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There are any number of satisfying patterns in a poetics of pairs. One line with two halves contains all the possibilities that have been explored by students of biblical poetry since at least Robert Lowth: map, echo, balance, magnify, reverse. A typical verse in the Psalms made of two lines offers four half-lines, a progression more exponential than arithmetic. Four lines, eight halves, do more than double the poet’s options. An English sonneteer of the 17^th century might spend ages arranging the eight + six of the Italian form or the three times four plus two of its Shakespearean twist. Given the challenge of shaping twenty-two lines, one for each letter of the alef-bet, the psalmist making an acrostic can try two fives and two sixes, four fours and two threes, three fives and a seven, seven threes and a one. Maybe there’s gematria and gnostic meaning involved, and obviously history and culture have their say, but there’s something in the art of patterning that pleases across cultures— us and the bowerbirds.

The artifice of the acrostic is on full display in Psalm 111 and its helpmeet Psalm 112. In both psalms, each line starts with a new letter, a visual satisfaction on the page. Not to demean the psalm or the genre, but it’s not incredibly hard to do, especially if one deals almost entirely in formulas, categories, and abstractions. Nevertheless, Psalm 111 is built for study. It’s possible to read the poem as interlinked pairs, each line a chiseled refrain:

I want to thank the Lord | with a whole heart    

in the huddle of the virtuous | and the crowd          

in the huddle of the virtuous | and the crowd     

great deeds | of the Lord    

great deeds | of the Lord              

to be studied | by all who enjoy them (1-2).

It’s a psalm of lines, after all, which can seem choppy if read wrong.

But read slowly, it’s a festival of nouns, pronouns, and participles. That “huddle of the virtuous | and the crowd” takes us from the smaller circle of those behind the scenes to the larger congregation, on out to “all who enjoy them.” That “them,” the third-person plural suffix at the end of verse 2, returns in verse 10 attached to another participle, “all who do them,” but without a clear antecedent this time: all who do what? The psalm becomes a quiz, something “to be studied,” a search for an implied antecedent. So we read backwards, hunting plural nouns, of which, given the psalm’s compression, there are many: “the start of sense | reverence for the Lord / the smart of good,” verse 10 begins, without any finite verbs to keep the chain from being a plural whole. “All who do sense, reverence, the smart of good,” one answer might read. Back to verse 9, “a reward… his pact… his name” is another possible chain of singular nouns to consider as a plural antecedent for “all who do them.” If it’s just plural nouns we’re looking for, verse 7 offers “mandates” and verse 4 “marvels.” But the best antecdent for “all who do them,” `oseihem, is in plain sight: the word “deeds,” ma`asei, the same “them” as “all who enjoy them” back in verse 2. It appears three times in the poem: once in verse 2, and twice in the lines closest to the psalm’s center, in “the force of his deeds” (6a) and “the deeds of his hands” (7a). These two “deeds” surround the psalm’s only infinitive construction: “to give them | the inheritance of the others” (6b). This central line includes the psalm’s only free-standing pronoun, lahem, “to them,” which refers directly to “his people,” which precedes it, but indirectly also to “all who enjoy them” and “all who do them,” looping the people and the Lord’s deeds in mutual pronominal reference.

More importantly, by relying so heavily on pronouns, nouns, and participles, this easy puzzle of a psalm manages to stay mostly outside of time. Nouns and pronouns are static. Participles are continuous. The poem clearly cares about continuity outside of time. Note the balanced repetition of “always” (3, 8, 10) and “ever” (5, 8, 9). There are only seven conjugated verbs in the entire psalm: “I want to thank,” “he made,” “he gave,” “he remembers,” “he made… know,” “he sent,” and “he ordered.” Of these seven verbs, the five perfective forms reinforce the Lord’s deeds, marvels, and mandates. The two imperfect verbs, “I want to thank” and “he remembers,” representing actions yet to be completed, speak for themselves.