Much of the introductory materials adheres to mainstream scholarship and is rooted in traditional historical-critical approaches, as one would expect in this commentary series. It is here that he discusses the unity and genre of Lamentations. Renkema is certainly not the only scholar who argues for the unity of Lamentations, although, among contemporary scholars, one is hard pressed to find more than a handful. Each strophe of a poem is related to the corresponding strophes in all the other poems. The alef- strophe in chapters 1 through 4 and the first verse of chapter 5, for example, are linked at the semantic level across the entire book.
Lamentations is, in other words, sui generis.
Those familiar with the method of interpretation of classical Hebrew and Ugaritic poetry pioneered by the Kampen School will find few surprises. The emphasis is on the structural analysis of the text, which segments the poem into a series of interrelated divisions that include, among others, canticles and cantos. As noted above, Renkema places much significance on external parallelism in his exegesis, so he includes a discussion of inclusions and responses. In the exegetical part of his commentary, Renkema identifies both inclusions and responses for every poem at the beginning of his discussion of each canticle. The exegetical portion of the commentary is over five hundred pages in length and, as such, offers an amazing amount of detailed exegesis for each poetic line.