The community lament, the funeral song, and the city lament appear to be the main influences on the poetry of Lamentations. In chapter two, the community lament is particularly strong, though it consists only of complaint and petition. In verses 18-22, several points of comparison can be made with the three forms summarized above:
18-19: The initial address to the wall is a characteristic found in the city lament.1 These verses also contain the summons to mourn found in the qinah form. While not exactly a petition itself, the poet here calls on Daughter Zion to petition God. There is also a continuation of the complaint in the description of the condition of the children in verse 19.
20: The standard petition of the community lament is found here in the mouth of the city – an imperative directed at God. In this case, ראה and נבט are the verbs chosen to encourage God to act. Of course, the fact that the poet demands that God “look” indicates that he is not currently “looking,” therefore hints at the divine abandonment motif of city laments (also featured frequently in individual laments). Also in this verse is the hint of reprimand and incredulity that is often found in the psalmic laments: because of God’s actions XY and Z has occurred – does God really want XY and Z to continue?
21-22: The poet returns to the complaint against God. God is accused of slaughtering the people without mercy, and no one has escaped his wrath. This is, of course, also a general description of the distress in correlation to the qinah. As in the beginning of the chapter, the blame continues to be assigned to the deity – echoes of the city lament. Finally, in these last two verses as well as verse 20, there is the possibility that that the personification of the city as a woman could be an Israelite version of the “weeping goddess” of the city lament.
Verses 20-22 in and of themselves are a mini-lament, since they are put as a unit into the mouth of Daughter Zion. She begins with a petition, and moves on to the complaint, as noted above.
Obviously a tone of sorrow and mourning permeates the entire passage, though anger is especially prominent in chapter two. After evaluating the forms most likely to have influenced chapter two and specifically verses 18-22, one could indeed say that Lamentations is a mixture of forms. The community lament is especially prominent in chapter two, and several features of the Mesopotamian city lament can also be seen. Whether or not the qinah form had a real influence on this chapter is debatable; a general feeling of lamentation is of course common to all three forms. Nevertheless, chapter two cannot be pinpointed into any one form. The variety of motifs drawn together, however, is “not something to be scoffed at or derided, but should be celebrated and enjoyed.”2 It is difficult to tell if the pulling of various types of lament was intentional; either way, the poet shows his skill in weaving a dramatic and emotional portrayal of the grief of the people, pulling in whatever resources he had available, whether consciously or subconsciously.
Whether one wants to create a new form, as does Berlin, or be satisfied identifying the poem as a creative mixture of several types of forms, the end result is one of emotional rawness that probably would have been used by the community in their mourning of the destruction of Jerusalem and the death and exile of many of her people. In this respect, it could have been used very much as a metaphorical dirge. Certainly, it is very unlikely that the poem was used to commemorate the re-building of the temple, as it is theorized that some city laments were used. The closest connections for use are those of the community lament, which later became integrated into the formal liturgy of the community.3