Sackcloth

Sackcloth is the visible costume of grief. A coarse fabric worn next to the skin or girded over the loins, it is put on at the news of death, at the threat of national disaster, in pleading before God, and in pleading before a stronger king. The same gesture serves a father weeping over a son, a prophet calling a people to repent, an enemy throwing himself on the mercy of an Israelite court, and even — in one of the strangest details of the rite — the cattle of a Gentile city begging not to be destroyed.

Mourning over the Dead

The first appearance of sackcloth in the rite of grief comes when Jacob is told that Joseph is dead. "And Jacob rent his garments, and put sackcloth on his loins, and mourned for his son many days" (Ge 37:34). The pattern set there — clothes torn, then sackcloth tied to the bare body — recurs whenever Israel buries someone. David enforces it on his troops at Abner's bier: "Rend your⁺ clothes, and gird you⁺ with sackcloth, and mourn before Abner. And King David followed the bier" (2Sa 3:31). When Mordecai hears of the decree against the Jews, "Mordecai rent his clothes, and put on sackcloth with ashes, and went out into the midst of the city, and cried with a loud and a bitter cry" (Es 4:1), and his act becomes the response of a whole people: "in every province, wherever the king's commandment and his decree came, there was great mourning among the Jews, and fasting, and weeping, and wailing; and many lay in sackcloth and ashes" (Es 4:3).

Job, sitting under his calamities, gives the rite its sharpest line: "I have sewed sackcloth on my skin, And have laid my horn in the dust" (Job 16:15). The fabric has become a second skin; the badge of mourning is now stitched to the body of the mourner.

The same picture carries into the Maccabean period. Mattathias and his sons answer the desecration of the temple in the same vocabulary: "And Mattathias and his sons rent their garments, and they covered themselves with sackcloth, and made great lamentation" (1Ma 2:14). When the city itself collapses, the lamentation widens — "the princes, and the ancients mourned, And the virgins and the young men were made feeble, And the beauty of the women was changed" (1Ma 1:26); "Every bridegroom took up lamentation: And the bride who sat in the marriage bed, mourned" (1Ma 1:27); "And the land was moved for the inhabitants of it, And all the house of Jacob was covered with confusion" (1Ma 1:28). The death of leaders triggers it too: "all Israel mourned for him with great mourning" at Mattathias's burial (1Ma 2:70), and a generation later Simon's people, "with their garments torn," cry to him for peace from the wall (1Ma 13:45). The wailing in the synagogue ruler's house when his daughter dies (Mr 5:38) belongs to this same family of household grief.

National Grief and the Prophetic Summons

The prophets do not invent the rite; they command it. Isaiah on Moab: "In their streets they gird themselves with sackcloth; on their housetops, and in their broad places, every one wails, weeping abundantly" (Is 15:3). Jeremiah on Judah: "For this gird yourselves with sackcloth, lament and wail; for the fierce anger of Yahweh has not turned back from us" (Je 4:8); and again, "O daughter of my people, gird with sackcloth, and wallow in ashes: make mourning, as for an only son, most bitter lamentation; for the destroyer will suddenly come upon us" (Je 6:26). Jeremiah turns the same summons toward Ammon: "Wail, O Heshbon, for Ai is laid waste; cry, you⁺ daughters of Rabbah, gird⁺ with sackcloth: lament, and run to and fro among the fences; for Milcom will go into captivity, his priests and his princes together" (Je 49:3). Joel calls Judah to a virgin-bride image: "Lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her youth" (Joe 1:8).

Once disaster is finished, the rite holds the survivors. Lamentations: "The elders of the daughter of Zion sit on the ground, they keep silent; They have cast up dust on their heads; they have girded themselves with sackcloth: The virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads to the ground" (La 2:10). Ezekiel folds the same costume into the apocalypse of the end: "They will also gird themselves with sackcloth, and horror will cover them; and shame will be on all faces, and baldness on all their heads" (Eze 7:18). Ezekiel also gives it to Tyre's foreign mourners — "in their wailing they will take up a lamentation for you, and lament over you, [saying,] Who is there like Tyre, like her that is brought to silence in the midst of the sea?" (Eze 27:32) — and the wider land has its own version: "For the mountains I will lift: a weeping and a wailing; and for the pastures of the wilderness: a lamentation; because they are burned up" (Je 9:10).

