Psalms 119

An acrostic in Hebrew poetry is a poem whose successive lines, verses, or stanzas begin with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet in order — aleph, beth, gimel, daleth, and so on through tav. The form is used at least eight times in the Old Testament for theological and pastoral effect, almost always in the Hebrew poetic books and Lamentations. The full set of biblical alphabetic acrostics: **Psalms 9–10 (originally a single composition, broken into two psalms), 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119, 145 in the Psalter; Proverbs 31:10–31* for the eshet chayil, the woman of valor; *Lamentations 1, 2, 3, 4** (with chapter 3 tripling the form — three verses per letter, sixty-six verses total). Chapter five of Lamentations is twenty-two verses long — the alphabet's letter count — but does not begin its lines with the letters in order, a haunting deflection of the form at the book's close. Psalm 119 is the most elaborate biblical acrostic and the longest chapter in the Bible. It is built of twenty-two stanzas of eight verses each — one stanza per Hebrew letter — and every one of the eight verses in a stanza begins with that letter. The entire psalm is a meditation on God's law, and the alphabetic structure is the form: God's word covers everything from A to Z, and the psalmist's love for it exhausts the alphabet trying to praise it. The acrostic form serves three purposes: structural completeness (a survey from aleph to tav of a subject), memorability (the alphabet is a mnemonic key), and theological signaling (the totality of God's word, mercy, or wisdom under a single ordered key). Most English translations preserve the structure only in marginal notes or footnotes; the original effect requires the Hebrew.

• Lamentations 1
• Lamentations 3
• Proverbs 31
• Psalms 145