The deepest run anywhere in Amos is fourteen words, and it sits on the one verse of the book where the Hebrew and the Greek column do not say the same thing. CATSS Amos 9:12 against Acts 15:17 — and each is the other's single deepest match, checked both ways across all 18,183 CATSS verse units and all 7,927 New Testament verses. The fourteen-word string stands in exactly one unit of the first and one verse of the second. Yet in the Hebrew of that verse Israel possesses the remnant of Edom, and in the Greek row the remnant of mankind seeks — two different subjects doing two different things. The run begins after that difference and never touches it. A measurement of shared wording can be at its strongest exactly where the columns are furthest apart, and this is what that looks like. See the method →
Amos 6:1–9:15 (selections)
Hebrew · Greek (CATSS, Rahlfs’ Septuaginta) · ESV⚠️ And the deepest run in the book sits on its least agreed verse. Fourteen words of CATSS Amos 9:12 stand unbroken in Acts 15:17. In the Hebrew of that verse Israel possesses the remnant of Edom; in the Greek row the remnant of mankind seeks. The run begins after that difference and never touches it.
The Shape of the Passage
Sequence — two woes, five visions, and a last word7:10–17 is the only prose narrative in Amos, and it interrupts the visions. Three visions, then Amaziah, then two more. Whatever that arrangement is doing, it puts the question who sent you? in the middle of the sequence where Amos is being shown things.
Author
7:14 is the most argued sentence in the book, and the Hebrew has no verb in it. לֹא־נָבִיא אָנֹכִי — not-a-prophet I. Whether that means I am not or I was not is a decision every translation has to make. The CATSS Greek row makes it: οὐκ ἤμην προφήτης, past tense. That is what the row reads; it settles nothing about the Hebrew.
And the trades named differ. The Hebrew has בוֹקֵר, a herdsman; the row has αἰπόλος, a goatherd.
Audience
Amaziah names the real audience problem. “The land is not able to bear all his words” — and the objection is jurisdictional: Bethel is the king’s sanctuary, so a Judean has no standing there.
By 9:11–12 the address has left Israel entirely. The last oracle reaches past the northern kingdom to all the nations who are called by my name — and it is those two verses that the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 stands nearest to among all 18,183 verse units on this disk.
Orient on the visions, Bethel, and the booth of David.
Search by topic: Amos, book of; vision reports, prophetic; Bethel; Amaziah; booth (sukkah) of David; Jerusalem Council; Edom in the prophets.
Which articles are relevant?
- Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Amos, Book of,” “Bethel,” “Amaziah,” “Edom,” “Vision.”
- Dictionary of the OT: Prophets (IVP) — “Amos: Book of,” “Visions,” “Prophecy and Society,” “Remnant.”
- Dictionary of NT Use of the OT (Beale & Carson) — on Acts 15:16–18.
- NIDOTTE — אֲנָךְ, סֻכָּה, יָרַשׁ, קֵץ.
The numbering needs no table here either
Amos carries no Hebrew/English verse offset at any point, so every reference on this page means the same thing in all three columns. Masoretic, CATSS and ESV all run 15 / 16 / 15 / 13 / 27 / 14 / 17 / 14 / 15 — 146 verses. Verified from content, not assumed. Of the twelve Minor Prophets, seven carry an offset somewhere and five do not; Amos is one of the five.
Fourteen words, and where they begin.
Amos 9:11–12 and Acts 15:16–17, checked from both ends
Two consecutive CATSS rows against two consecutive New Testament verses, and each pair is a maximum in both directions.
| pair | run | deepest partner for the row, of 7,927 NT verses | deepest partner for the verse, of 18,183 CATSS units |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amos 9:11 & Acts 15:16 | 6 | Acts 15:16, alone | Amos 9:11, alone |
| Amos 9:12 & Acts 15:17 | 14 | Acts 15:17, alone | Amos 9:12, alone |
The fourteen words: καὶ πάντα τὰ ἔθνη ἐφ' οὓς ἐπικέκληται τὸ ὄνομά μου ἐπ' αὐτούς λέγει κύριος — standing in exactly one of the 18,183 CATSS verse units and one of the 7,927 New Testament verses.
⚠️ But the rarity is complete by word four, not word fourteen. καὶ πάντα stands in 167 CATSS units and 19 New Testament verses; καὶ πάντα τά in 90 and 9; and only at καὶ πάντα τὰ ἔθνη does the string go unique on both sides. The other ten words are what makes the run long, not what makes it rare, and the page says so rather than letting the length imply more than it earns.
⚠️ Fourteen is the deepest run in Amos and not on this disk. The same screen run over all 18,183 verse units against all 7,927 New Testament verses finds twelve pairs deeper than fourteen, topped by Deuteronomy 6:5 against Mark 12:30 at 21, then three pairs at 20 and Joel 3:1 against Acts 2:17 at 19. Exactly six pairs sit at fourteen, of which this is one. The boundary of a book is doing work in any sentence with “deepest” in it.
Two normalisation steps are load-bearing for this figure. The Greek-letter filter removes the CATSS proper-noun asterisk and the elision apostrophes in ἐφ' and ἐπ' on both sides; and the final-sigma fold matters too — recomputed without it, this pair measures 5 rather than 14. Both steps are applied to both corpora and are stated in the method note below.
