Choosing the best pair of commentaries is not the same exercise as identifying the two highest-ranked individual volumes.

A good pairing should create something more useful than two similar books sitting beside each other. Ideally, one commentary should notice things the other is less equipped to see, compensate for weaknesses in the other’s method, or approach the same difficult passages from sufficiently different angles that reading both materially improves judgment.

For Lamentations, two pairings stand out. The first is the pairing I would recommend for most readers. The second is especially attractive for readers wanting a combination of foundational technical work and explicitly Christian theological interpretation.

1. Adele Berlin (OTL) + John Goldingay (NICOT)

Why the pairing works

This remains my first-choice pairing because Berlin and Goldingay overlap enough to converse intelligently but differ enough to prevent duplication.

Berlin is particularly strong on how Lamentations works as poetry. She repeatedly notices the significance of imagery, metaphor, personification, voice, bodily language, purity and impurity, and the complex literary presence of Daughter Zion. Her commentary often makes the reader stop over a detail that another commentary might explain correctly but pass over too quickly. She is especially good at showing that poetic form is not merely ornamental: the imaginative world of the poems is itself part of their meaning.

Goldingay provides the broader exegetical and theological framework. He gives more sustained attention to the Hebrew text, the history of interpretation, theological questions, historical setting, and the relationship between the book’s different voices. His refusal to reduce Lamentations either to orthodox theodicy or to protest against God is especially valuable. Confession, judgment, protest, grief, faith, accusation, repentance, and uncertainty remain simultaneously real.

The overlap is useful. Both take the literary character of Lamentations seriously and neither is eager to force the book into a simple progression from despair to confidence. But their emphases differ. Berlin often asks, “What is this image doing?” Goldingay more often asks, “How does this statement relate to the other theological voices in the book?”

That difference becomes particularly fruitful in Daughter Zion passages. Berlin is exceptionally sensitive to personification, sexuality, shame, impurity, and the experience created by the female voice. Goldingay helps situate those passages within the broader questions of judgment, guilt, protest, and divine agency. Reading them together guards against reducing the poetry either to literary experience without sufficient theological synthesis or to theological propositions that lose the force of the imagery.

The pairing also helps compensate for each commentary’s limitations. Berlin is less interested in sustained Christian theological interpretation and can leave some theological questions open at the literary level. Goldingay gives more explicit attention to theology and Scripture as a whole, even though I do not always follow his broader theological conclusions. Conversely, Goldingay is not as consistently original as Berlin in noticing the detailed operation of an image or metaphor.

What the reader gains from owning both

With Berlin alone, I would understand the poetry unusually well but still want a broader exegetical-theological guide.

With Goldingay alone, I would have arguably the best single all-round commentary, but I would miss some of Berlin’s most penetrating observations about how the poems create their emotional and conceptual world.

Together, they cover an unusually large proportion of what I want from Lamentations commentary: literary sensitivity, serious exegesis, theological balance, attention to voices, and repeated usefulness on individual passages.

How I would choose

If I could purchase only one of the two, I would choose Goldingay for comprehensiveness.

If I were asking specifically which one is more likely to make me notice something I had previously missed, I would choose Berlin.

If I could afford two commentaries, I would much rather have both than buy a second commentary methodologically very similar to either one.

2. Delbert R. Hillers (AYB) + Robin A. Parry (THOTC)

Why the pairing works

Hillers and Parry make an exceptionally complementary second pairing because they address almost opposite ends of the interpretive task.

Hillers supplies foundational work on the Hebrew poetry, acrostic structure, meter, parallelism, textual questions, ancient Near Eastern city laments, and the formal shaping of grief. His great insight is that artistic form is not an artificial container imposed upon authentic emotion. The acrostic gives order to experience that feels limitless and thereby makes communal remembrance and mourning possible. His work on Lamentations 3 and the representative role of the afflicted man has also shaped much subsequent discussion.

Parry, by contrast, asks how Lamentations should be received theologically as Christian Scripture. He is interested in divine anger, suffering, theodicy, divine suffering, spirituality, ethics, Jewish and Christian liturgy, political theology, canonical interpretation, and the relationship of the afflicted man to Isaiah’s Servant and ultimately Christ.

The two complement each other precisely because Parry does not attempt to replace the kind of philological and form-critical work Hillers performs, while Hillers does not attempt the sustained canonical and Christian theological synthesis that defines Parry’s volume.

Their different treatments of Lamentations 3 are particularly rewarding to read together. Hillers’ influential account of the man as a representative “Everyman” helps establish the literary question: how does one individual’s suffering relate to the community? Parry carries that question into biblical theology. He explores a trajectory toward the Servant and Christ while warning against allowing the man to eclipse Daughter Zion or pretending that the New Testament meaning was already fully explicit in the Old Testament poem.

The pairing also helps prevent two opposite errors. Hillers keeps theological interpretation anchored in poetry, ancient context, and the actual literary forms of the book. Parry prevents historical and literary analysis from becoming an endpoint that leaves unanswered the question of how Christians should receive Lamentations within Scripture.

What the reader gains from owning both

Hillers provides the foundations: form, poetry, ancient parallels, and some of the interpretive categories later scholarship inherited.

Parry provides the theological horizon: how the Old Testament voice can be heard faithfully before being brought into dialogue with the wider canon.

Neither replaces the other. Their differences are exactly what make the pairing useful.

Important limitations

Hillers inevitably reflects an older stage of scholarship. Later work on trauma, gender, polyphony, reception history, and the shifting voices of the poems develops areas that his commentary could not fully address.

Parry is not sufficiently detailed to become the reader’s main technical commentary on the Hebrew text. Some of his theological horizons also move beyond questions that can be established directly from individual verses.

Reading both minimizes those weaknesses.

How I Would Choose Between the Pairings

For most readers, I would begin with:

Berlin + Goldingay

That pairing gives the best combination of literary insight, verse-by-verse usefulness, theological balance, and breadth.

I would choose:

Hillers + Parry

if I were especially interested in moving from the historical and poetic foundations of Lamentations toward explicitly Christian theological interpretation.

A reader building a larger library would gain considerably from owning all four. Berlin and Hillers are not interchangeable literary commentators: Berlin excels in imagery, personification, and the poetic world of the finished text, whereas Hillers contributes foundational work on form and ancient genre. Goldingay and Parry likewise differ: Goldingay is the stronger all-round exegete; Parry gives much more sustained attention to theological and canonical interpretation.

Bottom Line

My first recommendation is Adele Berlin + John Goldingay.

Berlin repeatedly shows me things in the poetry that I might otherwise miss; Goldingay helps me decide how those details fit within the difficult theological whole.

If I wanted a second pair rather than two more similar reference commentaries, I would choose Delbert Hillers + Robin Parry. One moves deeply into the poetic and historical foundations of Lamentations; the other moves carefully outward into Christian theological interpretation.

That is the kind of complementarity I am looking for in commentary pairings: not merely two excellent books, but two books whose differences make each other more useful.