📚 TBC COLLEGE AND SEMINARY 📖

God gave several portions of His revelation in the format of an alphabetic acrostic, a format in which each verse of a passage begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet.  The Creator had built His original 22-consonant alphabet into His first humans, Adam, the ädäm, and Eve, Hkăwwäh, the woman built especially for him.  Though not visible in English texts, these acrostic structures are clear in the Hebrew Scriptures to those who possess a knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet.  Usually occurring in God's parallelistic structure, His holy men inscribed multiple passages, some with minor variations, in acrostic format.  Some of the more obvious acrostics occur in the following:

Psalms 9-10:  Together, these 22 verses comprise a complete acrostic.

Psalms 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119, and 145:  Each of these uses the acrostic format.

Proverbs 31:10-31:  These 22 verses are an acrostic describing the "Virtuous Woman."

Lamentations:  The whole book, except chapter 5, is written in the acrostic structures.

Psalm 119, all 176 verses, is one of the most prominent examples of an alphabetic acrostic.  Some English Bibles indicate this structure by dividing the psalm into groupings of eight verses each.  The overall 176 verses then form 22 sections, a number corresponding to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.  Thus, each of the 8 verses of a section begins with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet, with every section using a successive letter in alphabetical order.  This format simplifies memorization, because, knowing the alphabet, one needs only to memorize the 8 verses for each letter, and then he knows all 176 verses.

God also recorded Psalm 119 in another very special manner.  In each of the 176 verses, with the possible exception of verse 122, the Creator moved His human writer to include at least one of a series of specific words which refer to the quality and nature of His perfect revelation.  With the multiple occurrences in some verses, the total occurrences number more than 210.  The primary words which God incorporated into this psalm are indicated in the chart below.