lamentations combines elements of the qinah , a funeral dirge for the loss of the city, and the "communal lament" pleading for the restoration of its people. It reflects the view, traceable to Sumerian literature of a thousand years earlier, that the destruction of the holy city was a punishment by God for the communal sin of its people. However, while Lamentations

1700-457: The latter case) to write Greek loanwords, placing them at the end of the alphabet. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters did not last. Thus it was during the classical Latin period that the Latin alphabet contained 21 letters and 2 foreign letters: The Latin names of some of these letters are disputed; for example, ⟨H⟩ may have been called [ˈaha] or [ˈaka] . In general

1750-426: The most influential, introducing the lower case forms of the letters, as well as other writing conventions that have since become standard. The languages that use the Latin script generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns . The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English , for example,

1800-630: The mountain east of Jerusalem (Ezekiel 10:18-19)." In the Jewish tradition, this genre also appears over a millennium later in the Hebrew Bible , particularly in reference to the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon in the sixth century BCE. The similarities are, however, of motif rather than of form; in other respects, the Hebrew genre is quite different from its Sumerian predecessors. The Book of Lamentations shares some motifs with earlier Mesopotamian laments. Whereas

1850-462: The people of God: that the chastisement would only be for their good; a better day would dawn for them. Chapter 4 laments the ruin and desolation of the city and temple, but traces it to the people's sins. Chapter 5 (some) is a prayer that Zion's reproach may be taken away in the repentance and recovery of the people. In some Greek copies, and in the Latin Vulgate , Syriac, and Arabic versions,

1900-518: The reading does not end with a painful statement, a practice which is also performed for the last verse of Isaiah , Ecclesiastes , and Malachi , "so that the reading in the Synagogue might close with words of comfort". In Christian tradition, readings from Lamentations are part of the Holy Week liturgies. In Western Christianity , readings (often chanted) and choral settings of extracts from

1950-426: The reality of disaster, Lamentations concludes with the bitter possibility that God may have finally rejected Israel ( 5:22 ). Sufferers in the face of grief are not urged to a confidence in the goodness of God; in fact, God is accountable for the disaster. The poet acknowledges that this suffering is a just punishment, still God is held to have had choice over whether to act in this way and at this time. Hope arises from

2000-468: The sequence of the chapters is not chronological, and the poems were not necessarily written by eyewitnesses to the events. The book was compiled between 586 BCE and the end of the 6th century BCE, when the Temple was rebuilt. Because Second Isaiah , whose work is dated to 550–538 BCE, seems to have known at least parts of Lamentations, the book was probably in circulation by the mid-6th century, but

2050-496: The text (4QLam/4Q111, c.  37 BCE – 73 CE ), even the first chapter uses the pe-ayin order found in chapters 2, 3, and 4. The book's first four chapters have a well-defined qinah rhythm of three stresses followed by two, although the fifth chapter lacks this. Dobbs-Allsopp describes this meter as "the rhythmic dominance of unbalanced and enjambed lines". Again, few English translations attempt to capture this. Exceptions include Robert Alter 's The Hebrew Bible and

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2100-407: The uniform historical setting, are arguments for one author. The book's language fits an Exilic date (586–520 BCE), and the poems probably originated from Judeans who remained in the land. The fact that the acrostics of chapters 2–4 follow the pe-ayin order of the pre-exilic Paleo-Hebrew alphabet/script further supports the position that they are not postexilic compositions. However,

2150-431: The various letters see Latin spelling and pronunciation ; for the names of the letters in English see English alphabet . Diacritics were not regularly used, but they did occur sometimes, the most common being the apex used to mark long vowels , which had previously sometimes been written doubled. However, in place of taking an apex, the letter i was written taller : ⟨ á é ꟾ ó v́ ⟩ . For example, what

2200-527: Was added to the Latin alphabet, to represent sounds from the Germanic languages which did not exist in medieval Latin, and only after the Renaissance did the convention of treating ⟨ I ⟩ and ⟨ U ⟩ as vowels , and ⟨ J ⟩ and ⟨ V ⟩ as consonants , become established. Prior to that, the former had been merely allographs of the latter. With

2250-660: Was also a Lament for Uruk and a Lament for Nippur . The literary works of the Sumerians were widely translated by, for example, the Hittites , Hurrians and Canaanites . Samuel Noah Kramer suggests that subsequent Greek as well as Hebrew texts "were profoundly influenced by them." Contemporary scholars have drawn parallels between the lament and passages from the Bible (e.g. "the Lord departed from his temple and stood on

2300-512: Was itself descended from the Phoenician alphabet , which in turn derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs . The Etruscans ruled early Rome ; their alphabet evolved in Rome over successive centuries to produce the Latin alphabet. During the Middle Ages , the Latin alphabet was used (sometimes with modifications) for writing Romance languages , which are direct descendants of Latin , as well as Celtic , Germanic , Baltic and some Slavic languages . With

2350-419: Was probably called "hy" /hyː/ as in Greek, the name upsilon not being in use yet, but this was changed to i Graeca ("Greek i") as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing its foreign sound /y/ from /i/ . ⟨Z⟩ was given its Greek name, zeta . This scheme has continued to be used by most modern European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet. For the Latin sounds represented by

2400-663: Was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized, whereas Modern English writers and printers of the 17th and 18th century frequently capitalized most and sometimes all nouns; for example, from the preamble of the United States Constitution : We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote

2450-445: Was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the Latin alphabet, and even emperors issuing commands. A more formal style of writing was based on Roman square capitals , but cursive was used for quicker, informal writing. It was most commonly used from about the 1st century BC to the 3rd century, but it probably existed earlier than that. It led to Uncial ,

2500-439: Was the western form of the Greek gamma , but it was used for the sounds /ɡ/ and /k/ alike, possibly under the influence of Etruscan , which might have lacked any voiced plosives . Later, probably during the 3rd century BC, the letter ⟨Z⟩ – not needed to write Latin properly – was replaced with the new letter ⟨G⟩ , a ⟨C⟩ modified with a small vertical stroke, which took its place in

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