certain number of motifs, which pervades even the vav strophe where the psalmist had complete control over his material, simply prefixing ו, “and,” to the first word, though, as Soll (Psalm 119, 30) has observed, to make his task harder the poet chose to make the second letter alef in each line after the first. But rational ordering is not completely absent; on closer inspection many strophes have their own distinctive emphases. As to genre, although Ps 119 is by no means a pure wisdom psalm, it