Jerusalem Sat Alone in the Ruins Like a Widow

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The Women Thrown from the Chariots

Jeremiah walked the north road after the city fell. The Babylonians had already started the captives toward the river. He went looking for faces he knew from the Temple courts, daughters of houses that had sung in the courtyards, women who had moved through Jerusalem as if the stones would never come down.

He found them in chains. The most aristocratic of the Chaldeans had wanted them at first. They offered rank. They offered marriage. One of the daughters had said a prince would take her. One had said a prefect would marry her. Whenever Jeremiah had warned them about the city, they had asked why they should concern themselves. Then God sent disfiguring disease upon the women, and the same men threw them violently out of the chariots and drove the wheels over them. Jeremiah sat down in the dust and wept for faces, not for an idea of a city.

She Asks Those Who Pass to Look

Jerusalem sat in the ruins. The city spoke with a woman's mouth. "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any pain like my pain." (Lamentations 1:12) Her lovers had betrayed her. Her allies had turned. Her priests groaned. Her virgins grieved. She who had been great among the nations sat alone.

Jeremiah took a reed and wrote the word he had been carrying for years. Eichah (איכה). How. Not why. Not when it would end. How does she sit alone. Moses had said that word when the camp was too heavy to bear. Isaiah had said it when the faithful city played the harlot. Jeremiah said it now, with the cedar beams still smoking. Three friends of one noblewoman: one saw her at ease, one saw her in debauchery, one saw her ruined. He was the third, and the ruins were still warm under his knees.

God Walks the Burned House

God came down to the ruins with the angels and walked what had been His house. "Woe is Me on account of My house," He said. "Where are My children? Where are My priests? Where are My beloved? What could I do for you? I warned you. You would not mend your ways."

The house did not answer. The priests were gone. David was gone. Everything that had given the place its work was gone. God turned to Jeremiah. "Today I am like a man who has an only son. He prepares the marriage canopy for him, and his only beloved dies under it. You seem to feel little sympathy with Me and with My children. Go, summon Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses from their graves. They know how to mourn."

Call the Fathers from Their Graves

"Lord of the world," Jeremiah said, "I do not know where Moses is buried."

"Stand on the banks of the Jordan," God said, "and cry: Thou son of Amram, son of Amram, arise, see how wolves have devoured thy sheep."

Jeremiah went to the river. He called the name. The fathers who had argued for this people rose to see what had been done to their children. Abraham came. Isaac came. Jacob came. Moses came, though no man knows his grave. They looked at the burned house and at the women in the road. The angels wept. God wept. The permission stood, and the One who had given it walked the ash anyway.

Like a Widow, Not a Widow

Jeremiah wrote ke-almanah (כאלמנה), like a widow. Not almanah, a widow. A widow's husband is dead. God was not dead. He had walked the house. He had asked for His priests. He had sent Jeremiah to raise the fathers. The face had turned. The absence was real. The little kaf on the word, the "like," sat on the sentence the way a thin beam sits on a burned roof. She sat alone in the ruins like a widow. The husband had not died. One letter was the whole of the hope, buried under the rubble with the scattered scrolls.

He wrote five poems. Four of them follow the Hebrew alphabet, twenty-two verses, aleph to tav, nothing omitted. He let the letters hold what his chest could not. He moved from beginning to end because the grief was too large to carry without a frame, and the alphabet was the frame he had.