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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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

This collection features essays by leading scholars on the philosophical, theological, poetic and cultural aspects of lament, touching on the textual traditions of lament in Judaism, from Biblical, rabbinic and medieval iterations to contemporary Yemenite oral lamentations. The volume also includes four texts on lament by Gershom Scholem, translated here for the first time into English, as well as essays interpreting Scholem`s challenging work.

The CCLI charts may not reflect it, yet one thing many Christian churches discovered as the pandemic raged across the world (and violence at home and abroad) was the need for songs of sacred lament. Unfortunately, many churchgoers, especially those who identify as practitioners of contemporary Christian worship, have cultivated a gap between the biblical give and take of praise and lament revealed most poignantly in the book of Psalms. This chasm between praise and lament is a problem, as a liturgical discourse about disastrous events is weakened. Churches sing congregational songs of praise in the church, the chorus of ‘what ought to be’. Meanwhile, outside the church, artists in genres as diverse as folk and rap sing the chorus of what frankly ‘is’. For the church to be transformative, it must be grounded in what is (lament) and aiming toward what ought to be (praise). This is the value of the cycle of praise and lament in the church’s liturgy. This article explores the impact of CCM (contemporary Christian music) and praise and worship culture as it laments the loss of lament in Christian worship. The essay articulates the missing sense of ‘Truth’ in contemporary congregational music, as defined by Don Saliers’ Worship Come to Its Senses. The article closes by amplifying emerging Christian songwriters reintroducing lament to contemporary worship.

Laments of the Virgin Mary represent a devotional genre that offered its clerical and lay audiences of the High and Late Middle Ages a deeply inspiring, yet at the same time ambiguous, religious experience. Through the deeply emotional and markedly animated representation of the Passion, seen as if through the eyes of the mother of God, audiences and performers were not only reminded of the redemptive power of the Cross, but encouraged to experience Christ’s sacrifice in a more personal and intimate manner. In the pious practice of imitatio Mariae , believers mirrored the sorrow of the mother through their own bodies in order to develop a kind of visceral empathy towards, and hence a deeper understanding of, the divine.

Relatively little attention has been paid to biblical parallels to the wretched \"I\" of Rom 7:14–25. A few scholars have observed features shared with the psalms of lament, but these studies have been limited in scope and have proved inconclusive in identifying the \"I.\" A comparison between Romans 7 and one of the psalms of lament, namely Psalm 119, reveals a number of significant verbal and conceptual correspondences, which throw fresh light onto previously unclear aspects of the \"I\"'s monologue. In addition, Paul's wretched \"I\" is revealed as inhabiting the same symbolic world as the Christ-believers in Rome, experiencing with them the resurrection of lament in Christ.