I'd think you need to indicate multiple alphabetic matches. Your first regex actually matches only b followed by end of string and the second is really only matching start of string followed by a. The third is looking for a single character string.
Try this: select 'ab' ~ '^[a-z]+$'
or this: select 'ab' ~ '^[a-z]*$'
or if looking only for 2 character strings: select 'ab' ~ '^[a-z][a-z]$'
