Conflate Readings and the <i>Lamentations</i> Textual Tradition

One dimension of Lamentations’s textual tradition, namely, its propensity for conflate readings, provides the chief focus of inquiry in this essay. As I work to collect, elucidate, and clarify these conflate readings, other dimensions of these poems’ extant and reconstructable textualities come into view, viz. their rough chronology, prevalence of variability and multiformity. The phenomenon of conflate readings is well known to textual scholars of the Bible. The presenting peculiarity in Lamentations is the breakage in form to no apparent end that the preservation of such readings inevitably entails. Given how integral form is to this poetry’s operative poetics, such deformations require explanation. The solution posed posits shifts over time in the literary values that guided scribal practice when it came to the collecting and recording of variant readings. The resulting view of Lamentations’s literary history is far richer, more complex, and truer to scribal realia than that usually presumed by students of these poems.