Lamentations 3:1 - Scofield Reference Notes

The literary form of Lamentations is necessarily obscured in the translation. It is an acrostic dirge, the line arranged in couplets or triplet, each of which begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In the third Lament, which consists of sixty-six stanzas instead of twenty-two, each line of each triplet begins with the same letter, so that the entire sixty six verses are required to give the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. Thus verses 1-3 (Lamentations 3:1-3) of our version form but three lines of the original, each line beginning with A, etc.