Gendered Lament, Gendered Response: Reading Lamentations with Its Early Interpreters

Abstract Throughout the interpretive history of Lamentations, significant attention has been devoted to the relationship between the gendered voices in the book. Previous scholarship has traditionally construed the male figure of chapter 3 as the solution to the female figure’s problems in the first two chapters. Yet more recent work has centered the female figure as a corrective to the male voice typically privileged by previous interpreters. I build on this recent scholarship by reconsidering these gendered voices alongside some of their earliest readers. I show how early Jewish readers conceived of the relationship between these voices in ways that do not match modern assumptions about ancient conceptions of gender. In fact, I show that the early Jewish reuse of Lamentations conceives of a relationship where women, not men, provide a key to the suffering, breaking through the impasse produced by the destruction of the temple.