Note: A longer version of this article appears as “The Hope of Place: Placedness in Lamentations and Song of Songs,” in Hope for the World from the Old Testament: Essays in Honour of J. Gordon McConville, ed. David G. Firth, James A. Grant, and Alison Lo, GlossaHouse Festschrift Series 4 (GlossaHouse, 2025), 215–26.

Examining the significance of place in Lamentations and Song of Songs might at first appear odd or somewhat arbitrary. However, placing these two books in dialectical relationship is a helpful way to see how one place, the land of Israel, is envisioned at its best and worst. First, an overview of how people are depicted in their place within each book will be offered, before illustrating how Lamentations and Song of Songs blur the lines between people and place. By juxtaposing the sense of placelessness in Lamentations with the placedness of the Song, a vision of the inseparable flourishing and languishing of people and place emerges.

People in Place

The first aspect of placelessness in Lamentations concerns the relationship the Judahites have with their space. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann explains how the concept of placedness—which is intricately related to what he terms “landedness”—encompasses “possession of the land, . . . anticipation of land, [and] . . .  grief about loss of the land,” as opposed to Israel’s experiences of “landlessness” in the wilderness and exile.¹ While a few references are made in Lamentations to the landlessness of literal exiles, the book focuses on the placelessness of those remaining in the land. The Judahites have become figurative exiles who have lost their place, even if not their space—their place has been turned into a space!²

We read of how Jerusalem has been taken from the height to the depth—once the perfection of beauty and joy of the earth (2:15)—now utterly destroyed.³ God threw her glory down from heaven to earth (2:1), destroying his meeting place, as easily as one might decimate a garden (2:6).⁴ Jerusalem’s strength is gone; her defenses, the strongholds and fortifications, the walls, gates, and bars, lie in ruins (2:2, 5, 8–9). The city’s spiritual centres are left lifeless, as the altar and sanctuary are destroyed and YHWH has abandoned them (2:1, 6). Previously, no one would have believed that any enemy could enter Jerusalem’s gates (4:12); yet Jerusalem lies exposed. Jerusalem’s fortunes have been reversed, and Lamentations invites us to mourn the city’s physical destruction. Not only has the city been destroyed, but the space has become unsafe (5:9–11). The land is no longer a place known for abundance (2:2), but a space of lack (1:11, 19; 4:4–5, 10; 5:4, 6, 9). The very ground which used to produce sustenance for them has now become an enemy.⁵ The Judahites, despite being landed, have no rest or resting place (1:3; 5:5). Their inheritance—their land—has been given away to foreigners and they have become an orphaned and widowed people (5:2–3). Without a place, they forget what it is to be happy (3:17–18) and recall their days of wandering without a home (1:7).

This contrasts starkly with the lovers in the Song, who are emplaced in a verdant landscape, surrounded by luscious fruits and spices (figs, grapes, honeycomb, wine, milk, and saffron)—even claiming “beside our doors are all choice fruits” (7:13). They are depicted as secure even in the “wild,” seemingly unsafe places we find them: the wilderness and craggy cliffs (3:6–11; 4:7).⁶ Each lover invites the other to share their place—the man his pasture (1:8), the woman her garden (4:16). The lovers are depicted “at home” with each other almost anywhere; their very identity is informed by “their place and everything in it.”⁷

People as Place

The second aspect of placelessness in Lamentations consists in the metaphor of person as place, intertwining body and space, especially as found in the first chapter with the presentation of Daughter Zion, the city-woman.⁸ Jerusalem, personified as a woman, is given a persona—the city is the lamented corpse, the bereaved widow and mother, the exiled slave, and a voice protesting YHWH’s treatment of the city-woman and her people.⁹ The body of the woman, Daughter Zion, and the space of the destroyed city fuse in readers’ and hearers’ imaginations, becoming interchangeable as objects of pity and scorn, such that the destruction of one is interchangeable with that of the other.¹⁰ Daughter Zion’s body is constructed of the deconstructed city; the city speaks with the traumatized woman’s voice. Together they are violated, exposed, destroyed, mocked, shamed, derided. The city-woman, constructed as one body, is also deconstructed as one.

The city-woman of Lamentations withers away when compared with the virile nature-woman, as well as the nature-man, constructed in the Song. It is not only that the lovers enjoy the fruits of the land, they are also poetically deeply “embedded” into it, such that “human experience is inseparable from the appreciation of and experience within the material landscape. . . . The poetry self-consciously blurs boundaries between the landscape and the lovers.”¹¹ Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis explains that “what comes most clearly into our mind’s eye through the medium of the Song is not two gorgeous human beings, but rather a gorgeous land”—“and not just an anonymous lush land: she becomes the land of Israel."¹²

Both books image a place-woman: the city-woman in Lamentations and the nature-woman in the Song. Just as the woman in the Song is constructed with creatures and places, so the woman in Lamentations is deconstructed by the devastation of many of the same places. Contained within this construction is an assumption about the relationship between place and person. By constructing the self with places and deconstructing the self with places, one can infer that if one’s place is destroyed, one’s self is destroyed.

