For Three Transgressions, and For Four

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Amos, Book of,” “Oracles Against the Nations,” “Tekoa,” “Sakkuth and Kaiwan.”
• Dictionary of the OT: Prophets (IVP) — “Amos: Book of,” “Justice and Righteousness,” “Day of the Lord,” “Numerical Sayings.”
• Dictionary of NT Use of the OT (Beale & Carson) — on Acts 7:42–43 and Acts 15:16–17.
• NIDOTTE — פֶּשַׁע, מִשְׁפָּט, צְדָקָה, סוֹד.

Amos carries no Hebrew/English verse offset at any point.

All three agree, chapter for chapter. Five of the twelve Minor Prophets are like this; the other seven are not, and the two books already on this shelf carried five offsets between them.

The Greek phrase behind “for three transgressions” was searched across every one of the 18,183 CATSS verse units held here.

Eight units carry ἐπὶ ταῖς τρισὶν ἀσεβείαις. The other 18,175 carry it zero times. In this corpus the wording belongs to two chapters of one book.

⚠️ But the length of that string is not what isolates the eight, and the page should not imply that it is. The two-word run ταῖς τρισίν already stands in exactly the same 8 units and nothing else. Nineteen distinct contiguous runs, of lengths two through six, land on precisely this same set of eight — the longest of them being καὶ ἐπὶ ταῖς τέσσαρσιν οὐκ ἀποστραφήσομαι at six words. The four-word string printed above is one member of that band, not the thing doing the work.

The individual words are not rare in the same proportion: across the 18,183 units ἐπί stands in 2,438, ταῖς in 505, τρισίν in 21, τέσσαρσιν in 9 and ἀσεβείαις in 10 — the eight Amos units plus two others.

And the opening of the first unit differs from the other seven, though neither opening is unusual in itself. Amos 1:3 begins καὶ εἶπεν κύριος; 1:6, 1:9, 1:11, 1:13, 2:1, 2:4 and 2:6 each begin τάδε λέγει κύριος. In the Hebrew all eight open כֹּה אָמַר יְהֹוָה. Across the 35 files, 64 units open καὶ εἶπεν κύριος and 30 open τάδε λέγει κύριος, and within Amos the first of those also opens 1:2 and 7:8. Both columns are printed as their files have them.

Scope, twice. Counted on the CATSS FORM column (cols 0–24) across the 35 .mlxx files held here — which do not include Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Joshua or Daniel. The negative was also checked on the other side of each row: ταῖς, τρισίν and ἀσεβείαις never appear anywhere past column 29 — parse, lemma or preverb — in any of the 18,183 units, and the string stands in 0 of the 7,927 New Testament verses. This is a statement about the files held here and not about the Greek Old Testament. Exhaustive within that scope; nothing sampled.

Two consecutive CATSS rows, two consecutive New Testament verses, and each pair is a maximum in both directions.

Both strings are unique — and the uniqueness is complete at two words. καὶ ἀνελάβετε τὴν σκηνὴν τοῦ Μολοχ καὶ τὸ ἄστρον τοῦ θεοῦ stands in exactly one of the 18,183 CATSS verse units and one of the 7,927 New Testament verses. So does καὶ ἀνελάβετε on its own; so does μὴ σφάγια for the shorter pair. Everything after word two is common material — καί runs to 36,827 CATSS tokens, τοῦ to 6,182, τήν to 3,896. The runs are long; the rarity is carried by their first two words, and the page says so rather than letting the length imply more than it earns.

Nor is six a distinctive depth on its own: five Amos units reach six somewhere in the New Testament (5:25, 8:11, 9:5, 9:11, 9:13), and 180 of the 18,183 units reach six or more. What is specific to these two pairs is the mutual uniqueness in both directions, not the size of the number.

Where the shorter run stops is visible in the columns. Amos 5:25 has ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ τεσσαράκοντα ἔτη and Acts 7:42 has ἔτη τεσσεράκοντα ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ — the same four elements, not in the same sequence, which is where a contiguous-run test must stop.

All 146 CATSS rows of Amos against all 7,927 verses of the Greek New Testament.

There is a clean gap: nothing in Amos reaches 7, 8, 9 or 10. The two rows above the gap are 5:26, in this study, and 9:12, in the next one. The maximum for the whole book is 14, at Amos 9:12 — outside these five chapters, and it is taken up in the second Amos study.

