Lamentations 1

The book opens with the haunting cry, “How lonely sits the city that was full of people!” Jerusalem is pictured as a widow, once a princess, now weeping bitterly in the night with no one to comfort her, her friends turned enemies and her people gone into exile. The poem confesses that the LORD has afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions, and she appeals to Him to see her affliction, acknowledging, “The LORD is in the right, for I have rebelled against his word.”