Lamentations 5King James Version
The final chapter, a prayer. Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us. The crown is fallen from our head. Woe unto us, that we have sinned. 'Turn thou us unto thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.' The book ends with a question mark: unless thou hast utterly rejected us.
The final chapter abandons the acrostic form and becomes a collective prayer. The community speaks together: orphaned, landless, enslaved, hunted for bread, women raped, young men worked to death, elders dishonored, music silenced. All joy is gone. The crown has fallen. They cry to God who sits enthroned forever, and ask why he has forgotten them so long. The last plea is for restoration, but the very last line admits God may have utterly rejected them. The book ends without resolution.
A community stripped of everything still turns to address the God who they fear may have abandoned them, and the prayer ends without an answer.
21: "Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old." The one clear request of the whole chapter, immediately shadowed by the fear that God will not answer it.
The surviving population after 586 BC faced occupation, forced labor, and the complete dismantling of every institution that had organized their lives: temple, priesthood, monarchy, calendar, music, feasts. This prayer catalogs the wreckage. It is written by people who are still inside the disaster, not looking back on it, and who do not yet know if there will be a way out.
The collective survivors, speaking as one body. The fatherless and widowed. The young men forced into labor. The women who were raped. The elders who no longer sit in the gate. The Lord, addressed directly as the one who remains enthroned while they are desolate.
Chapter 5 is not an acrostic, but it has exactly 22 verses, matching the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. The form is gone but the count remains, a ghost of structure in a chapter about lost structure. The unresolved ending is intentional. Lamentations does not close with reassurance. It closes with the question still open, which is why communities in genuine grief have returned to it for 2,600 years.
The joy of their heart has ceased. Their dance has turned into mourning. These are not metaphors. They are a community taking inventory of what is simply gone.
1Remember, O LORD, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach.
2Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens.
3We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows.
4We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us.
5Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest.
6We have given the hand to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread.
7Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities.
8Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand.
9We gat our bread with the peril of our lives because of the sword of the wilderness.
10Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine.
11They ravished the women in Zion, and the maids in the cities of Judah.
12Princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of elders were not honoured.
13They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood.
14The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick.
15The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning.
16The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned!
17For this our heart is faint; for these things our eyes are dim.
18Because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes walk upon it.
19Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation.
20Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time?
21Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.
22But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.