This psalm and the next one are a
striking testimony to the scrambling in textual transmission that,
unfortunately, a good many of the psalms have suffered. The Septuagint presents
Psalms 9 and 10 as a single psalm, and there is formal evidence for the fact
that it was originally one poem. Psalm 9 in the Hebrew begins as an alphabetic
acrostic: verses 2 and 3, aleph (four times); verse 4, bet; verse
6, gimmel (dalet, the next letter, is missing); verse 7, heh;
verses 8–11, waw; verse 12, zayin; verse 14, ḥet; verse
16, tet; verse 18, yod; verse 19, kaf. It is notable that
some lines of poetry have been interspersed between the acrostic lines, unlike
other acrostic psalms in which the sequential letters of the alphabet occur in
consecutive lines. Then Psalm 10 begins with the next letter of the alphabet, lamed,
after which the acrostic disappears, to surface near the end of the psalm with
the last six letters of the alphabet—verse 7, peh; verse 8, ayin;
verse 12, qof; verse 14, resh; verse 15, shin; and verse
17, taw. Now, what accompanies this confusion is a whole series of
points, especially in the second half of the psalm, at which the text is not
intelligible and is in all likelihood defective. Something along the following
lines seems to have happened to our psalm: at some early moment in the long
history of its transmission, a single authoritative copy was damaged (by decay,
moisture, fire, or whatever). Lines of verse may have been patched into the
text from other sources in an attempt to fill in lacunae. Quite a few phrases
or lines were simply transcribed in their mangled form or perhaps poorly
reconstructed. When the chapter divisions of the Bible were introduced in the
late Middle Ages, the editors, struggling with this imperfect text, no longer
realized that it was an acrostic and broke it into two separate psalms. The
result of this whole process, alas, is that we are left with a rather imperfect
notion of what some of the text means. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible,
3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:40)
