Michiana Covenant Presbyterian Church

When you hear "Psalm 119", what are your first associations? There are probably two things that immediately pop into your mind: 1) it is very long 2) it talks incessantly about the word of God With a little more study a third fact emerges: Psalm 119 is arranged as an acrostic. Each stanza has eight verses. Each of the eight verses in each stanza begins with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet. That is why most English translations divide the Psalm into 22 stanzas, with the name of each Hebrew letter at the beginning of each stanza: aleph, beth, gimel, daleth, etc. Hebrew has 22 letters, and so the 22 stanzas complete the whole Hebrew language. And quite frankly this third fact explains the other two. The reason why Psalm 119 is so long – and the reason why it talks incessantly about the word of God, is because we should see that all of human language from aleph to taw in Hebrew, and from A to Z in English, should be employed in extolling the glories of the Word of God...