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The distinctive ancient culture of the Seto (south-eastern Estonia) is of special interest, among other things, for its rich lament tradition which survived until the recent past. Unlike the laments of other Balto-Finnic peoples, which are an exclusively solo genre, some Seto laments – all the bridal laments and the funeral laments for a deceased maiden – are performed by a group of lamenters as a kind of polyphonic lamenting song. The unusual practice of choral lamentation raises important questions about the functions and meanings of laments in traditional culture, the specificity of the lament genre as a form of expressive behaviour, and the relationship between the genres of lament and song in Seto culture. This article explores these and some other questions by means of musical analysis of Seto lament tunes and attempts to place the Seto lament tradition in the context of the laments of linguistically and geographically related peoples.

This study shows how the language of lament liberates a woman from a socially constructed murderous identity. By using stylistic analysis and mainly focusing on the method of singing lament, this article shows the possibility of undermining the socially constructed identity of the ancient Greek heroine Medea. As the 19th-century thoughts in England about women acquired the most exacerbated misogynist overtones, the problem for the women artists was a desperate search for a new identity and, thus, for language. Two crucial Victorian poets, Amy Levy and Augusta Webster, turned to Greek mythology to explore the collective cultural constructions, recognized the power of lament as a literary device and used it to provide a new perspective to ancient Greek playwright Euripides’ Medea. They formulated their poem using the linguistic and contextual rules of lamentation, such as interrogative questions, alliteration, assonance, phonetic structuring, highly metaphorical language, wordplay, parallelism and antithesis. Due to the figurative devices and deviant use of language, they made the reader witness the melancholy and mourning of heroin. They got the reader to think that they should reconsider Medea. Thus, this study focuses on the poetic language of Levy and Webster to provide a different angle to the concept of identity and give the reader a better sense of what Medea is all about. This article provides critical insight into the power of the language of lament in the deconstruction of rigid and stable identity. Moreover, it shows the critical role that language and the performance of lament play in the construction of the self-perception of the speaking subject.

This article surveys the imprecatory words in the book of Psalms and examines and questions their place in the faith life of the third decade of the 21st-century world, one that is fraught with the impact of a global pandemic, political uncertainties, and racial injustices. The first section of the article examines the vitriolic words and sentiments found in the Psalter and in other places in the Old and New Testaments. It then suggests that we, as readers of these texts, in the words of Phyllis Trible, wrestle with such words and demand a blessing from them, much as Jacob did at the Jabbok with his mysterious wrestler. The second sectionof the article discusses various 20th- and 21st-century scholarly and ecclesial understandings of the Psalter’s imprecatory words. Next, the article discusses the form and scriptural status of the Psalter’s imprecatory words, emphasising the poetic and metaphoric characteristics of the Psalter’s words. Finally, the article addresses the ethics and appropriation of the Psalter’s imprecatory words in the 21st century. It concludes that, without the languages of absolute lament against injustice and violence that these biblical words provide, our dialogue with and our cries to God are empty and lifeless.

This article surveys the imprecatory words in the book of Psalms and examines and questions their place in the faith life of the third decade of the 21st-century world, one that is fraught with the impact of a global pandemic, political uncertainties, and racial injustices. The first section of the article examines the vitriolic words and sentiments found in the Psalter and in other places in the Old and New Testaments. It then suggests that we, as readers of these texts, in the words of Phyllis Trible, wrestle with such words and demand a blessing from them, much as Jacob did at the Jabbok with his mysterious wrestler. The second section of the article discusses various 20th- and 21st-century scholarly and ecclesial understandings of the Psalter’s imprecatory words. Next, the article discusses the form and scriptural status of the Psalter’s imprecatory words, emphasising the poetic and metaphoric characteristics of the Psalter’s words. Finally, the article addresses the ethics and appropriation of the Psalter’s imprecatory words in the 21st century. It concludes that, without the languages of absolute lament against injustice and violence that these biblical words provide, our dialogue with and our cries to God are empty and lifeless.

Lament seems to have been universal in the ancient world. As such, it is an excellent touchstone for the comparative study of attitudes towards death and the afterlife, human relations to the divine, views of the cosmos, and the constitution of the fabric of society in different times and places. This collection of essays offers the first ever comparative approach to ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern traditions of lament. Beginning with the Sumerian and Hittite traditions, the volume moves on to examine Bronze Age iconographic representations of lamentation, Homeric lament, depictions of lament in Greek tragedy and parodic comedy, and finally lament in ancient Rome. The list of contributors includes such noted scholars as Richard Martin, Ian Rutherford, and Alison Keith. Lament comes at a time when the conclusions of the first wave of the study of lament-especially Greek lament-have received widespread acceptance, including the notions that lament is a female genre; that men risked feminization if they lamented; that there were efforts to control female lamentation; and that a lamenting woman was a powerful figure and a threat to the orderly functioning of the male public sphere. Lament revisits these issues by reexamining what kinds of functions the term lament can include, and by expanding the study of lament to other genres of literature, cultures, and periods in the ancient world. The studies included here reflect the variety of critical issues raised over the past 25 years, and as such, provide an overview of the history of critical thinking on the subject.

