A Way To Remember

One of the first books printed in America was The New England Primer. Schoolchildren learned their ABC’s from it for more than a hundred years. It began, “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all,” and continued, “This Book attend, thy life to mend.” For D it had “A Dog will bite a thief at night” and it closed the alphabet with “Zaccheus he did climb a tree his Lord to see.”

But twenty-five hundred years before New England schoolmasters were teaching their youngsters the ABC’s with poetry, teachers in the Temple in Jerusalem were doing the same thing. We can still read some of these poems in the book of Psalms.

Eight or nine of the Psalms were written in acrostic form, meaning that each line of the psalm begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This format helped youngsters learn their ABC’s, and it helped parents memorize the Psalms.

• Psalms 9–10: When taken together, these two psalms appear to have been an acrostic, although an incomplete one.
• Psalms 25, 34, and 145: Each line begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
• Psalms 111 and 112: Each half line begins with a successive Hebrew letter.
• Psalm 37: Every other line begins with a successive Hebrew letter.
• Psalm 119: The stellar example of acrostic poems. It has twenty-four stanzas of eight verses each. Each verse in the first stanza begins with the first Hebrew letter, then the next eight verses begin with the second Hebrew letter, and so on.

Try piecing together an English acrostic based on verses in the Psalms.

Here’s a start:

As the deer pants for streams of water,

so I long for you, O God (42:1).

But may all who search for you

be filled with joy and gladness (40:16).

Come with great power, O God, and rescue me!

Defend me with your might (54:1). . . .

Divine Instructor, gracious Lord,

Be thou forever near;

Teach me to love thy sacred Word

And see my Savior there.

ANNE STEELE