... The authoritative Daughter Zion found in the Masoretic Text Lamentations vanishes within the book’s history of consequences. She does not disappear accidentally; rather, interpreters’ use of the Septuagint’s statement of Jeremianic authorship systematically and thoroughly erases her. The Septuagint Lamentations opens with an incipit not found in the Hebrew Lamentations: “And it happened, after Israel was taken captive and Ierousalem was laid waste, that Jeremiah sat weeping and gave this lament over Jerusalem and said” (Septuagint Lamentations 1:1). Thus, the entirety of Lamentations can be taken as spoken by Jeremiah himself, and within his speech, there appears to be little room for Zion to lament. At crucial moments in the Hebrew text of Lamentations 1 and 2 (for example 1:11), where the speaker seems to transition from the narrator to Zion herself, in the Greek, the speaker could remain Jeremiah. Additionally, the dramatic opening of chapter 3, “I am the man”, fits seamlessly into the Septuagint opening of Lamentations, where the man may easily be Jeremiah, while the man’s identity remains enigmatic in the Hebrew. ...