He hath inclosed my ways with hewn stone, he hath made my paths crooked.
The speaker portrays his own ways as fenced in with dressed stone and his paths as bent out of straightness, so that forward movement is blocked and no direct course can be found. The obstruction is solid and deliberately shaped, and the deviation turns the track aside rather than leaving it open. The line stands within a chapter arranged by the Hebrew alphabet in sets of three, with the first three verses beginning with the first letter, the next three with the second, and the pattern continuing in that order. That triple acrostic ordering gives striking literary form to a book whose burden is profound anguish.
The speaker portrays his own ways as fenced in with dressed stone and his paths as bent out of straightness, so that forward movement is blocked and no direct course can be found. The obstruction is solid and deliberately shaped, and the deviation turns the track aside rather than leaving it open. The line stands within a chapter arranged by the Hebrew alphabet in sets of three, with the first three verses beginning with the first letter, the next three with the second, and the pattern continuing in that order. That triple acrostic ordering gives striking literary form to a book whose burden is profound anguish.