Acrostics and Structure

An acrostic poem is one in which successive lines or stanzas begin with successive letters of the alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet has twenty-two letters, and the Hebrew Bible contains a number of poems built on it. The clearest are Psalms 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119 and 145, Proverbs 31:10-31, and the first four chapters of Lamentations. Psalms 9 and 10 together form a broken acrostic, and the Septuagint treats them as a single psalm. The first chapter of Nahum has been read as a partial acrostic, though scholars disagree about how far the pattern runs.

The poems use the alphabet in different ways. In Psalm 37 a new letter begins, for the most part, every second verse. Psalms 111 and 112 are acrostics by half-line, so the whole alphabet runs through ten short verses. Psalm 119 is the most elaborate: twenty-two stanzas of eight verses, every verse in a stanza beginning with the same letter, which is why it has 176 verses. The KJV prints the Hebrew letter names, ALEPH, BETH and so on, as headings above its stanzas, and many modern Bibles do the same, but in most other acrostics English readers are never told the pattern is there. Lamentations 1, 2 and 4 give each letter one verse of twenty-two; Lamentations 3 gives each letter three verses, sixty-six in all. Lamentations 5 has twenty-two verses, the number of the alphabet, but its verses do not run through the letters.

You can check all of this yourself. Open any of these chapters in an interlinear and tap or read the first Hebrew word of each verse. One caution first: in the Psalms the heading counts as part of the first verse in the Hebrew, and in some psalms as a verse of its own, so the alphabet may start with the second Hebrew word, or the Hebrew verse numbers may run one ahead of the English. Lesson 4 explains the numbering. In Lamentations there are no headings, and the pattern is plain from the first verse.

The acrostics are not always perfect, and the imperfections are themselves worth knowing. In the Hebrew of Psalm 145, preserved in the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC), there is no verse for the letter nun: the mem verse, 145:13, is followed directly by the samekh verse, 145:14. The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll from Qumran Cave 11 and the Septuagint both contain a nun line, and the BSB includes it as the second half of 145:13: 'The LORD is faithful in all His words and kind in all His actions.' Psalms 25 and 34 both lack a line for waw, and both end with an extra line beginning with pe after the tav. And in Lamentations 2, 3 and 4 the letter pe comes before ayin, the reverse of the usual order, while chapter 1 has the usual order. Some scholars connect this with ancient alphabet inscriptions that put pe before ayin; others think it reflects a variation in teaching the alphabet. Nobody knows for certain.

The Bible never says why its poets used the alphabet, so every answer is an inference, and several are held by careful readers. The simplest is memory. A poem whose next line must begin with the next letter is easier to learn by heart and harder to lose a line from, and in a culture where most people heard rather than read scripture, that matters. The weakness of this explanation on its own is that Psalm 119 and Lamentations 3 are very long and not obviously easy to memorise, and the poets could have chosen simpler devices.

A second answer is completeness. To go from the first letter to the last is to cover everything, the way an English speaker says from A to Z. Proverbs 31 then praises the capable woman from aleph to tav; Psalm 119 meditates on God's law with every letter; and Lamentations grieves the fall of Jerusalem through the whole alphabet, four times. On this reading the form says that nothing has been left out.

A third answer applies especially to Lamentations, and it is held in two forms that pull against each other. Some readers see the alphabet as order imposed on chaos: the city has been destroyed, and the poet answers by building a poem whose structure cannot be broken, so that the form itself is an act of faith. Others see it as a limit set on grief: the alphabet gives the mourner a way to say everything and then to stop, because the letters run out. Both readings are attractive, both have defenders among commentators on the book, and neither can be proved from the text. You may teach either as a possibility. You should not teach either as the reason.

The Pastoral Care track's lesson Teaching a Church to Lament uses Lamentations to teach a congregation how to grieve, and it is the right place to go for that. What this lesson adds is the reading underneath: once you know that chapter 3 runs in threes through the alphabet, you can see that the famous verses of hope are not a free-standing promise but one stanza of three verses, the chet stanza, inside a long, ordered, painful poem.

Here are the three verses that begin with chet, from the WLC. Verse 22: חַסְדֵי יְהוָה chasdei YHWH, the loving devotions of the LORD, with hesed in the plural construct. כִּי לֹא־תָמְנוּ ki lo-tamnu, that we are not finished, a qal perfect first person plural of the root תמם (t-m-m), to be complete or used up. כִּי לֹא־כָלוּ רַחֲמָיו ki lo-khalu rachamav, for His compassions have not come to an end, a qal perfect third person plural of כלה (k-l-h), to be finished, with rachamav, his compassions, a plural from the same root as the word for womb.

