The season of disappointment gave the displaced a long time to remember and to ponder that poetry of anticipated loss. The sense of displacement gave time to collect and order such poetry into coherent patterns that were on the way to canon. But mostly they listened—again and again—to the cadences of divine disappointment and alienation that sounded a steady beat of loss. The poetry was old; but its effect was to create a contemporary context for lament. The lamentation was the human response of Israel to the divine poetry of alienation. The poetry was true, it turned out, and so the grief was
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