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The Book of Lamentations is a set of five poems mourning the loss of Jerusalem and its temple, destroyed by the Babylonians in 587/6 BCE. In the Hebrew Bible, it is one of the Five Megilloth, a sub-section of the Ketuvim. In Protestant Bibles, it comes after Jeremiah -- a nod to the traditional idea that Jeremiah wrote Lamentations.
The five poems are organized around the Hebrew alphabet, which is truly unfortunate for translators, because there is no adequate way to reproduce the effect in English, or at least not without taking some serious liberties with the text. The first, second, and fourth poems each consist of 22 verses, in which each verse begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The third poem consists of 66 verses: three verses beginning with Aleph, three verses beginning with Beit, three verses with Gimel, and so on through the twenty-two letters. The fifth poem is not written in the same acrostic style, but still has the same number of lines: 22.
As with other pages migrated from biblicalambiguities.net, this page may contain material paraphrased or even outright copied without direct attribution from the KJV, RV, ASV, JPS (1917), WEB, NHEB, Kittel's BH, the pre-1923 volumes of the ICC series, or the commentaries on Genesis of Dillmann, Skinner, and Driver. More details on this policy can be found here: biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and biblicalambiguities-translation-disclaimer.