The Penitent King and the Besieged City

Sackcloth turns from grief to plea when a king or city, under judgment, puts it on to ask Yahweh to relent. Ahab, after Elijah's word against him: "when Ahab heard those words, that he rent his clothes, and put sackcloth on his flesh, and fasted, and lay in sackcloth, and went softly" (1Ki 21:27). The king of Israel inside besieged Samaria, when his cloak is torn open, is seen to have been wearing it underneath all along: "the people looked and saw that he had sackcloth inside on his flesh" (2Ki 6:30). Hezekiah, on hearing the Assyrian threat: "King Hezekiah heard it, that he rent his clothes, and covered himself with sackcloth, and went into the house of Yahweh" (2Ki 19:1). When the angel of Yahweh stands with sword drawn over Jerusalem, "David and the elders, clothed in sackcloth, fell on their faces" (1Ch 21:16). Daniel, calculating the years of the desolation: "I set my face to the Lord God, to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting and sackcloth and ashes" (Da 9:3).

The Maccabean armies fight in the same posture. Before the battle near Mizpah: "they fasted that day, and put on sackcloth, and put ashes on their heads. And they rent their garments" (1Ma 3:47). When the desecrated sanctuary is reached, "they rent their garments, and made great lamentation, and put ashes on their heads" (1Ma 4:39). Mattathias's grief over the slain Sabbath-keepers — "Mattathias and his friends heard of it, and they mourned for them exceedingly" (1Ma 2:39) — and his own opening cry, "Woe is me! Why was I born to see the ruin of my people, And the ruin of the holy city" (1Ma 2:7), belong to the same liturgy of repentant lamentation that the older kings wear under their robes.

The sharpest single example is Nineveh, where the city's whole population — and its livestock — go into the rite together. The king's order: "let them be covered with sackcloth, both man and beast, and let them cry mightily to God: yes, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in his hands" (Jon 3:8). Repentance and the costume of repentance are bound to each other; the first thing the city does when it believes the prophet is to put on the cloth.

The Submission of Envoys

The rite has a diplomatic edge. When Ben-hadad of Aram is broken before Israel, his counselors propose surrender in the same costume that Israelites wear before Yahweh: "Look now, we have heard that the kings of the house of Israel are merciful kings: let us, we pray you, put sackcloth on our loins, and ropes on our heads, and go out to the king of Israel: perhaps he will save your soul. So they girded sackcloth on their loins, and [put] ropes on their heads, and came to the king of Israel, and said, Your slave Ben-hadad says, I pray you, let my soul live" (1Ki 20:31-32). The cloth here is a foreigner's plea — sackcloth as the visible currency of mercy between kings, used because it is recognized as the costume of a beaten man hoping to be spared.

The Two Witnesses and the Loosing of Sackcloth

The rite carries forward into apocalyptic vision. The two witnesses of Revelation appear in it for the whole length of their testimony: "And I will give to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth" (Re 11:3). Their costume preaches before they speak — for over three years of prophesying, they wear what Israel wore at every funeral and every defeat.

The opposite gesture closes the rite. When Yahweh delivers a sufferer, the sackcloth comes off, and the loosing is itself the sign of the answer: "You have turned for me my mourning into dancing; You have loosed my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness" (Ps 30:11). The image works only because the cloth had to be tied on first. Through the whole sweep of the rite — Jacob over Joseph, Hezekiah before the Assyrians, Daniel calculating the years, Mattathias and his sons facing the desecration of the temple, the Ninevites and their cattle, the two witnesses with twelve hundred and sixty days to prophesy — sackcloth is the body's way of saying what cannot yet be said in any other form: that something has been lost or is about to be, and that the mourner is willing to be seen wearing it.