Today is the 29th day of October. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible, and here we are at

the threshold of a sparkly, shiny, new week. And we've got some ground to cover this week

before the week is over. We will enter a new month. And we're going to begin four. That's

four books in the scriptures this week. So in the Old Testament, we will read through the book

of Lamentations, which we're about to get to in just a minute, and then begin the book of Ezekiel.

And in the New Testament, we'll read Paul's Letter to Philemon, which we will read today,

and then move our way into the Book of Hebrews. So we've got some ground to cover, and let's get

to it. We're going to read from the Good News translation this week. And we will begin by

beginning the Book of Lamentations. And the Book of Lamentations is a book that contains five

poems, and they're poems of lament and grief. And this lament is over the fall and destruction

of Jerusalem. And we covered some of that territory as we read through Jeremiah's prophecies.

So in Hebrew, this book is called Ica, which means how could this happen? And of course,

we know how it could happen. Jeremiah, the prophet, warned over and over over decades

of impending doom. If the children of Israel didn't return from their wicked ways,

now the prophecy has come true. And although Ica or Lamentations doesn't claim an author,

and there's really no definitive proof, we have church tradition that tells us that the prophet

Jeremiah wrote these Lamentations. So we don't know that for a fact, but he was obviously intimate

with the scenario and in the same time period. So Lamentations was probably written somewhere in

an early 587 BC as the Babylonians conquered and then completely destroyed Jerusalem in 586.

Whether Jeremiah wrote this or not, someone who was an eyewitness probably did.

And today in Jewish culture, on the ninth day of Ab, which is July 16th on the Western calendar,

Lamentations is read on a day of fasting to commemorate the fall of Jerusalem.

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