Getting Biblical in Daily Life
War & Displacement
The historical backdrop for Lamentations is the invasion of Jerusalem and the exile of the Jewish people to Babylon. Like countless groups throughout history, these guys have been attacked and forced from their homes into foreign lands.
The author of Lamentations abhors (we've been dying to use that word) these particular actions. Losing one's home is especially abhorrent:
- Enemies have stretched out their hands over all her precious things; she has even seen the nations invade her sanctuary, those whom you forbade to enter your congregation[…] For these things I weep; my eyes flow with tears; for a comforter is far from me, one to revive my courage; my children are desolate, for the enemy has prevailed. (1:10, 16)
- Remember, O Lord, what has befallen us; look, and see our disgrace! Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to aliens. (5:1-2)
If you've been paying attention, you might have noticed that these people living in the Kingdom of Judah actually took their homeland from people who were already living there hundreds of years before. These guys were called the Canaanites and the whole Book of Joshua is about how the Israelites slipped in, murdered most of them, kicked out the rest, and then took over their land.
Of course, that was done on God's orders. The Israelites believed that this was the homeland that God had promised them, and that taking it and forcing people out was following his wishes. We're guessing the Canaanites might have written some laments of their own. And anyone left over after the final siege of Jerusalem might have been enjoying the irony of the situation.
Not so shockingly, "God told us to" has been a pretty popular excuse over the years for anyone looking to do a little land grab. Muhammad tried to spread Islam throughout Arabia partly through military victories. During the Crusades, Christians tried to win the Holy Land back with mixed results. Later, the Pilgrims set sail on a mission from God and managed to snag themselves some sweet (and most-definitely occupied) real-estate in the process.
And then there's the the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a result of Palestine being partitioned in 1948 by the U.N., establishing separate Arab and Jewish states. There were land and population transfers involving hundreds of thousands of people. Today, Israeli settlers moving into the previously Palestinian territories believe that they are just re-taking the land of Judea and Samaria promised to them by God. For Jews, the establishment of the state of Israel was a miracle. The Palestinians who lost their land called it al-Nakba—the catastrophe.
Today, wars of aggression and involuntary population transfers are illegal according to all kinds of international laws. But this stuff still happens. Millions of people are displaced from their homes every year according to the U.N. due to wars and conflicts that make home a dangerous place to be. Almost half of these refuges are children. You can tune into CNN any day of the week to see the lamentations of the suffering refugees, complete with starving children, weeping mothers, and armed captors.