Die Klagelieder by Christian Frevel, and: Lamentations by Gina Hens-Piazza, and: "Con la diestra en la espalda": Estudio sobre las imágenes de Dios y su actuar en Lamentaciones by Juan David Figueroa Flórez (review)

These three different works on Lamentations represent two commentaries for a popular audience that each fill lacunae in new commentary series and a monograph for a scholarly audience. One might expect the two commentaries on Lamentations to be similar, but they provide a study in contrasts.

One might expect the commentaries to be approximately the same length, but F.'s volume is longer than one would expect and H.-P.'s is shorter. The difference in length is remarkable and accounts for several other differences. F. offers a full and detailed introduction to the Book of Lamentations, including such traditional concerns as composition, cultural and historical context, literary form, and theology that totals seventy pages. H.-P. provides a slim introduction that offers little information about these topics but does elaborate on the perspective and approach of the commentary. Her eleven-page introduction is significantly shorter than the nineteen-page series introduction by Barbara Reid. Both introductions clarify the feminist orientation of the volumes and the series. Like every volume in the Wisdom Commentary series, the volume on Lamentations includes the NRSV translation and short essays by other contributors on various topics, which leaves even less space for H.-P.'s commentary. The more fulsome commentary by F. devotes limited space to visual aids, especially ancient Near Eastern iconography.

The volume by F. offers such a full discussion of Lamentations that it almost becomes a scholarly commentary rather than a popular one. Throughout the details, F. maintains an accessible discussion and avoids citations of secondary literature. H.-P. likewise keeps the commentary accessible with some citation of scholarship and much less discussion of detail. While F. provides verse-by-verse commentary, H.-P. comments briefly on wider sections of text (e.g., Lam 2:1-10, 11-19, 20-22).

The two commentaries also diverge in their approaches to, and appreciation of, Lamentations. F. comments from a classic historical-critical perspective and seeks to say something about almost every aspect of the text. He provides the reader with a substantive education about the whole book and its background, including some attention to matters of gender. His treatment of the personified Jerusalem, however, is brief and illustrates why the Wisdom Commentary was initiated. For all the detailed commentary, F. does not include ample discussion of gender issues generally or personified Jerusalem specifically. By contrast, H.-P. focuses more strictly on matters of gender and, with that emphasis, intentionally blocks out a wide range of other topics and approaches that inform F.'s commentary. Her feminist approach is highly evaluative—and negatively so. She does not seem to like Lamentations because of its images of suffering women blamed for their pain, although this blame sometimes seems to come more from her than from the text. For example, the starving children in Lam 4:2-4 represent the scale of the catastrophe since people normally provide for their children, but these are abnormal times (worse than the destruction of Sodom in v. 6). H.-P., however, reads the text as blaming women for the suffering of the children, and she does not note that the text admits of a very different (but still feminist) reading. Analogously, she sees personified Jerusalem as a victim blamed for her pain, overlooking other possibile interpretations that many scholars have unpacked. The lament shows that the woman suffers in ways disproportionate to her guilt, and the personification of the city as a mother adds considerable pathos to the description of everyone's...