A boxed insert on the right contains the author's name and title with library markings.

GRIGOR NAREKATSI
BOOK OF LAMENTATIONS
Knowledge?
24. V. 19
Gh K B/ 15

A WORD TO THE READER

The fruits of divine providence, appearing through the ages in various forms for the benefit of the Armenian people, give the grateful examiner cause to think: not only to know with certainty the selection of these diverse gifts, but also to recognize with respect those through whose hands they were gifted, and to receive them with a kiss. Among the number of heavenly gifts, the prayer-offering volume of our most blessed father, Gregory of Narek, may justly be inscribed. It is a work, indeed, for which no equal has yet been found in other nations, and it stands high at the summit. By it, honor is raised not only to the first cause God, but also to the secondary cause—the administrator of the writing—who is carried up to a high degree of glory, resembling the first saints.

A new Moses has appeared, bringing down from the highly honored Narekian monastery the tablets of prayers to the Armenians, just as that ancient one brought the law to Israel from the solitude of Sinai. David, the spirit-breathing psalmist of the Armenian Church, with intelligible harps, passed before the majestic Ark, not rejoicing bodily in timbrels, but revealing the hidden secrets of the soul to the view of the world, of angels, and of men. He is the archetype for those who repent, recording songs of confession for the instruction of the penitent; not taking the laments of strangers into his mouth, like those of Saul or Abner (2 Kings 1:18, 3:34), but casting the corruption of his own soul into song to be heard by God in the hope of resurrection.

And what else is more familiar than to depict the Savior in the ancient one—both by name and by worship? A new Second Illuminator, a second Gregory, who bequeathed to us the rule of prayer, just as the first one did for the faith. Like the patriarch Jacob desiring Joseph...