ABSTRACT
The fragments from Origen’s Commentary on Lamentations survived, as other fragments of Origen’s works did, in catenae (chains), Byzantine biblical commentaries formed by stringing together brief passages excerpted from older commentaries. In spite of the obscurity that comes from the loss of context, we find in this, one of the earliest of Origen’s commentaries (between 222 and 225, according to Nautin), 1 the same approach to the Bible that he continued to employ throughout his life. Origen initially approaches the text as a grammateus, establishing the work’s form in Hebrew, setting it in a historical context, comparing translations, and, where necessary, identifying prosôpa. 2 Note, in fragment XXV, Origen’s concern, without using the term, to identify the prosôpon of the speaker when Lamentations 1:9 switches from a third-person voice, presumably to be identified as the prosôpon of the prophet Jeremiah, to a direct address to God in the second person (“See, Lord, my humility …”). In his attempt to understand the text in its historical context, Origen draws on Josephus’s account of a similar circumstance, the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70 (fr. CIX). As we see in the fragments on Lamentations 1:4, 1:9, and 1:10, Origen first uses such grammatical techniques to establish the literal sense of the text, which then provides the basis for an elevated sense.