Implications of Placelessness

Lamentations exhibits a complete loss of placedness. The land is no longer a place of belonging and flourishing, but a space of chaos, devastation, and lack. Place is deconstructed and destroyed along with the people. Place has become space. This phenomenon of place-become-space has considerable implications for a theology of humanity.

First, ruined space corresponds to broken bodies. Lamentations offers a comprehensive list of body parts that are destroyed or involved in mourning. Just as Lamentations’s acrostic structure shows the fullness of human suffering (“from א to ת”, or “A to Z”),¹³ so also the comprehensive list of body parts shows the complete embodied-ness of suffering (“from head to toe”). Inversely, in the Song, every aspect of each lover is praised, literally from the head down. Thus, placedness enables the flourishing of whole bodies.

Second, ruined space corresponds to social disintegration.¹⁴ In Lamentations, the community is broken and destroyed—babies cannot nurse (4:4), mothers eat their children (4:10), young men are slaves (5:13), young women are raped (5:11), elders receive no honor (5:12). By contrast, in the Song belonging to others imparts the benefits of community. For example, when the woman expresses shame about her darkened skin (1:5), the man’s loving corrective follows shortly after (1:8), with a more direct reversal in 4:7.¹⁵ Furthermore, rather than the isolation expressed by Daughter Zion in Lamentations, the couple within the Song is surrounded by the supportive community of the “Daughters of Jerusalem/Zion.”

Third, ruined space corresponds to the suffering of the natural world. While human suffering is at the forefront, Lamentations contains “a nonhuman subject, the city, that suffers on account of human behavior, that is cursed for human sin.”¹⁶ The injury to the human population and to the earth/city are one and the same. The city itself mourns in Lamentations for both its destruction and its people’s destruction. In contrast, the flourishing of the natural world when spring arrives encourages the lovemaking of the couple (2:12–14). Thus, mutual flourishing of humanity and the natural world in the Song contrasts with mutual suffering in Lamentations.

Fourth, ruined space corresponds to incomparable suffering. Daughter Zion laments, “Is there any sorrow like my sorrow?” (Lam 1:12). The Judahites of Lamentations are without a place; it has been destroyed. And all the Judahites ask for is to be seen (1:11, 12, 18, 20; 2:20; 3:50; 5:1), yet they and their land are looked upon only to be mocked (1:8; 2:16). They plead for someone to answer their cry (1:18, 21), but they are spoken to only to receive full rejection (2:16; 3:61–63). The people are so defiled that they scream to their neighbors, “Go away, go away, don’t touch”; therefore, they are fugitives and wanderers without a place to dwell and belong (4:13–15). The language of the Song is just the opposite; the lovers share bounteous places and incomparable delight in one another as they enjoy surpassing pleasure (see 1:2b, 8–9; 2:3; 4:10; 5:9; 6:8–10).

Lamentations ends without resolution, drawing the reader into despair over a lost place. Even the landed Judahites have no security, no belonging, no home; they have become exiles within an emptied and destroyed space. The only way for this space to become the Judahites’ place once again is for it to regain its relationality; there must be harmony between God, people, and land. Thus, the restoration the Judahites long for is not a mere “spiritual” restoration, but an embodied and placed restoration of the whole land. Therefore, restoration is inextricably connected with placedness: as the land is devastated and destroyed, personhood and community deconstruct and disintegrate. The lack of resolution in the Song, conversely, leaves the reader with hope and longing, enlivened to the potentials of placedness.

Conclusion

“Places, we realize, are as much a part of us as we are a part of them,” Indigenous wisdom teaches.¹⁷ As Song of Songs and Lamentations display a fusion of land and body—one with pleasure, the other with horrifying exposure—the reciprocal method of constructing and deconstructing person out of place becomes apparent. Though he was referring to the book of Job, an assertion by Old Testament scholar J. Gordon McConville provides a fitting summary: “a strong connection with place is part of human flourishing”; so, inversely, disconnection from place (or, in McConville’s words, “the rupture of rootedness”), even without physical removal, creates chaos, “result[ing] in the most tenuous hold on life.”¹⁸

For the Song, a sense of belonging in place enraptures our theological imaginations with the interdependent relationships of humanity and the rest of the creation with God. In contrast, Lamentations submerges us in an experience of disrupted place that is illustrative of disrupted relationship between God, people, and land. It is of interest that each book ends ambiguously. Where has the beloved gazelle bounded off to (Song 8:14)? Will God utterly forsake the people of Jerusalem, or what will be their fate (Lam 5:22)? In essence, the Song, with its portrayal of pleasure but lack of full satisfaction, draws the reader into the desire for a safe place of belonging in which to enjoy familiar pleasures. By contrast, the devastation of place and loss of placedness in Lamentations—with its incomparable suffering, including broken bodies, social disintegration, and suffering of the natural world—leaves the reader longing for restoration. These dialectical poetics work in tandem to communicate the biblical vision of what God intended for humanity, which then provides hope for how life can be lived well in the present: people rooted in place, with its potentials to offer pleasure, flourishing, community, and wholeness.