Endnote 7 – Can Archaeology Help Date the Psalms?

With regard to chapter 25, this chapter parallels chapter 34 in that both chapters lack a verse for the letter vav (the sixth letter) and both add an extra pe verse at the conclusion of the acrostic. This makes it very likely that chapter 25 originally paralleled chapter 34 in its pe/ayin order as well.

With regard to chapter 37, this is an acrostic where the ayin section is missing. But the section for samekh (the previous letter) has an unusually large number of words and spans three verses, 37:27–29, while the sections for all the other letters span only one or two. Moreover, the Septuagint (the ancient translation of the Bible into Greek) has an additional phrase here, not found in the Hebrew. The most likely explanation is that there was once an ayin verse here, some of which has been picked up in the samekh section. Of all the 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, why is it that the textual problem arises in the context of the ayin verse? Probability suggests that this is not mere coincidence, but that it has something to do with the issue of the pe/ayin order. Perhaps something went wrong in the course of the re-ordering of the original pe/ayin order to ayin/pe. Or perhaps at some point, a scribe accustomed to the later ayin/pe order was copying from a text which had the pe/ayin order, and jumped to the wrong line. I strongly believe that if the correct text of this chapter is ever established, it will end up being one in which the pe preceded the ayin.

Although many scholars have argued for an original pe/ayin order in chapters 9–10 and 34, none that I have seen have taken the next step and argued, as I am, that chapters 25 and 37 originally followed the pe/ayin order as well. Of course, without the archaeological evidence of the recent decades, they had no reason to suspect that this might be the case.