Lamentations 3:22–24

Lamentations 3:22 — "It is because of Yahweh's loving kindnesses that we are not consumed"

The Hebrew word rendered "loving kindnesses" is the plural of hesed — one of the Old Testament's most theologically loaded terms. Hesed cannot be fully captured by any single English equivalent; it carries connotations of covenantal fidelity, steadfast love, loyal mercy, and tenacious goodness that refuses to let go of its object. The plural form (hasadim) is emphatic, suggesting an inexhaustible abundance, a treasury of mercies rather than a single reserve. The verb "consumed" (tamnu) echoes the language of fire and utter destruction; Israel in 587 BC has watched Jerusalem burn, the Temple collapse, and her people dragged into exile. The wonder the poet expresses is not triumphalism but astonished relief — we should have been annihilated, and we were not. This is not a claim that punishment was avoided; Lamentations has catalogued suffering in brutal detail through the preceding 65 verses. It is rather the recognition that what could have been total extinction was restrained. Divine judgment, however severe, was not divine abandonment.

Lamentations 3:23 — "They are new every morning"

The subject of "they are new" (Hebrew hadashim) refers back to the hasadim — the mercies themselves. This verse contains one of the most countercultural theological claims in all of Scripture: God's mercy is not a finite stock that diminishes with each draw upon it. It does not grow stale or depleted. Every morning is not merely a new day but a new dispensation of divine love. The morning (boqer) in Hebrew thought was the time of deliverance and fresh beginning — the Exodus happened at dawn, the manna fell fresh each morning (Exodus 16), and dawn would later become the hour of the Resurrection. The poet is drawing on this deep symbolic grammar. The implicit corollary is pointed: if mercy is renewed each morning, then each morning is an invitation to renewed trust, renewed repentance, renewed relationship. The verse also implicitly answers Israel's despair (3:18, "my hope is perished from the LORD"): hope is not perished, because the source of hope — God's merciful faithfulness — replenishes itself daily.

Lamentations 3:24 — "'Yahweh is my portion,' says my soul"

"My portion" (Hebrew helqi) is the language of the Levitical allotment: when Canaan was divided among the tribes, the tribe of Levi received no territorial inheritance because Yahweh himself was declared their portion (Numbers 18:20; Deuteronomy 10:9). The poet — writing in the midst of catastrophic loss, including the loss of the land — deliberately reaches for this precise image. Even when the physical inheritance (land, Temple, monarchy) has been stripped away, the true inheritance remains. This is a radical theological reorientation: possessing God is the only possession that cannot be taken. The phrase "says my soul" (naphshi) indicates this is not merely a doctrinal proposition but a deeply personal, interior act of faith. The soul speaks — this is confession in the ancient sense: an act of trust made aloud in the face of contradiction. The verse anticipates a profound mystical tradition in which union with God, not any created good, is the soul's final rest and true homeland.

Typological and Spiritual Senses

In the typological reading developed by the Fathers, the "morning" of renewed mercies points toward Easter morning itself — the ultimate novum of divine love, when the mercies that seemed buried on Good Friday were renewed beyond all expectation in the empty tomb. The "portion" language undergoes its deepest fulfillment in the Eucharist, where Christ becomes literally the portion — the food and inheritance — given to the soul each day at the altar.

Catholic tradition illuminates this passage with remarkable precision through several converging streams.

On hesed and the Covenant: The Catechism teaches that God's love is not merely affectionate but faithful and irreversible: "God's love for Israel is compared to a father's love for his son… it is a stronger love than a mother's for her children" (CCC 218–220). The plural hasadim resonates with the Church's understanding that divine mercy is not a single act but a permanent disposition of the divine nature. St. Thomas Aquinas, commenting on divine mercy (misericordia), argues that it is not a passion in God but a perfection — it belongs to the very essence of who God is (Summa Theologiae I, q. 21, a. 3).

On Renewal and Morning: St. John Chrysostom, in his homilies on repentance, repeatedly invokes the image of the daily renewal of mercy to argue against despair: "Do not say 'I have sinned much, how can I be saved?' Where sin abounded, grace super-abounded." This directly echoes the theology of Lamentations 3:23. The Second Vatican Council's Gaudium et Spes (§22) likewise affirms that the human vocation is renewed in every age through Christ.

On "Portion" and the Eucharist: St. Augustine's famous opening of the Confessions — "Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee" — is the spiritual commentary on verse 24. The soul that names God as its portion has grasped what Augustine calls the summum bonum. In the Eucharistic theology of the Church, this reaches its sacramental summit: Christ gives himself as food, as viaticum, as the portion that satisfies completely (John 6:35). Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est (§1) insists that the encounter with God's love is the origin of Christian life — which is precisely the confession of Lamentations 3:24.

Against Presumption and Despair: The Council of Trent (Session VI, Decree on Justification, ch. 9) warned against both presumption and despair. This passage navigates exactly that narrow way: it does not minimize punishment (no presumption), yet refuses to abandon hope (no despair).

Contemporary Catholic life is saturated with sources of spiritual exhaustion — moral failure, ecclesial scandal, personal tragedy, cultural hostility — that can produce the same numbing grief the poet of Lamentations inhabits. These three verses offer a concrete spiritual discipline, not a vague consolation. Make the morning decisive. The Church's tradition of Morning Prayer (Lauds) in the Liturgy of the Hours is built on precisely the theology of verse 23: each dawn is a sacramental moment in which God's mercies are renewed, and the praying Church shows up to receive them. Catholics who do not pray the Office might nonetheless cultivate a morning offering — explicitly acknowledging that they begin this day not on the strength of yesterday's virtue, but on the freshly renewed mercy of God. When the examination of conscience at night reveals failure, Lamentations 3:23 is the antidote to scrupulous despair: the morning is coming, and it will be new. And for those in seasons of acute loss — grief, unemployment, illness, estrangement — verse 24 offers the one claim that cannot be stripped away: Yahweh is my portion. Name it aloud, as the soul names it in the text. The act of naming is itself the prayer.