Commentaries on the Book of Lamentations

Like I usually do after a preaching series at the FreeWay, I thought I'd post some information and/or reviews of some of the secondary resources I consulted in preparing my series on the Book of Lamentations.  It is a very telling thing, that, while scholarly commentaries on Lamentations were readily available, I found almost no commentaries that focused specifically on preaching Lamentations, like, perhaps, Sydney Gredainus did with Ecclesiastes (telling in so far as it illustrates some of the things I said in this series about our hesitancy to make real space for lament in our corporate worship).  That said, here are two of the main resources I worked with:

Paul R. House, Lamentations (Word Biblical Commentary Series, Thomas Nelson)

I have always appreciated the WBC series for its thorough work with the original languages and the historical provenance of the text, and for its ability to engage a wide range of critical perspectives while maintaining a clearly Evangelical hermeneutic.  Paul House's work with Lamentations in this series, it turns out, is no exception to the rule; I found his analysis insightfu and helpful.  He draws out a number of critical isues over things like authorship, genre/form, historical dating and so on.  What I didn't quite expect, having sloughed through some pretty technical stuff in the WBC in the past, was the profound pastoral sensibility with which he handled this difficult book, a sensitivity that shone especially in his thoughts on "why study Lamentations" and in his handling of the theodicy questions that echo in the background of the most difficult passages of Lamentations.

Robin Parry, Lamentations (Two Horizons Series, Eerdmans)

Robin Parry's commentary on Lamentations reflects a genuine sensitivity to the poetic form of the book (much of his translations, for instance, try to convey the acrostic "feel" of the original), and his insightful readings often draw out subtleties of the text that might otherwise have been missed. (That the word translated "The man" in 3:1 is actually ha gibor (the valiant one/warrior). Stuff like that.) His work was especially helpful for sermon prep. because, where the House commentary presented each chapter as a whole, Parry broke each chapter down into smaller units of thought that lent themselves more readily to "sermonization," and helped to parse out the inner logic of each chapter more clearly.