Though we can never know who wrote these poems, they were obviously composed in the shadow of supreme destruction, forged in the fires of tragedy and despair; Lamentations 1 makes that context clear enough. But even that horror was not able to extinguish the hope that one may always find in God and God’s never-failing love and mercy.

Our last look for this year at the prophet Jeremiah includes the astonishing, and at the same time ludicrous, land deal that YHWH proposes to the prophet while he languishes in a Jerusalemite prison.