Intro to Lamentations 2

As Jeremiah prophesied Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. Jeremiah watched as the city was starved into submission and then burned. The inhabitants were treated mercilessly--many were slaughtered, the rest taken captive back to Babylonia. Jeremiah surveys the city and is inspired of God to write. Lamentations (which means "loud cryings") is a set of five poems or elegies. It can be called "an elegy written in a graveyard." The chapters, except the middle one (chapter 3) have the same number of verses, that is, twenty-two, and the third chapter has three times the number of the others, that is, sixty-six. This is because there are twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet. In chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4, each verse begins with each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The third chapter runs in triplets and the first verse of each triplet begins with the corresponding Hebrew letter. The fifth chapter has 22 verses but does not follow the same pattern.