Five funeral songs for a fallen city — grief poured out, hope kept alive.
"They are new every ______: great is thy faithfulness."
The beloved hymn 'Great Is Thy Faithfulness' comes from the exact center of Lamentations — a shaft of light in the Bible's darkest book.
Four of the five chapters are acrostics, marching through the Hebrew alphabet letter by letter — grief given structure, sorrow from A to Z.
Lamentations was written in the smoking ruins of Jerusalem, and is still read aloud by Jews every year on Tisha B'Av, the anniversary of the temple's destruction.
Chapter 3 breaks the pattern with sixty-six verses — a triple acrostic — and hides the book's turn: 'It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed.'