Verse 23: חֲדָשִׁים לַבְּקָרִים chadashim labbeqarim, new for the mornings, where the plural adjective agrees with the plural compassions of the verse before. רַבָּה אֱמוּנָתֶךָ rabbah emunatekha, great is Your faithfulness, a feminine adjective with the feminine noun emunah and the suffix your. Notice the change of person. In 3:22 the speaker talks about God: His mercies. In 3:23 he turns and speaks to God: Your faithfulness. The poem has moved from description into prayer in the space of one line.

Verse 24: חֶלְקִי יְהוָה chelqi YHWH, my portion is the LORD, אָמְרָה נַפְשִׁי amrah nafshi, says my soul, עַל־כֵּן אוֹחִיל לוֹ al-ken ochil lo, therefore I will hope in Him, a hiphil imperfect of יחל (y-ch-l), to wait or hope. Now look back three verses. Verse 21 ends with the same two Hebrew words, עַל־כֵּן אוֹחִיל al-ken ochil, therefore I have hope. The BSB renders the one verb two ways, have hope and will hope, which is fair, since the imperfect can carry either sense. But in the Hebrew the hope of 3:21 and the hope of 3:24 are the same words, and they bracket the chet stanza, one in the line just before it and one in its last line. A repeated phrase at the start and end of a unit is called an inclusio, and it is one of the most reliable structural signals in Hebrew.

Now the textual question, which deserves to be heard at full strength because it changes the first line. The Hebrew as the Masoretes preserved it reads tamnu, we are not finished. The BSB follows it, as does the KJV: 'It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed.' The argument for this reading is weighty. It is the text of the manuscripts. It makes sense: the speaker belongs to a community that has survived a catastrophe, and its survival is itself the evidence of God's loving devotion. And a reading that is slightly harder to fit to the parallel line is, by a standard rule of textual criticism, less likely to be a scribe's improvement.

The alternative reading drops one letter. Instead of תָמְנוּ tamnu, it reads תַּמּוּ tammu, a third person plural of the same verb: the loving devotions of the LORD have not ceased. Some ancient translations, including the Syriac, appear to reflect this, and a number of modern English translations adopt it, setting the Masoretic reading in a footnote. The argument for it is the parallelism you learned in lesson 1: with tammu, both lines have God's love as their subject, his loving devotions have not ceased, his compassions have not come to an end, which is the most common shape of a Hebrew pair. And the difference between the two readings is one small letter, the kind of thing a copyist could add or lose. Both readings are held by competent scholars, and both say something true. On one, God's love has not ended; on the other, we have not ended because his love has not. You can preach the verse honestly on either, and you should know which one your Bible is following.

Lesson 1 showed you a small chiasm in Psalm 19:1, where the Hebrew order runs subject, verb, object and then object, verb, subject. Chiasm at this scale is common, certain and easy to see. Genesis 9:6 is the classic case: שֹׁפֵךְ דַּם הָאָדָם shofekh dam ha'adam, one who sheds the blood of man, בָּאָדָם דָּמוֹ יִשָּׁפֵךְ ba'adam damo yishafekh, by man his blood will be shed. The words run sheds, blood, man, then man, blood, shed, a qal participle at one end and a niphal imperfect of the same root at the other. The form enacts the content: what the killer did comes back on him in reverse order. 'Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man his blood will be shed' is the BSB, and it keeps the mirror.

The disputed question is chiasm at a large scale: whole psalms, whole chapters, whole books arranged as mirrors around a centre, A B C D C' B' A', with the centre carrying the main point. Interest in such structures goes back a long way, but three modern works shaped it. Nils Lund's Chiasmus in the New Testament (1942) argued that chiastic structure runs through both Testaments. James Muilenburg's presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature in 1968, published as Form Criticism and Beyond, called scholars to study the rhetorical structure of the finished text, and the movement he launched is still called rhetorical criticism. And John W. Welch edited Chiasmus in Antiquity (1981), which gathered examples from many ancient literatures. Since then large chiasms have been proposed for almost every book of the Bible.

