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Document Details : Title: Unified Diversity Subtitle: The Cultural Trauma Narrative of Lamentations Author(s): ALSENE-PARKER, M.D. Journal: Biblica Volume: 106 Issue: 1 Date: 2025 Pages: 27-53 DOI: 10.2143/BIB.106.1.3294357 Abstract : One of the central questions in Lamentations scholarship is how, if at all, its multiple perspectives fit together. This paper commends a reading of Lamentations that simultaneously holds together the parts and the whole, following the book’s acrostic structure. Each poem has its own perspective, but they also share themes that draw them together into a literary whole. Lamentations thus creates a unifying cultural trauma narrative that, following Jerusalem’s fall in 587 BCE, provided the Judahite community unity amid its diversity. This article’s approach provides contemporary interpreters with a fresh framework for reading Lamentations’ distinct poems as an integrated whole. |
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