One might quibble with the first part of this statement in light of passages such as Lamentations 3:22-24 which appear to look forward in hope, but Adele Berlin captures the general sense of Lamentations well in noting, "Lamentations does not look forward and does not look back, does not dwell on what went before or what will come after–its gaze is fixed directly on the event itself . . . Lamentations is an expression of the suffering and grief associated with the calamity of destruction, but even more, it is a memorialization of that suffering and grief. It eternalizes the catastrophic moment and its aftermath, freezing it in time, probing it from various perspectives, and preserving it forever,"
Adele Berlin, Lamentations, Old Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 1.
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