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; chapter 1 keeps the familiar sequence, and chapter 5 has twenty-two verses and no acrostic at all. → first discussed at Lamentations 1:1