119: Mem

The letter Mem [מ] symbolizes water and is associated with the number forty. If that seems an odd pairing, we should consider that the first “forty” in scripture denotes the duration of the Genesis flood in days. Thereafter, the number is often associated with testing or judgment.

In the New Testament, water is most frequently associated with the Holy Spirit of God. It is not without reason that we call that great, singular event in which the Spirit came to indwell all who are in Christ and bind together Jew and Gentile into one body a “baptism”. But water serves other purposes than cleansing and testimony. It meets the perpetual need of humanity. Jesus cried out to the thirsty, “Come to me and drink.” John comments, “He said this about the Spirit.”

How does the Spirit operate in the human heart? Well, he uses the word of God, which is where our psalmist comes in once again.

119: Lamedh

The Lamedh [ל] is the twelfth letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the symbol of learning. It begins the second half of the alphabet and the second half of Psalm 119, thus putting learning at the heart of the human experience, and spiritual learning most central of all.

One of the most important lessons we can ever learn is to worship appropriately.

119: Kaph

If you are going to find Christ in Psalm 119, today’s eleventh “stanza” of the psalm is by far the best place for it. For a consistent prophetic portrayal of the sinless, suffering servant, these eight lines have no parallel in the psalm, which makes our reading a perfect fit for the tail end of the Christmas season, as we move from the contemplation of our Lord’s birth to considering his purpose in coming into the world. By non-coincidence, the letter Kaph [כ], which begins every line, has a dual meaning to Hebrew scholars: “form” and “crown”.

No, I’m really not making this stuff up.

119: Yodh

Yodh [י] is the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet as well as the smallest, the famous “jot” of “jot and tittle” in the KJV of Matthew 5:18, corresponding with the English “i”. In Greek, it is iota, the smallest particle. “Not an iota will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” A yodh is a single point, but it also has the numeric value of ten in Hebrew.

The Old Testament personal name of God begins with yodh (in orange) and looks like this:

יהוה

Every verse of this section of Psalm 119 also begins with yodh.

119: Teth

The ninth Hebrew letter, Teth [ט], is the symbol of all the goodness of creation. It is also the first letter of the word tov, meaning “good”. Technically, first in our Western, left-to-right way of reading is actually last in Hebrew, but you get what I mean. This is what the word tov looks like in Hebrew letterforms:

טוב

(You can see the teth in orange at the end, which is actually the beginning.) When God saw that “it was good” seven times in Genesis 1, that’s tov each time, and the initial letter of the word has come to be associated with all that creative goodness in its many manifestations.

Variants on the word tov, each with the initial teth, also show up six times in this ninth section of Psalm 119.

119: Heth

Pronounced chet, Heth [ח] is the eighth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, called by Jewish scholars the “letter of life”. They teach that a soul at one with God is enlivened by the “essential life” God himself possesses, which does not seem an unreasonable proposition. Where Christianity differs with Judaism, of course, is over the matter of how being “at one” with God comes about.

As the New Testament teaches, it is only in the person of Jesus Christ that the essential life of God may be communicated to his creatures.

119: Zayin

I don’t always believe everything Hebrew scholars say about their alphabet (or anything else). As I may have mentioned, they have a tendency to be whimsical.

Nevertheless, they suggest the letter Zayin [ז] represents movement and struggle, not to mention the number seven. Literally, it means “weapon” or “sword”, and looks like one — or so it is claimed — if you angle your eyeballs exactly the right way when you squint at it.

I’m still trying to see it, but then I’m about as Hebrew as a polar bear. To me it looks more like a club or maybe a wooden mallet.

119: Waw

The first Waw [ו] in the Torah (pronounced vav) begins its sixth Hebrew word, thus joining the words for “heaven” and “earth”. This is also the twenty-second letter of the Hebrew Bible (our Genesis 1:1), so scholars believe it represents all twenty-two individual powers of creation and all the letters of the alphabet together. (The Hebrew alphabet, as mentioned several times in this series, has only twenty-two letters.)

Literally, ו means “hook” or “peg”. Hebrew sages say the letterform portrays Jacob’s ladder, reaching down from heaven to earth. It’s a nice thought, but personally I think those sages may have waxed a little fanciful.

119: He

Gabriele Levy’s Alefbet entry for today’s letter reads: “He [ה] represents divine revelation, the breath of the Creator (Psalm 33:6 — ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host’). The world was created with the utterance of the He. It represents the gift of life and creates the verb of being (היה Haya — being).”

Wow, is that ever on the nose, as we will see shortly. The themes of life and being weave throughout this section of Psalm 119.

119: Daleth

The Hebrew letter daleth or dalet [ד] is also the word for “door”, signifying humility and receptiveness. Alefbet says dal is “the realization that as humans, we having nothing of our own, but are entirely dependent on the creator and that every breath and movement is given to us from him”.

This is certainly the attitude of the psalmist in today’s section. We find him eager to receive knowledge, understanding and practical affirmation of the truth of God in his daily walk, reflecting the underlying meaning of the letter with which each line commences.

119: Gimel

The third letter of the Hebrew alphabet is gīmel [ג], which means “all”. Gabriele Levy’s Alefbet says gīmel signifies “a dynamic balance between opposing powers … constant transformation, change and motion, and translates literally as camel, an animal we associate with motion and travel between faraway places”.

I think that image may help with these next eight verses of Psalm 119, which, as I read them, are all about sojourning, an obsession with truth and otherworldly priorities.

119: Beth

It’s one thing to intellectually acknowledge the benefits of regular Bible reading and meditation. It’s another to actually do it day in and day out. That requires a consistent application of the will. Those who make the word of God their daily companion will reap the benefits of it. Dabblers, dilettantes and occasional readers will not.

On to section 2 of 22 in Psalm 119, where each line begins with the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which looks like this: בּ. It is pronounced “bet” rather than “beth”. Put it together with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and you get “aleph-beth”, from which we get “alphabet”.

The influence of Hebrew on the individual units of the English language is not profound, but its overall impact is considerably greater, as discussed here.

119: Aleph

Hebrew proverbs frequently involve line pairs, with the second line being some kind of restatement of the idea expressed in the first, or else providing a contrast, clarification or correction to it. In an extended series of these, such as we find in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, context is generally irrelevant, though there are occasional exceptions. The subject may change twenty times in the course of a chapter.

119: Introduction

Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible by any metric you might choose.

In English, it’s 176 verses and approximately 2,445 words long (depending on your translation). The English verse divisions reflect a highly regular underlying structure based on the Hebrew alphabet, with each of its 22 sections made up of eight pairs of ideas. All eight verses in each section begin with the same Hebrew letter, and the letters are in order.

It is probably the most carefully crafted chapter in the entire Bible.