The Missing Nun Verse — Psalm 145:13–14
מַלְכוּתְךָ … סוֹמֵךְ
What to look for
Psalm 145 walks the alphabet verse by verse — until mem (malchutcha) is followed directly by samekh (somech). The nun verse is simply not there.
What it is
An acrostic with a deliberate gap: the Masoretic text of this psalm skips the letter nun.
Why it matters
The Talmud explains: nun begins naflah — 'fallen is the virgin of Israel' (Amos 5:2) — and David would not write Israel's fall into a psalm of pure praise. Instead the next verse catches what the missing letter would have dropped: 'YHVH upholds all who fall (noflim).'
How it has been understood
Then the Dead Sea Scrolls spoke: the Great Psalms Scroll from Qumran contains a nun verse — 'Faithful (ne'eman) is God in all His words' — as does the ancient Greek translation. So this page is a live crossroads of textual history: a thousand-year-old witness to the shorter text, facing a two-thousand-year-old scroll with the longer one. The gap itself has become the meeting place.