What the measurement is, and is not. Contiguous runs of normalised word forms, Greek against Greek, on the files held here: 18,183 CATSS verse units across 35 files and 7,927 verses of the SBL Greek New Testament across 27. Both sides lowercased, accents and breathings dropped, final sigma folded, and filtered to Greek letters — the same filter on both corpora. Word forms, never lemmas. It says nothing about which text is prior and nothing about citation.

Each is a difference between two columns, printed as each file has it. Why any of them stands as it does is not something these files can settle, and the page does not guess.

Against all 7,927 verses of the Greek New Testament its longest run of consecutive identical word forms is two, and even that is a two-way tie.

The New Testament does not cite it, and a word-run screen has no way to register a sentence that has been remembered rather than repeated. Ten Greek words that have shaped a great deal of preaching, and this measurement sees almost nothing. That is a fact about the measurement.

Both columns are worth reading side by side anyway: the Hebrew has נַחַל אֵיתָן, a wadi that does not dry up; the Greek row has χειμάρρους ἄβατος, a torrent no one can cross.

Acts 7:42 and 7:43 stand closer to Amos 5:25 and 5:26 than to anything else among the 18,183 CATSS verse units on this disk, and the relation holds in the other direction too.

That is unusual on this shelf. Most of the well-known connections examined in the Hosea studies returned runs of two to four, and several found their deepest partner somewhere no one proposes as a source. Here the screen and the expected answer agree, twice, consecutively.

Amos 5:27 ends ἐπέκεινα Δαμασκοῦ. Acts 7:43 ends ἐπέκεινα Βαβυλῶνος.

The Hebrew of 5:27 has לְדַמָּשֶׂק, Damascus, so the Hebrew and the Greek row agree with each other and Acts 7:43 reads otherwise. The page reports the three readings and stops there — which text anyone was working from, and why the word stands as it does, are not questions these columns settle.

It is worth noticing that the difference falls one verse past the end of the eleven-word run, in material the run never reached.

The deepest run in the whole book is not in these chapters. It is at Amos 9:12 against Acts 15:17, at fourteen words, and it is again a mutual maximum. The two Amos studies therefore end the same way — on a pair of rows that a speech in Acts stands closer to than to anything else in the corpus.

The eight-row count is scoped to 35 files. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel are not among the Greek files held here. “Nowhere else on this disk” is what was measured; “nowhere else in the Greek Old Testament” is not.

The Amos 5:24 result is a negative and it is scoped twice. Longest contiguous run of identical word forms, on the CATSS FORM column against the MorphGNT surface column, across all 7,927 New Testament verses. It does not mean the New Testament is unaware of the verse; it means no two consecutive forms beyond a pair line up.

And a phrase count is not an argument about composition. That the formula appears eight times in two chapters and nowhere else here is a fact about distribution. Whether the eight oracles were composed together, and whether the Judah oracle belongs with the rest, are questions this page does not touch.

No Hebrew or Greek critical apparatus. No Qumran material — the Minor Prophets scroll from Nahal Hever bears directly on the Greek of these books and was not consulted, and there is a fragmentary Amos among the Qumran finds. No Targum, Syriac, Vulgate, Aquila, Symmachus or Theodotion. No text-critical work on Acts 7:43, where the manuscript tradition varies at more than one of the points measured above.

And nothing about the history. The date of the earthquake of 1:1, the identity of Sikkuth and Kiyyun, and the eighth-century politics behind the oracles are questions a word count cannot touch.

Damascus. Gaza. Tyre. Edom. Ammon. Moab. Judah. Israel. Eight times the same sentence, and the Greek column lets you count them exactly: eight verse units on this disk carry the phrase, and the other eighteen thousand do not.

An audience in Samaria could nod through six of them. The seventh names the southern kingdom, which is still someone else. The eighth uses the identical words and runs three times as long as any of the others.

And the chapter that follows the funeral song ends on two verses that a sermon in Acts stands nearer to than to any other verse in eighteen thousand — while the row at 5:24, about justice rolling down like water, registers on the same measurement as two words.

Fifth study on the Minor Prophets shelf, and the first of two on Amos. The second takes chapters 6 to 9, and the deepest run in the book.