The Luster Has Faded for the People of God: The fourth poem of the book is also an acrostic, but of a different structure than the previous three chapters. Each verse starts with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and in this way is similar to chapters 1 and 2. But a simple comparison of the verses in English or Hebrew shows that the verse-stanzas thus formed are much shorter (comprising two rather than three bicola per verse). Thus, this chapter is about a third shorter than chapters 1 and 2 and considerably shorter than chapter 3 which has sixty-six verses each of which is a bicolon.

Two voices are heard in chapter 4. The narrator speaks in verses 1–16, while we hear the community’s voice (us/our) in the remainder of the chapter. Dobbs-Allsopp (Lamentations, p. 129) comments that…