A poem whose successive lines or stanzas begin with the successive letters of the HEBREW ALPHABET — twenty-two of them, alef to tav. It is used for Lamentations 1, 2 and 4 (twenty-two verses each), Lamentations 3 (sixty-six, three verses per letter), Psalm 119 (eight verses per letter, 176 in all), Psalm 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 145, Proverbs 31:10-31 and the opening of Nahum. ⚠ No translation can carry it without rewriting the text, so it is invisible in every English Bible. What it is FOR is worth asking: an alphabet supplies a container, a way of saying 'everything, A to Z,' and a guarantee the poem will stop — which is why the form clusters in the two places it does, wisdom and grief. ⚠ In Lamentations 2, 3 and 4 the letters AYIN and PE are REVERSED, an old order also found on an abecedary from Kuntillet Ajrud — and on two further, independent finds: a potsherd abecedary excavated at Izbet Sartah (12th–10th century BCE) and a related inscription at Tel Zayit, both writing PE before AYIN centuries before Lamentations was composed. Three separate archaeological witnesses to the same reversed order argue against scribal slip and for two genuinely competing, equally standard alphabetical sequences in ancient Israel; chapter 1 keeps the familiar sequence, and chapter 5 has twenty-two verses and no acrostic at all. ⚠ Proverbs 31:10-31 is the cleanest example in the Bible: twenty-two verses, alef to tav, with NO irregularity of any kind — unlike Psalm 145 (which drops a letter) or Lamentations (which reorders a pair). That matters for reading it: a complete alphabetic poem is a formal set-piece, which makes the passage far easier to read as praise built to be memorable than as a list of requirements. Only the NWT and TNM print the Hebrew letters so an English or Spanish reader can see the frame. → first discussed at Lamentations 1:1