Lamentations 1:1, Lamentations and the Hebrew Alphabet

//So begins the book of Lamentations, an appropriately named treatise. It’s a five chapter lament, written poetically … so poetically, in fact, that it’s impossible to properly translate to another language.

You see, the whole book is an acrostic. There are 22 verses in the first chapter, and each one starts with a unique letter, stepping through the Hebrew alphabet … Alef, Beit, Gimel, Dalet, Hei … through the final letter, Tav, which begins the final verse.

Chapters two, four, and five follow the same pattern: 22 verses stepping through the alphabet. But the middle chapter is even more amazing: It is a triple acrostic! There are 66 verses, and the verses start with Alef, Alef, Alef, Beit, Beit, Beit, Gimel, Gimel, Gimel and so on through the final letter.

You may be aware that the Bible was never divided into chapter and verse in the original Hebrew and Greek. Such divisions are entirely artificial in our current-day translations. This makes this one book of the Bible even more special, because it provides us important clues for the study of ancient Hebrew metric. For once, we really do know where the verses begin and end!