Psalm 111: An Acrostic Catalogue of Praise

The acrostic form of Psalm 111 is invisible in English translation but unmistakable in Hebrew. The psalm contains ten verses. The first eight verses each have two cola while the last two verses each have three, yielding exactly twenty-two cola for the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Aleph through tav, beginning to end, every letter accounted for. This was not a parlor trick. Acrostic composition served at least three pedagogical functions in ancient Israel: it aided memorization, it signaled completeness (the praise covers "everything from A to Z"), it disciplined the poet to think across the full range of vocabulary rather than settle into easy phrases. Lamentations 1-4 use the form for grief. Psalm 119 uses it for Torah meditation. Here it is used for the works of God.

Verse 1 opens with "hallelujah," then commits the speaker to whole-hearted thanks in two settings: "the council of the upright and the assembly," most likely the smaller circle of devout fellowship and the larger congregation of public worship. The body of the psalm then catalogues God's deeds. He is gracious and compassionate (a deliberate echo of the self-disclosure at Sinai in Exodus 34:6), he provides food for those who fear him, he remembers his covenant forever, he sent redemption to his people. The covenant references almost certainly point to the Abrahamic and Sinai covenants together, with the post-exilic community reminding itself that the same God who kept faith across the Babylonian crisis is the God whose hesed is being praised in the present tense.

The hinge is v10, one of the most quoted lines in Hebrew Wisdom literature: "the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom." The phrase appears almost verbatim in Proverbs 1:7 and 9:10. Its placement here at the close of an acrostic catalogue of God's deeds is structurally meaningful. The psalm has just listed what God does. Wisdom, it then says, begins with taking that catalogue seriously. The fear in question is not a cowering dread but the awe of a creature who has finally registered the scale and reliability of the Creator. Read alongside Psalm 112, which uses the same acrostic form to describe the person who actually fears the LORD, the pair becomes a diptych. One side shows the works of God. The other side shows the life that those works produce in the worshiper.