NOTES for Lam 2:1-22
Apparently, the author of the Book of Lamentations either witnessed the events of 587 himself, or heard a detailed account of them; in any case, he describes the destruction of the city and the Temple vividly and in detail (vv. 5-9). And the most terrible event for him was undoubtedly the complete destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, down to its foundations: after all, this was the house of God, the place where Yahweh manifested His presence to the people, so that now, together with the end of the Temple, the history of the Jewish people as God's people must also come to an end. If God has left His house, does this not mean that He has also left the people who built that house for Him?
At first glance, everything looked exactly that way, and there was nothing to hope for. Yet hope remained, though of course it was not connected with what the organizers of the anti-Babylonian revolt had hoped for, the revolt that brought Jerusalem and all Judea to final catastrophe. Their calculation was purely political: they hoped for help from Egypt, which for a whole range of reasons never came.
The author of the Book of Lamentations understands that the destruction of the Temple is not accidental, that God turns away from Jerusalem because even earlier Jerusalem had turned away from God, listening not to true servants of God, such as Jeremiah, to whom tradition ascribes the book's authorship, but to "prophets" whose whole merit consisted in flattering the people by telling them what they wanted to hear (v. 14). And all this had been foretold in the Torah, in the Book of Deuteronomy, whose author speaks clearly of exile as punishment for apostasy (Deut 29:22-28). As we can see, the punishment consists not in God Himself bringing calamities down on the heads of His people, but in His leaving them to their fate; this proves enough for the people to suffer a true catastrophe, not only spiritual but also political.
At the same time, however, the Torah also gave hope: in the case of repentance and turning back, God could again return the exiles to the land of their fathers (Deut 30:1-10). The prophets said the same, including Jeremiah: the exile and the destruction of Jerusalem are not yet the end. Everything that follows depends entirely on the spiritual state of the people, on their readiness to comprehend what happened, repent of the sins committed, and turn again to the One in whom they can hope and who will not fail them as the Egyptians failed the rebellious Jerusalemites.