Lamentations 3:22–23: “new every morning” in a ruined city

Explanation — not a translation

In brief

“His mercies don’t fail. They are new every morning. Great is Your faithfulness.” These words are not spoken from a place of comfort. They come from a poet sitting in the ruins of Jerusalem, in the middle of one of the darkest books of the Bible, who chooses to remember God’s steadfast love while the grief is still raw.

The setting

Lamentations is a set of five poems mourning the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Babylonians in 587/586 BC. The first poem begins with the city pictured as a widow weeping in the night (Lamentations 1:1–2). The Hebrew text does not name the author; an old tradition, reflected in the Greek Septuagint, links the book to Jeremiah, which is why it follows his book in Christian Bibles.

The poems are carefully made. Chapters 1, 2 and 4 are acrostics, each verse beginning with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet; chapter 3 is a triple acrostic, with three verses for each letter. Grief is given a shape, from the first letter to the last.

Hope in the middle

Chapter 3 begins in near despair. The speaker says God has walled him in, shut out his prayer and “filled me with bitterness” (3:1-18). Then something shifts.

Nothing outside has changed: the city is still in ruins. What changes is what the poet chooses to call to mind.

• “loving kindnesses” — the Hebrew hesed, God’s loyal, covenant love, the love that keeps its promises.
• “mercies” — a word related to the Hebrew for womb, suggesting tender, almost parental compassion.
• “new every morning” — the poet does not claim to have enough mercy stored up for the future, only enough for today, given again each day.
• “Great is Your faithfulness” — the poem turns from speaking about God to speaking to Him.

The first line can be read two ways in Hebrew: that “we are not consumed,” as the WEB-C has it, or that God’s loving kindnesses never come to an end. Both readings rest the community’s survival on God’s love rather than on its own strength.

What it doesn’t mean

These verses do not make grief wrong or tell mourners to hurry past it. The book’s hope sits at its center, not its end: the last chapter ends without an answer: a question to God, a plea to be restored, and the fear that He has rejected His people (Lamentations 5:20–22). Lamentations shows that hope and lament can be prayed side by side, and that bringing raw sorrow, and even protest, to God is itself an act of faith. The question Is it wrong to be angry at God? explores this further.

The surrounding verses also contain hard theology, describing the disaster as coming from God (3:1-16) while insisting that He “does not afflict willingly” (3:33). Readers in every tradition have wrestled with those lines rather than smoothing them over.

How it has been read

Jewish communities read Lamentations on Tisha B’Av, the fast that mourns the destruction of the temples. In the traditional Catholic liturgy, passages from Lamentations are sung during the last days of Holy Week, applying the grief over Jerusalem to the suffering and death of Jesus. Many Protestant Christians know these verses through the hymn Great Is Thy Faithfulness.

Read it with

Lamentations 3:25–33 continues with waiting and God’s compassion. Psalm 30:5 says that joy comes in the morning. Jeremiah 29:11, from the same era, is explained here. The Hope and Grief pages gather related passages.