סSamek

Psalm 145 walks the alphabet, and the nun verse is missing from the traditional Hebrew text. The letter that follows nun is samek — and samek's verse is "Jehovah upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that are bowed down." The upholding word is somekh, the letter's own verb. That the psalm's word for holding people up stands immediately after the place where a line has gone missing is a fact about the page, checkable in any Hebrew Bible. What readers have made of it belongs in the devotional band, where it is labeled.

Chapters are medieval and verse numbers are from the 1500s, but the Hebrew Bible has always had its own sections, and two letters do the marking. A samek in the margin signals a closed section — a break inside a run of text. A pe signals an open one, where the scribe started a fresh line. These marks are older than any chapter division, they are already visible in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they show a reader where the ancient scribes themselves thought one thing ended and another began. Two letters, quietly organizing the whole book.

Verses 113 to 120 belong to samek, and the poet puts the letter's own verb inside them: "Uphold me according unto thy word, that I may live: and let me not be ashamed of my hope" (verse 116). The Hebrew is samkeni — hold me up. The stanza that has to start every line with the prop letter asks God to be the prop.