Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadJames Hastings Dictionary of the Bible: Acrostic
Subjects in this Topic:
ACROSTIC.—Acrostic poems, i.e. poems in which initial letters recurring at regular intervals follow some definite arrangement, occur to the number of 14 in the OT; another instance is Sir_51:13-30. All these are of a simple type, and are so planned that the initials recurring at fixed intervals follow the order of the Hebrew alphabet; thus the first section of the poem begins with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph; the second with the second letter, beth; and so on down to the twenty-second and last letter, taw. The interval between the several letters consists of a regular number of lines. In Psa_111:1-10; Psa_112:1-10 this interval is one line; in Psa_25:1-22; Psa_34:1-22; Psa_145:1-21, Pro_31:10-31, Sir_51:13-30, and in the fragment, which does not clearly extend beyond the thirteenth letter, contained in Nah_1:1-15, the interval is 2 lines; in Lam_4:1-22 it is 2 longer lines, in chs. 1 and 2 it is 3 longer lines; in Psa_9:1-20; Psa_10:1-18 (a single continuous poem), and in Psa_37:1-40, it is 4 lines. In Lam_3:1-66, where the interval between each successive letter of the alphabet is 3 long lines, each of each set of three lines begins with the same letter; and similarly in Psa_119:1-176, where the interval is 16 lines, each alternate line within each set of 16 begins with the same letter.
Certainly in Lam_2:1-22; Lam_3:1-66; Lam_4:1-22, and, according to the order of the verses in the LXX [Note: Septuagint.] , in Pro_31:1-31, probably also in Psa_34:1-22 (where the sense seems to require the transposition of Psa_34:16 and Psa_34:15) and in Psa_9:1-20, the sixteenth and seventeenth letters of the Hebrew alphabet occupy respectively the seventeenth and sixteenth places in the acrostic scheme. The reason for this is unknown.
Comparatively few of these poems have come down to us intact. They have suffered from accidental errors of textual transmission, and probably also from editorial alterations. In some cases an entire strophe has dropped out of the text; thus the sixth strophe (of 2 lines) has fallen out between Psa_34:6-7, and the fourteenth between Psa_145:13-14, though in the latter case it still stood in the Hebrew MS from which the Greek version was made. Occasionally lines have been inserted, as, apparently, in more than one place in Psa_37:1-40, and in Nah_1:2. But such corruption of the text is really serious only in Psa_9:1-20 f., Nah_1:1-15, and Sir_51:13-30.
The earliest of these fifteen poems are probably Lam_2:1-22; Lam_4:1-22, which may have been written in the earlier half of the 6th cent. b.c.; but the custom of writing such poems may have been much more ancient. Perhaps the latest of the poems is Sir_51:13-30 (about b.c. 180), but the Jews continued to compose such poems long after this.
The English reader will find the strophes clearly distinguished, and the initial Hebrew letters with their names in English letters indicated, in the RV [Note: Revised Version.] of Psa_119:1-176. Unfortunately the RV [Note: Revised Version.] does not give the initials in the other poems; but they will be found, in the case of the Psalms, in (for example) Kirkpatrick’s Psalms (Cambridge Bible), Cheyne’s Book of Psalms, Driver’s Parallel Psalter. For Lam_2:1-22; Lam_4:1-22 see Expositor, 1906 (April) [G. A. Smith]; for Nah_1:1-15, Expositor, 1898 (Sept.), pp. 207–220 [G. B. Gray], or Driver, Century Bible, p. 26 f. Common though it is in other literatures and with such mediæval Jewish poets as Ibn Ezra, no decisive instance of the type of acrostic in which the initial letters compose a name, has been found in the OT, though some have detected the name Simeon (or Simon) thus given in Psa_110:1-7, Psa_25:1-22; Psa_34:1-22 contain each an additional strophe at the close of the alphabetic strophes; in each case the first word of the verse is a part of the Hebrew verb pâdâh, ‘to redeem,’ and it has been suggested that the author or a copyist has thus left us a clue to his name—Pedahel; but interesting as this suggestion is, it is for several reasons doubtful.
G. B. Gray.