עAyin

Open a Hebrew Bible at Deuteronomy 6:4 and two letters are drawn larger than everything around them: the ayin that ends shemaʿ (“Hear”) and the dalet that ends ʾechad (“one”). This is not a printer's flourish. The Masoretes — the Jewish scribes who copied and safeguarded the text through the early Middle Ages — catalogued the enlarged letters deliberately, and they are visible in the great manuscripts.

Put the two big letters side by side and they spell ʿed, the Hebrew word for “witness.” The scribes who wrote them that way knew exactly what they were doing. What the big letters do not do is change a single word of the verse: the sentence says what it says either way. This is a scribal act laid on top of the text, ancient and visible, and it is one of the strangest true things in the Bible's transmission.

Four chapters of Lamentations are alphabet poems: each verse begins with the next letter of the alphabet, in order. Chapter 1 runs normally — ayin at verse 16, then pe at verse 17. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 do the opposite: pe comes first, then ayin.

For centuries that was written off as a scribal slip repeated three times. It is not. Alphabets scratched onto pottery long before the exile — at ʿIzbet Ṣarṭah (about 1200 BC), Tel Zayit (tenth century BC) and Kuntillet ʿAjrud (about 800 BC) — carry the same reversal. The poets were not slipping. They were using an order that was older than the one that eventually won.

This is the one place in this whole section where the biblical text and a physical potsherd shake hands. Pe's room carries the other half of it.

In an alphabet poem the poet has to find a word starting with the right letter, and more than once the word he reached for was “eyes.” Psalm 145's ayin verse is “The eyes of all wait for thee.” Psalm 34's ayin verse is “The eyes of Jehovah are toward the righteous.” Psalm 119's ayin stanza — eight verses, all beginning with this letter — sits at verses 121 to 128.

It is a lovely coincidence of craft, and worth enjoying as exactly that: a poet under a rule, choosing a good word that fit it. It is not a code, and the poems never claim it is.