Lamentations

Lamentations is five poems written in front of a destroyed city: the temple burned, famine, humiliation, people deported. Four of them are acrostics — each stanza beginning with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet — which gives grief a shape, almost a way of containing what does not fit. The book neither rushes the pain nor offers cheap comfort; it lets the lament last. And exactly at the middle of the structure, in chapter 3, comes the best-known turn: "his mercies... are new every morning; great is your faithfulness". It is one of the most useful books in the Bible for anyone grieving, because it shows that complaining to God is a legitimate form of prayer.