Bible Commentaries

Verse 1

The literary form of Lamentations is necessarily obscured in the translation. It is an acrostic dirge, the line arranged in couplets or triplet, each of which begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In the third Lament, which consists of sixty-six stanzas instead of twenty-two, each line of each triplet begins with the same letter, so that the entire sixty six verses are required to give the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. Thus verses 1-3 or our version form but three lines of the original, each line beginning with A, etc.