might have grown impatient and perplexed over what appeared to them to be disparities and inequities between the prosperity of the wicked and the grief of the righteous, still the Old Testament was firmly convinced that God’s moral order in the governing of the universe would be vindicated. In the book of Lamentations, more than perhaps anywhere else except for its individualistic expression in the book of Job, we are led into an experience of suffering and communal pain on a scale seldom endured