Psalm 119 - In Praise of the Law

Notice the title of this post is not Psalms 119.  It is only the one Psalm.

I am not going to type it all out here as it is much too long for that.  I just wanted to explain two interesting details of this Psalm that I did not know about before yesterday.

First, do you see those weird headings throughout the Psalm?  They are the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.  א - Aleph, ב - Beth, ג - Gimel, and so on.  There are 22 of them which is why there are 22 sections of 8 verses each in Psalm 119.  Here is the neat part, if you were to read Psalm 119 in Hebrew, each verse starts with the letter indicated.  Obviously this is lost in translation, but you can see that the author was looking to incorporate alliteration in his work.  He is using the entire alphabet to praise the word of God.

Second, every verse (literally, take a look, every single verse has it) points to the word of God.  Various different words are used throughout the Psalm.  Decrees, Precepts, Law, Word, Commands, Statutes, and so on.  I had never noticed this before although it is quite blatant.

Kind of cool to know these two little tidbits right?  Now read Psalm 119.  It becomes more of a poem or song instead of just a long chapter full of words.  It sure would be neat to be able to read the entire book of Psalms in the original languange.