Check out Psalm 119! Whoa. It’s the longest chapter in the Bible!
It’s 176 verses long, divided into 22 stanzas of eight verses each. Each stanza is named after a Hebrew letter: aleph, beth, gimel, etc. (What, you don’t have the Hebrew alphabet memorized?)
Here’s the cool part. In the original Hebrew, each verse begins with its “title” letter. That is, in the “aleph” stanza, all eight verses start with the first Hebrew letter. The “beth” verses all start with the second Hebrew letter. And so on. Obviously, this effect gets lost in translation, but the original audience would have noticed it.
This kind of writing—where the first letters of each line spell out a word or phrase or form a pattern—is called an acrostic.
Here’s an example of an acrostic in English, with the lines spelling out SACRAMENT.
Psalm 119 is the most complete acrostic in the Psalms, but it’s not the only one. There are also these:
- Psalms 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119, and 145 all have acrostic elements in their original Hebrew.
- Lamentations 1, 2, and 4 are all acrostics, each with 22 verses, one for each letter in the Hebrew alphabet.
Why do you think Old Testament writers used acrostic style writing? One reason might be that the structure makes the text easier to remember. Going through the whole alphabet also suggests completeness—it covers everything “from A to Z” (or from aleph to tau).