An unusual ancient Greek lament form, hitherto overlooked by students of the subject, displays the following syntax: parallel sentences with verb in initial position (Vi) expressing the loss, followed by the grammatical subject (S). Sometimes the same verb was used in each of the parallel lines. ViS parallelism is a subliterary syntax reflecting a very old style. A number of Greek authors adopted this syntax to represent or allusively echo the form. Examples, although relatively scarce, are spread through a diverse range of ancient literature spanning at least six centuries, from the second century BC to the fourth century AD, with earlier echoes as far back as Homer.

Over the last few decades, the field of trauma studies has shed new light on biblical texts that deal with individual and collective catastrophe. In The Language of Trauma in the Psalms , Danilo Verde advances the conversation, moving beyond the emphasis on healing that prevails in most literary trauma studies. Using the lens of cognitive linguistics and combining insights from trauma studies and redaction criticism, Verde explores how trauma is expressed linguistically in the book of Psalms, how trauma-related language was rooted in ancient Israel’s external realities, and how psalms helped define Yehud’s cultural trauma in the Persian period (539–331 BCE). Rather than assuming the psalmists’ personal experiences are reflected in these texts, Verde focuses on the linguistic strategies used to express trauma in the Psalms, especially references to the body and highly dramatic metaphors. Current analyses often approach trauma texts as tools intended to help sufferers heal. Verde contends that many group laments in the book of Psalms were transmitted not only to heal but also to wound the community, ensuring that the pain of a previous generation was not forgotten. The Language of Trauma in the Psalms shifts our understanding of trauma in biblical texts and will appeal to literary trauma scholars as well as those interested in ancient Israel.

How do survivors mourn when violence controls movement, speech, and public grief? This article reads lament as a political–theological practice that keeps the dead publicly addressable under forced (im)mobilities—conditions in which some are deported, disappeared, or killed while others are compelled to remain amid ruins, surveillance, and stigma. Through a comparative reading of Lamentations and Han Kang’s Human Acts, this study develops “fourth-person lament” to name a ruin-saturated address (“you”) that is relayed through multiple voices and across the boundary of death, refusing to resolve responsibility into a single speaker or a finished story. The analysis shows how lament is mediated through bodies that remain—hunger, wounds, exhaustion, unburied dead—and through spaces turned into archives of violence, so that catastrophe cannot be sealed into closure or denial. By tracing struggles over memory and affect—over who may move, who must stay, and whose deaths can appear as grievable—this article argues that lament operates as resistant passage within enforced (im)mobility: a communal and public insistence that memory, mourning, and responsibility remain open to contestation.

Nigeria's ongoing struggle with insurgency has led to one of the most serious crises in its contemporary history, resulting in shattered communities, deep scars and a lingering atmosphere of insecurity. This research utilised a theological analysis grounded in Scripture, African theology and global perspectives on liberation and reconciliation to investigate how the church can effectively engage with insurgency. Methodologically, it relies on biblical interpretation, theological traditions of lament, forgiveness and reconciliation and contextual analyses of Nigeria's socio-political landscape. The primary findings of the research suggest that a faithful response necessitates that the church adopt a language of lament that confronts denial and honours the grief of victims; to foster a theological imagination that dismisses scapegoating and revenge-driven violence; to engage in accompaniment as a present, incarnational support for the suffering and to embody a prophetic witness by holding leaders accountable and advocating for systemic changes. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications Additionally, it shows that the reintegration of ex-combatants cannot merely be limited to state rehabilitation initiatives but must encompass theological commitments to forgiveness, accountability and communal healing. Furthermore, prevention is best pursued through interfaith collaboration, public theology that addresses corruption and poverty and investments in education and peacebuilding.

The relationship between popular vernacular Catholicism and the more official liturgical variety has varied over centuries. Following the subjugation of Ireland by the late 17th century, and the institution of anti-Catholic proscriptions, the number of priests available became more restricted. Religious observation subsequently centered on holy days and local sacred sites including healing wells, many of them dedicated to saints. Always central figures in death rituals, women who mourned the dead—“keening women”—were so called because they lamented the dead through a combination of voice and song. We will show how the songs relate to a deep liminal spirituality that existed semi-independently of official Church norms, and how the voice served to establish their position. In the Catholic revival of the late nineteenth century, such forms were ousted by European modes of worship, but persisted at the margins, allowing us insight into their previous vigor.