After the Fall

In context

Freed from his chains at Ramah, Jeremiah chooses to stay with Gedaliah, the governor at Mizpah, among the people left in the land (Jeremiah 40:1–6). It is a hard reading: Ishmael, of the royal family, eats bread with Gedaliah and then kills him, and kills men on their way to the Lord’s house (41:1–7). Afraid of the Chaldeans, the people ask Jeremiah to pray and promise to obey, but when the answer after ten days is to stay, they call him a liar and go to Egypt, taking Jeremiah and Baruch with them (42:1–43:7). There they say they will go on burning incense to “the queen of the sky” (44:15–17).

Lamentations is five poems of grief for the fallen city, and in four of them the verses follow the Hebrew alphabet. Its lines on the famine are very hard (Lamentations 2:20; 4:10). In the middle comes, “his mercies don’t fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness” (3:22–23), the words the hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” is named for.

Psalm 137 remembers the captives: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yes, we wept, when we remembered Zion” (Psalm 137:1). It ends with a hard cry against Edom and Babylon (137:7–9).