"Proverbs 31 wife"

I'm not gonna lie...when I hear someone say "the Proverbs 31 wife," I sometimes turn my head to roll my eyes, not out of disrespect, but because sometimes this woman just sounds like someone who is tired, overworked and underpaid, a woman who has a ton to do and look after. What woman do I know of who has time or energy to do all these things fully and passionately? My mother always amazes me with all that she does and how well she does it, as well as so many other Godly women that I know. But the thought of striving to be this woman overwhelms me at times. I totally respect her, though, and do want to be able to be a woman of this caliber.

Anyway.....I was reading something about it today on Bible Gateway, and read this in the footnotes:

Verses 10-31 are an acrostic, each verse beginning with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet

Maybe this is common knowledge, but I'd never heard that before in my life. So I looked a bit more into it and this is what I found....

Acrostics in the Hebrew Bible

One of the many interesting rhetorical features of the Hebrew Bible is its use of alphabetical acrostics. These acrostics are not "hidden codes" -- they are literary compositions in which the writer has used the letters of the Hebrew alphabet as the initial letters for a sequence of verses. J.A. Motyer describes this feature as "a poetic way of saying that a total coverage of the subject was being offered."

In the common form of acrostic found in Old Testament Poetry, each line or stanza begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet in order. This literary form may have been intended as an aid to memory, but more likely it was a poetic way of saying that a total coverage of the subject was being offered -- as we would say, 'from A to Z.' Acrostics occur in Psalms 111 and 112, where each letter begins a line; in Psalms 25, 34, and 145, where each letter begins a half-verse; in Psalm 37, Proverbs 31:10-31, and Lamentations 1, 2, and 4, where each letter begins a whole verse; and in Lamentations 3, where each letter begins three verses. Psalm 119 is the most elaborate demonstration of the acrostic method where, in each section of eight verses, the same opening letter is used, and the twenty-two sections of the psalm move through the Hebrew alphabet, letter after letter. --J.A. Motyer, "Acrostic," in The New International Dictionary of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987), p. 12.

In Proverbs 31:10-31 the initial letters of each verse go through the Hebrew alphabet in order.

(Source here)

How cool is that? I had no idea! Go to the website and check out the hebrew and english translation next to each other. It's really neat.

What a neat way for us to have a thorough idea of a woman of "godly character"!