Hebrew Acrostics In Other Psalms

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In other lessons, we have seen that in the Tanakh, there is a beautiful acrostic in Proverbs 31 as well as an elaborate acrostic in Lamentations. Psalm 119 is also written as one huge acrostic, but can be subdivided into a series of smaller acrostic Psalms.

Several other Psalms also contain acrostics, where the verses follow the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

Psalm 25 contains 22 verses (the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet) and nearly contains a perfect acrostic. Verse 2 starts with Alef instead of Bet, but the next two words in Hebrew both start with Bet. Verse 6 should start with Vav but does not. To make up for this missing Hebrew letter, verses 18 and 19 both start with Resh.

Psalm 34 contains an acrostic, starting from verse 2. However, like Psalm 25, the Hebrew letter Vav is missing at the start of verse 7 where it might have been expected.

Psalm 37 is interesting in that it is almost a perfect acrostic. An acrostic appears to be forming every other verse in the opening verses in Hebrew, but as the acrostic develops, certain Hebrew letters are missed out, or the order of some Hebrew letters is switched round.

Psalm 145 is nearly a perfect acrostic, but the Hebrew letter Nun is missed out.

It is interesting to speculate on why some of these Psalms are not perfect acrostics. There are probably reasons why certain Hebrew letters are missed out. However, it is unlikely that this is due to textual corruption (the usual explanation from academics), because the Hebrew text has been preserved with these omissions for many centuries. Every generation of scribes who has preserved the Hebrew Bible has preserved it this way, with every scribe being aware that the acrostics are not perfect, yet carefully copying the Hebrew text the way it was written, without 'correcting' the Hebrew manuscripts that were in front of them.

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