MacArthur on Jerusalem’s destruction

Extracts from MacArthur’s introduction to the book of Lamentations:

• No other entire OT book contains only laments, as does this distressful dirge, marking the funeral of the once-beautiful city of Jerusalem (cf. 2:15). This book keeps alive the memory of that city’s fall (586 B.C.) and teaches all believers how to deal with suffering.
• Jeremiah wrote Lamentations as an eyewitness (cf. 1:13–15; 2:6, 9; 4:1–12), possibly with Baruch’s secretarial help (cf. Jer. 36:4; 45:1), during or soon after Jerusalem’s fall in 586 B.C. It was mid-July when the city fell and mid-August when the temple was burned. Likely, Jeremiah saw the destruction of the walls, towers, homes, palace, and temple; he wrote while the event remained painfully fresh in his memory, but before his forced departure to Egypt c. 583 B.C. (cf. Jer. 43:1–7).
• So important was Jerusalem’s destruction that the facts are recorded in four separate OT chapters: 2 Kings 25; Jeremiah 39:1–11; 52; and 2 Chronicles 36:11–21.
• Lamentations is read on the ninth of Ab (July/August) to remember the date of Jerusalem’s destruction by Nebuchadnezzar. Interestingly, this same date later marked the destruction of Herod’s temple by the Romans in A.D. 70.

John F. MacArthur Jr., The MacArthur Bible Commentary (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005), La.