The Fall and the Exile
- When
- 586 BC, after the fall of Jerusalem
- Written by
- Jeremiah, by tradition
- Chapters
- 5
The big idea
Five laments over burned Jerusalem: grief poured out honestly before God, with hope breaking in at the center. His mercies are new every morning.
Themes
- Grief and lament
- God’s faithfulness
- Sin and judgment
- Hope in the dark
Memory verse
It is of the LORD’S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.
Key passages
- 1How lonely sits the city
- 3:22–33His mercies are new every morning
- 5A prayer for restoration
Links to other Scripture
- Matthew 23:37–39Jerusalem, Jerusalem
- Luke 19:41–44Jesus weeps over the city
- Psalm 137By the rivers of Babylon
- 2 Corinthians 1:3–4The God of all comfort
Read the text
Choose a chapter to read it here in the King James Version. Verses with a dotted underline have notes from Bible scholars. Tap one to open them.
Notes from
Chapters
King James text and the commentaries of Henry, Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, Gill, Clarke, Calvin, and Keil and Delitzsch are in the public domain. Tyndale Open Study Notes are used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license, from tyndaleopenresources.com. Texts were reformatted for this site.
Journal prompts
Keep a journal or notebook for your study. Write your answers there, in your own words.
- Where do you see Christ in this book?
- Lamentations lets grief be grief. What loss do you need to give yourself room to mourn?
- In the middle of ruin comes “His mercies are new every morning.” What mercy did you see this morning?
- Write a lament of your own: what is wrong, what you want, and what you still trust.
- In one sentence, this book is about…