קינות הערים השומריות ומגילת איכה: לקראת מחקר תאולוגי משווה

This article presents an outline for conducting comparative theological inquiry into the city lament genre in Mesopotamian literature and in the Bible, beginning with a survey of the theological foundations of Sumerian city laments. It focuses on such issues as the sharing of responsibility among the gods, the cosmological mechanism that produces the destruction, the involvement of natural forces in the process of devastation, and the reasons for the destruction offered by the laments. The Sumerian city laments are then compared to the Book of Lamentations with respect to those issues, and some interesting differences emerge, among others: the extent to which the deity is responsible for the events; the different theological mechanisms developed by each tradition to deal with the problem of theodicy; the relation between nature and history as two arenas of divine activity; and the question of whether and how the destruction can be understood in causal terms of punishment for crimes