The Literary Form of Lamentations. 

        The first four poems are written in the Qinah, or dirge metre. In this the normal form of Hebrew poetic parallelism is abandoned. Instead of two or more lines of equal length, we have long lines divided into two unequal parts, the second being shorter than the first. Normally the first half has three beats, the second two. The second half continues and fills out the thought of the first half.

        The metre is obscured in the A.V., but the R.V. sets out the long lines, without, however, indicating the break. Exi­gencies of translation more often than not mask the peculiarity of this metre, though once known it can often be recognized. The effect of the metre may be best seen in Moffatt’s trans­lation, though he sometimes achieves it only by considerable freedom in his renderings.

        In addition, the first four contain an alphabetic acrostic arrangement. There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and so chs. 1, 2, and 4 have 22 verses each, while ch. 3 has 66.

        In chs. 1 and 2 each verse has three Qinah lines, the first line of each verse beginning with the appropriate letter of the alphabet. As translated by the R.V. the following verses have four lines each, 1:1, 2, 7; 2:2, 6, 17 (five), 19, but with the exception of 1:7 and 2:19 this is due only to faulty division of lines in the R.V. translation.

        Ch. 4 resembles chs. 1 and 2, except that each verse has only two long lines. The four lines of ver. 22 are again due to the faulty division in the R.V.

        Metrically ch. 3 is the most complicated. It falls into groups of three verses (indicated by the R.V). in which each verse begins with the same letter of the alphabet. In spite of the greater number of verses, the third poem is obviously the same length as the first two.

        Ch. 5 employs normal Hebrew parallelism and contains no acrostic. But since it too has 22 verses, one is tempted to wonder whether the author had ihtended at some time to transform it into an acrostic poem. Though it is not in the Qinah metre, a dirge-like note is struck by the assonances of the endings -u, -nu, -anu, -enu, -inu, -unu no less than 44 times.

        It is the extremely artificial nature of the metre employed in these poems that has been one of the chief reasons for making many conservative scholars hesitant to accept the traditional authorship. We are not dealing here with the spontaneous outpourings of a broken heart, but with polished and self-conscious literature. Jeremiah was a great poet, but we find nothing in his prophetic poems to prepare us for Lamen­tations.