I recently audited a class taught by Loren Wilkinson on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The one-week class was very interested in the exegesis of the poetry of Hopkins, but we still spent a great deal of time reading the poetry aloud for the sake of enjoying the pleasing sounds of Hopkins's writing. The sound of the poems is likely what drew most of the students to take the class in the first place. One of Hopkins's most well-known poems, "As Kingfishers Catch Fire," is representative of Hopkins's oeuvre in its attention to both theology and the natural world. But what stands out before the exegesis is the alliteration in the first line: "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame." Could the poem have been about a shelduck? Perhaps in every way but the "sh" and the "d." 

The first Psalm opens similarly. The problem is that English translations of the poem do not even seem to attempt to replicate the alliteration of the first line, worrying instead about how to deal with the gender of the subject. Here is the first line:

אַ֥שְֽׁרֵי־הָאִ֗ישׁ אֲשֶׁ֤ר

It is transliterated as 'ashree ha'ish 'asher. 

Notice the number of repeated letters. Each word contains an 'aleph א followed by a shin שׁ. The first three consonants of the line are repeated in order in the final three consonants. Also noteworthy is the vowel patterns, where each of the three two-syllable words bear an "a"-sound followed by an "i/e"-sound. That's six syllables following a similar pattern of consonants and vowels with enough variation that the speaker/hearer can note that three different words are being pronounced. 

Now, have a look at the various English translations from well-known versions:

RSV: Blessed is the man who

NIV: Blessed is the one who

ESV: Blessed is the man who

NRSV: Happy are those who

NLT: Oh, the joys of those who

KJV: Blessed is the man that

NET: How blessed is the one who

JPS: Happy is the one who

While all of these translations are justifiable as translations of the text, none of them translate the sounds in any significant way. Of course, no English translation could repeat the same consonants and be English, but the spirit of the alliteration is possible even with most of the words above. How about: "How happy is the human who . . ."?

What the translations concern themselves with, instead, is the gender of the word ha'ish. The general understanding is that the word אִישׁ / 'ish is the English equivalent to "man" while the word אָדָם / 'adam is equivalent to the gender neutral "human." However, it would be odd to think of Psalm 1 as addressed only to men. Some translations come with footnotes to explain their decisions. The NET, for instance, has a very lengthy footnote that includes the following: 

The principle of the psalm is certainly applicable to all people, regardless of their gender or age. To facilitate modern application, we translate the gender and age specific “man” with the more neutral “one.”

The ESV generally avoids gender neutrality in its translations, but even it recognizes the general nature of the character in its footnote, writing, "The singular Hebrew word for man (ish) [sic] is used here to portray a representative example of a godly person." In other words, the text says "the man" and so we should translate it "the man," but the reader should somehow understand that "the man" actually means "any godly person." 

The problem is that the text doesn't say "the man" or "one" or "those." It says ha'ish. And ha'ish is surrounded by the words 'ashree and 'asher. In other words, the word's meaning is affected by the words surrounding it. The problem is that the meaning (depending on one's meaning of "meaning") gets lost in translation and there's very little we can do about it.¹ 

In the book How the Bible is Written (2019), Gary Rendsburg highlights the very many places he sees alliteration being used by the biblical authors. The chapters on alliteration work mainly as a catalogue of the places in the Bible where the authors chose alliterative word combinations. He argues that "the ancient Hebrew wordsmiths . . . [were] spicing their compositions with alliteration when so desired in an effort to further enhance the reading . . . pleasure."² Beyond reading enjoyment, the most reliable thing one can say is that alliteration draws attention to a phrase, making it stand out from the sea of text surrounding it. 

In Jonah 1:4, for instance, the phrase "[the ship] threatened to break up" is translated from the Hebrew  חִשְּׁבָ֖ה לְהִשָּׁבֵֽר / ḥishevaa lehishaver. I have my students read through the book of Jonah in introductory biblical Hebrew before they have much of an understanding of verbs. We are just working on pronunciation and recognizing the few words we can when we read the first chapter of Jonah. This phrase stands out despite the class's relative ignorance. Many students assume that the words are related since they sound so similar. But they actually have nothing in common but the sh and the v. 

The meaning of the phrase is easy enough to render in English, but "meaning" is only one aspect of the text. The verb translated "threatened" is almost always the domain of humans or God and outside of Jonah is usually translated in the semantic range of "think" or "plan." But boats don't think. And even in a story as fabulous as Jonah, where cattle are called to wear sackcloth, inanimate objects do not think like humans. While translators are willing to give the boat some agency by having it "threaten to break up," the point of the word, to my mind, is not the meaning but the sound. The unrelated words חִשְּׁבָ֖ה לְהִשָּׁבֵֽר / ḥishevaa lehishaver, from חשׁב and שׁבר, are conjugated to sound alike and the sounds are what led the author to use those words more than meaning behind them. Had the author been striving for semantic clarity, then he would have written something like הֵחֵלָּה לְהִשָּׁבֵר / heḥellaa lehishaver ("it began to break") which has a nice sound, but not the concentration of alliterative qualities.

While sound has long been recognized as an important feature of biblical exegesis, most attention has been paid to related words or puns. The story in the Garden of Eden is littered with examples of keywords of various stripes. The 'adam (human) being formed from the 'adamaa (humous) is one example; the couple being 'arummim (naked) and the serpent being 'arum (clever) is another. Alliteration between two unrelated words has been largely ignored, even though the Old Testament has many examples of alliteration, as catalogued by Rendsburg.³ In most cases, scholars include alliteration with other types of wordplay. Only a very few articles have focused entirely on alliteration.⁴ Indeed, I was not able to find any commentary that even mentioned the alliteration in the opening of Psalm 1. 

I imagine the reason this very common feature of biblical Hebrew literature is ignored has largely to do with the tyranny of meaning in biblical exegesis. In Protestant churches, there has been a tradition of attempting to preach on every bit of Scripture no matter how small.⁵ Certainly, there is plenty of meaning to be mined from Scripture, but it should not go unnoticed that after beginning with the pleasurably assonant and alliterative opening line about the blessed person, the psalmist describes that blessed person: "this one pleasures in YHWH's teaching, / and utters that teaching day and night."