The Alphabet Psalms

Witness Three in the investigation The Sealed Count — back to the case.

Written Letter by Letter

Some passages of Scripture were written so that each line, or each group of lines, begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The first starts with aleph, the second with beth, and so on through all twenty-two letters to tav. A poem built this way is called an acrostic.

English translations hide the pattern completely. A reader of the King James Version would never know it was there, except in one place. Over the sections of Psalm 119 the translators printed the names of the Hebrew letters, ALEPH, BETH, GIMEL, and so on, because they knew the psalm could not be understood without them. Most readers pass over those little headings without a second look.

The point of this witness is simple. The number twenty-two is not only found in history books and dig sites. Scripture uses it on its own pages, on purpose, as the frame for complete thoughts.

Psalm 119

Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible. It has twenty-two sections, one for each letter. Each section has eight verses, and every one of those eight verses begins with the same letter. Twenty-two times eight is one hundred seventy-six verses.

And what is the subject of this enormous alphabet? Almost every verse names the Law of Yahuah under one of its titles: His law, His testimonies, His statutes, His precepts, His commandments, His judgments, His word, His way. The psalm opens,

PSALM 119:1 — KJV

Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of Yahuah.

The writer took every letter Israel had and gave every one of them to the Law. There is no letter left over for anything else. From aleph to tav, the whole alphabet is spent on Torah.

The psalm also keeps the right order. It does not make the Law the way in. It asks first for Yahuah’s mercy and deliverance, and then promises to keep the Law:

PSALM 119:41 — KJV

Let thy mercies come also unto me, O Yahuah, even thy salvation, according to thy word.

PSALM 119:44 — KJV

So shall I keep thy law continually for ever and ever.

Deliverance first, then the walk. The alphabet of Psalm 119 is not the alphabet of a man earning his way. It is the alphabet of a delivered man walking in the commandments.

Lamentations

The book of Lamentations mourns the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon. It has five chapters, and four of them are alphabet poems.

• Chapter 1 has twenty-two verses, one for each letter.
• Chapter 2 has twenty-two verses, one for each letter.
• Chapter 3 has sixty-six verses, three for each letter.
• Chapter 4 has twenty-two verses, one for each letter.
• Chapter 5 has twenty-two verses, but they do not follow the alphabet.

Even the chapter that breaks the alphabet keeps the count. The city was gone, the temple was burned, and the people were dragged away, yet the grief was poured out in an ordered number. Twenty-two lines was the shape of a complete lament, from the first letter to the last, nothing left unsaid.

As Witness Two showed, chapters 2, 3, and 4 place pe before ayin, matching the alphabet order found scratched on pottery and painted on walls in the land. The text and the ground agree.

Proverbs 31

The book of Proverbs closes with the description of the woman of strength, beginning, “Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies” (Proverbs 31:10). The passage runs from verse 10 through verse 31. That is twenty-two verses, and in Hebrew they run from aleph to tav.

The last word of the book of Proverbs is an alphabet. The wisdom of the whole book is gathered into a portrait of a household ordered by the fear of Yahuah, and that portrait is written in a complete count.

The Smaller Alphabet Psalms

Psalm 119 is the largest acrostic, but not the only one. Psalms 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, and 145 are also built on the alphabet, some fully, some with a letter missing or doubled. Psalms 111 and 112 are the tightest of the set, each running exactly twenty-two short lines from aleph to tav.

Psalm 111 uses its alphabet to say this:

PSALM 111:7-8 — KJV

The works of his hands are verity and judgment; all his commandments are sure. They stand fast for ever and ever, and are done in truth and uprightness.

PSALM 111:10 — KJV

The fear of Yahuah is the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have all they that do his commandments.

Again, the full alphabet carries the commandments. Again, the subject is a word that stands fast forever.

What the Pattern Shows

When a writer of Scripture wanted to say that something was complete, whole, lacking nothing, one of the ways he said it was to run the full alphabet. First letter to last letter meant everything in between. The epigraph of this study comes from the resh section of Psalm 119, and in Hebrew it opens with a play on that letter: the sum of Yahuah’s word is truth.

That is the same thinking that stands behind counting the books as twenty-two. The Scriptures were the complete word of Yahuah, from first to last, nothing missing and nothing added. Counting them by the letters was a way of saying that the collection was whole.

To be plain, the alphabet poems do not list the books. No psalm says how many scrolls belong in the collection. What the poems do show is that the number twenty-two was already the way Scripture itself spoke of fullness, long before any historian wrote the count down. When Josephus and the church writers after him counted twenty-two books, they were counting in the language Scripture had already taught.

Where the Pulpit Buried It

The pulpit preaches Psalm 119 as a warm devotional about “the Bible” in general, or about loving God’s word as a feeling. The Law in the psalm is quietly turned into a generic word for Scripture, and the letters at the top of each section are ignored. The believer never learns that a psalmist gave every letter he had to Torah.

The translations bury the pattern, and the pulpit leaves it buried. But the pattern is there, in the oldest Hebrew text, carried by the scribes for thousands of years. Scripture counts itself in twenty-two. That count was not handed down from a council. It was written into the Psalms, Proverbs, and Lamentations by the men who wrote the Scriptures.

Revelation, the prophecy Yahuah gave to John, ends with a blessing that echoes the first verse of Psalm 119. “Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city” (Revelation 22:14). The alphabet that opened with the blessed man walking in the Law closes with the blessed man entering the city.

One of five witnesses in a single case. The five together make the case of The Sealed Count.