Hear the case for them at full strength. Ancient texts were mostly heard, not read, and listeners need structure they can feel. Mirrored structures are well attested in ancient literature, and the small ones are beyond dispute, so it is no great leap to suppose that writers also built large ones. Some proposals are strong, with clear verbal repetitions in the right places that are hard to explain as accident. Gordon Wenham argued in 1978, in the journal Vetus Testamentum, that the flood story in Genesis 6-9 is a single mirrored structure turning on God's remembering Noah in 8:1, and many readers find the pattern compelling. When such a structure is really there, it tells you where the writer put his weight.

Now hear the critique at full strength, because it is also serious. With enough freedom to choose your labels, you can find a mirror in almost any text, because most passages begin and end on related notes and have something in the middle. The proposer chooses where the unit starts and stops, which elements count as matching, and which are ignored, and competing chiasms are often proposed for the same passage, each with a different centre. Wenham's proposal itself drew a detailed reply from J. A. Emerton in the same journal in 1987 and 1988, arguing that the pattern depended on selective matching. And the assumption that the centre of a chiasm is its main point is itself an assumption: in Genesis 9:6 the centre is the word man, twice, which is important, but the point of the verse is the reversal at its ends.

The useful outcome of this argument is a set of tests. Craig Blomberg proposed a list of criteria in a 1989 article on the structure of 2 Corinthians 1-7, and others have proposed similar ones. In plain terms, they come to this. The structure should be found in the text as it stands, not after rearranging or emending it. The matching elements should be marked by real repeated words or unmistakable ideas, not by labels the reader has chosen to make them match. The structure should account for the whole passage, not skip the parts that do not fit. The centre should be worth being a centre. And the pattern should be visible to other careful readers working independently. A chiasm that passes those tests deserves to be taught. One that does not may still be a useful study outline for you, but it should not be presented to a congregation as the structure the writer intended.

Here is a structural claim you will hear, worked through as a test case. It is often said that the hope of Lamentations 3:22-23 stands at the centre of the book, and that the book's structure therefore makes hope its message. Part of that is true and part of it is not, and the difference matters for how you preach the book.

The count is easy. The five chapters have 22, 22, 66, 22 and 22 verses: 154 in all. The middle of the book therefore falls between the seventy-seventh and seventy-eighth verses, which are 3:33 and 3:34. Verse 3:33 reads, 'For He does not willingly afflict or grieve the sons of men.' So the passage of hope that begins at 3:21 does stand around the centre of the book, and the central verse itself is a claim about God's heart: that affliction is not what he wants. That is a real and striking finding, and you can show it to anyone with a Bible.

But 3:22-23 is not the exact centre, and, more important, the book does not end at the centre. Chapter 3 goes on to cry for vengeance, chapter 4 returns to the horrors of the siege, and chapter 5, the one poem that breaks the acrostic, ends with a question that the book never answers: 'unless You have utterly rejected us and remain angry with us beyond measure' (Lamentations 5:22). Jewish practice, when Lamentations is read aloud, repeats the prayer of 5:21 after 5:22, so that the reading does not end on the question, which tells you how sharply its ending has always been felt.

Two readings of the book's shape are held by serious interpreters, and you should give your hearers both. One reading holds that the hope at the centre governs the whole: it is the theological heart of the book, placed where the structure gives it greatest weight, and everything before and after is to be read in its light. The other holds that the book places hope in the middle and then deliberately returns to grief, so that hope is real but is not allowed to be the last word; the book teaches a church to keep praying when the answer has not come. The structure supports both. What it does not support is the habit of reading 3:22-23 alone, as if the chapter and the book around it were not there.

Take your practice poem, or your capstone passage if it is a poem. On a new notebook page headed Structure, answer three questions with the tools.

First, is it an acrostic? Open each verse in the interlinear and write down the first Hebrew letter of the first word, remembering that in a psalm the heading may come first. If the letters run in alphabet order, you have found one; write down how many verses each letter gets and any letter that is missing or out of order. If they do not, write No, which is the answer for most poems.

Second, look for frames. Scan the interlinear for a Hebrew word or phrase that appears near the beginning and again near the end of the poem, or of a section of it, the way al-ken ochil frames Lamentations 3:21-24. Write down each repetition with its verses. A repetition that frames a unit is the strongest structural evidence you will find.

Third, if a study Bible, a commentary or a sermon has offered you a chiastic outline of your passage, test it against the criteria in section 4, one by one, and write a sentence on each: is it in the text as it stands; are the matches real repeated words; does it cover the whole passage; is the centre worth being the centre; would another reader find it? If no one has offered you one, do not try to construct one. Write what you did find. Keep the Structure page with your Lines and Images pages for the capstone.