DAB October 29, 2026

Lamentations.

It's this strange... mournful, grieving territory that we are wandering into in the Old Testament.

The Book of Lamentations is composed of five poems.

All of them are poems of lament, and they are over the fall and destruction of the city of Jerusalem.

And we can easily kind of check out into antiquity here, or we can realize, you know, what would be the poem of lament written if your city were completely destroyed? Like, I know that's hard to imagine, but like, you know, I'm like in Nashville.

So if this entire area, this entire city with millions of people were destroyed, What would the songs that came out of this city be since it's a music city and since it's a lot of poets here and there's a lot of, you know, a lot of creatives.

And so how would that collectively look? That's kind of the territory that we are wandering into and appreciating the magnitude of the soul-wrenching emotion that is coming from these poems of woe and lament, are coming from the destruction of the holy city of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is lost.

The temple of the Almighty God has been destroyed.

Just knocked down and burned.

Fire consumes the city.

Ash is thick in the air.

Blackness to cover out.

The sun, blood, is in the streets.

In Hebrew, this book is called Eichah.

That means how, how How could this happen? Of course we know that historically it did happen.

The Babylonians did finally breach the wall of Jerusalem and then once they got in they destroyed the city.

And the archaeological evidence of the Babylonian conquest can still be found in the destruction layers of Jerusalem.

So most of it's all under the ground because Jerusalem is still a modern city.

But there are definite places where the archaeology is known.

You go down to the Babylonian, to the layers for this time.

And you can clearly see the city was burned.

There's a complete ash layer.

How could it happen? Well, how it could happen was so much the subject matter that we just read about.

For example, in the prophecies of Jeremiah, Jeremiah had warned for decades that it was going to happen if they didn't change.