In | Workbook: Acrostics and Their Values

Grab your Workbook Journal!

[Record your answers in the workbook provided at the beginning of this course.]

We explored acrostics as one form used in the Psalms. But Lamentations is structured completely with acrostics. Bible scholar Dr. Robin A. Parry has suggested a few reasons why this is the case.

1) The acrostic form makes it memorable: Patterning long speeches after the order of the alphabet would have made them easier to remember for public performances or recitations. 

2) The acrostic form has artistic appeal: This form would have made these speeches more attractive and stylized in a way that would enhance their content and appeal.

3) The acrostic form captures the depth and breadth of the tragedy: By involving every letter of the alphabet this form can give the feeling of exhausting the limits of language to describe virtually unspeakable suffering and sadness. 

4) The acrostic form structures the chaos: The scenes we encounter in Lamentations and the fall of Jerusalem are total disorder and chaos. The fabric of society is coming apart and the personal experience of everyone in the city devolves into an almost indiscriminate jumble of pain. The alphabet is a simple way of bringing order to this chaos and beginning to piece together a coherent and structured description of what has taken place. 

Adapted from: Robin Parry, Lamentations, 2010, pp. 13–15.

2. Of these four reasons, which do you find most compelling, and why?