Is there a way to purposefully aquire a lock on a delta table?

For multi-cluster writing to S3, DynamoDB is used as a lock for commit. This necessary because S3 does't support an atomic test/set operation. Delta does not support multi-operation transactional locking at the SQL level, which is what I assume you are asking about.

in case it's useful the team at salesforce wrote about using zookeeper when dealing with conflicting txns https://engineering.salesforce.com/global-synchronousness-and-ordering-in-delta-lake-9b912d980ebf/