Biblical Acrostics (1 of 3)

The A-Z (or A-V) of godliness.

I’ve mentioned ancient acrostics before, including The Babylonian Theodicy, of which I published a translation. I’ve also translated one Biblical acrostic, “The Perfect Wife” from Proverbs 31:10-31. However, there are other Biblical acrostics worthy of attention. Acrostic-to-acrostic translations are rare, but there are so many Biblical translations that a few acrostic English translations do exist.

Biblical acrostics don’t spell out words or sentences. Instead, they run the span of the Hebrew alphabet—all twenty-two letters of it, from aleph to tav. This seems to represent completeness—by using every sign in the language, the alphabetic acrostic seems to encompass everything that exists.

Of these, the most sprawling and best-known is Psalm 119, which expands on the previous psalm’s “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” It has a set of eight stanzas for each letter. A few years back, Douglas van Dorn offered this translation:

Of course, one problem with translating these is that 22 letters doesn’t represent every letter of our alphabet. But doing it this way does make things much easier on the translator, avoiding the starting letters X and Z. (Hebrew has its uncommon starting letters too, vav/waw and tet, which the original composers had to work around.)

Next: The remaining psalms.