The text of chap. i.—ii. 4 has been badly mauled and is clamant for reconstruction of some kind. As it lies, there are traces of an alphabetical arrangement as far as the beginning of ver. 9,[219] and so far Gunkel’s changes are comparatively simple. Many of his emendations are in themselves and apart from the alphabetic scheme desirable. They get rid of difficulties and improve the poetry of the passage.[220] His reconstruction is always clever and as a whole forms a wonderfully spirited poem. But to have produced good or poetical Hebrew is not conclusive proof of having recovered the original, and there are obvious objections to the process. Several of the proposed changes are unnatural in themselves and unsupported by anything except the exigencies of the scheme; for example, 2_b_ and 3_a_ are dismissed as a gloss only because, if they be retained, the _Aleph_ verse is two bars too long. The gloss, Gunkel thinks, was introduced to mitigate the absoluteness of the declaration that Jehovah is a God of wrath and vengeance; but this is not obvious and would hardly have been alleged apart from the needs of the alphabetic scheme. In order to find a _Daleth_, it is quite arbitrary to say that the first אמלל in 4_b_ is redundant in face of the second, and that a word beginning with _Daleth_ originally filled its place, but was removed because it was a rare or difficult word! The re-arrangement of 7 and 8_a_ is very clever, and reads as if it were right; but the next effort, to get a verse beginning with _Lamed_, is of the kind by which anything might be proved. These, however, are nothing to the difficulties which vv. 9-14 and chap. ii. 1, 3, present to an alphabetic scheme, or to the means which Gunkel takes to surmount them. He has to re-arrange the order of the verses,[221] and of the words within the verses. The distichs beginning with _Nun_ and _Ḳoph_ are wanting, or at least undecipherable. To provide one with initial _Resh_ the interjection has to be removed from the opening of chap. ii. 1, and the verse made to begin with רגלי and to run thus: _the feet of him that bringeth good news on the mountains; behold him that publisheth peace_. Other unlikely changes will be noticed when we come to the translation. Here we may ask the question: if the passage was originally alphabetic, that is, furnished with so fixed and easily recognised a frame, why has it so fallen to pieces? And again, if it has so fallen to pieces, is it possible that it can be restored? The many arbitrarinesses of Gunkel’s able essay would seem to imply that it is not. Dr. Davidson says: “Even if it should be assumed that an alphabetical poem lurks under chap. i., the attempt to restore it, just as in Psalm x., can never be more than an academic exercise.”