Where the fourteen words begin, and what they step over
The run starts at καὶ πάντα τὰ ἔθνη — that is, after the part of the verse where the two Hebrew and Greek columns disagree.
| the opening of 9:12 | |
|---|---|
| Hebrew | לְמַעַן יִירְשׁוּ אֶת־שְׁאֵרִית אֱדוֹם — that they may possess the remnant of Edom |
| CATSS row | ὅπως ἐκζητήσωσιν οἱ κατάλοιποι τῶν ἀνθρώπων — that the remnant of mankind may seek |
| Acts 15:17 | ὅπως ἂν ἐκζητήσωσιν οἱ κατάλοιποι τῶν ἀνθρώπων τὸν κύριον |
Two things differ between the Hebrew and the row: who is acting (Israel, against the remnant of mankind) and what they do (possess, against seek). Acts 15:17 reads with the row. The page reports the three readings and does not order them — which text anyone was working from, and why any of them stands as it does, are not questions these columns settle.
Note also that the run does not cover the disagreement. It begins one clause later, so the fourteen matching words and the point of difference are in the same verse and never overlap.
The rest of the screen across these four chapters
Of the 146 CATSS rows of Amos, the cumulative distribution against all 7,927 New Testament verses is:
| run reached | rows of the 146 |
|---|---|
| 3 or more | 102 |
| 4 or more | 41 |
| 5 or more | 19 |
| 6 or more | 7 |
| 7 to 10 | 0 |
| 11 or more | 2 |
| 14 | 1 |
Nothing in Amos reaches 7, 8, 9 or 10. The two rows above that gap are 5:26, covered in the first Amos study, and 9:12 here. Both of them are places where a speech in Acts stands closer to an Amos row than to any other verse in the corpus — Stephen at Amos 5:25–26, and James at Amos 9:11–12.
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.
A word that occurs once, and a pun that does not survive.
אֲנָך — the plumb line
The Hebrew word at 7:7 and 7:8 stands nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, and the Greek row answers it with a different substance.
| 7:7 wall | 7:7 in his hand | 7:8 answer | 7:8 set among | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hebrew | אֲנָךְ | אֲנָךְ | אֲנָךְ | אֲנָךְ |
| CATSS row | ἀδαμαντίνου | ἀδάμας | ἀδάμαντα | ἀδάμαντα |
Four occurrences in two verses, and the row is consistent across all four. What אֲנָךְ denotes is genuinely uncertain — “plumb line” is the traditional rendering and “tin” is widely argued — and this page has no way to decide it. What it can report is that both columns keep one word for it throughout the vision, and they are not the same word.
The summer fruit and the end
Amos 8:2 turns on two Hebrew words that share their consonants. קָיִץ, summer fruit, and קֵץ, end. The vision shows the first and the sentence announces the second.
In the Greek row the two words are ἄγγος ἰξευτοῦ and τὸ πέρας. A reader of the row sees a fowler’s vessel and then an ending, with no sound linking them. The pairing that carries the verse in one column is not present in the other — which is a statement about what each column contains, not about how either came to contain it.
The same pattern of vision-plus-verdict runs at 7:8, where the answer (אֲנָךְ) is not a pun at all, and the two visions are built differently in the Hebrew as well.
Four more places where the columns name different things
| verse | Hebrew | CATSS Greek row |
|---|---|---|
| 6:1 | הַשַּׁאֲנַנִּים — at ease | τοῖς ἐξουθενοῦσιν — those who despise |
| 6:4 | כָּרִים — lambs | ἐρίφους — kids |
| 7:7 | אֲדֹנָי standing | ἀνήρ — a man standing |
| 9:1 | הַכַּפְתּוֹר — the capital | τὸ ἱλαστήριον |
Each is printed as its file has it. Why any of them stands as it does is not something these columns can settle.
Two speeches in Acts, and the two rows they land on.
Both Amos studies end the same way
Amos produces exactly two runs above six anywhere in the book, and both of them are a speech in Acts standing on an Amos row.
| CATSS row | New Testament verse | run | mutual maximum? | string rarity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amos 5:26 | Acts 7:43 (Stephen) | 11 | yes, both ways | 1 CATSS unit, 1 NT verse |
| Amos 9:12 | Acts 15:17 (James) | 14 | yes, both ways | 1 CATSS unit, 1 NT verse |
Two speeches, two chapters apart in Acts, landing on rows four chapters apart in Amos — and in the corpus held here nothing else in either direction comes within four words.
And in both places the Hebrew reads differently from the Greek row. At 5:26 the names are Sikkuth and Kiyyun in one column and Moloch and Raiphan in the other; at 9:12 it is Edom and possess against mankind and seek. The page notes the pattern and does not explain it.
Hebrews 8:8 and the days that are coming
Amos 8:11 and 9:13 both open ἰδοὺ ἡμέραι ἔρχονται λέγει κύριος, and so does Hebrews 8:8. Each returns a run of six.
On this disk that five-word string stands in exactly two CATSS verse units — the two Amos rows — and one New Testament verse. But the scope matters more than usual here: Jeremiah is not among the 35 Greek files held, and the formula is frequent in Jeremiah. The count of two is a fact about this corpus and would not survive a fuller one. Hebrews 8:8 introduces a long quotation of Jeremiah 31, not of Amos.
This is the clearest case on the page of depth without distinctiveness — a run of six built entirely from a formula, next to a run of fourteen built from a sentence that occurs once.
Where this page is weakest, and what was not reached.
The limits
Every count is scoped to 35 Greek Old Testament files. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel are not among them, and the Hebrews 8:8 case above shows exactly how much that can matter to a rarity figure.
The 9:12 difference is reported and not resolved. That the Hebrew and the Greek row read differently there is visible in the columns. Which is prior, and what produced the difference, are questions with a large literature and none of it was consulted for this page.
And a mutual maximum is not proof of citation. It means no other pair in either corpus shares more consecutive word forms. On this shelf that has already coincided with the expected answer (Acts 7, Acts 15, Acts 2) and failed to (Revelation 5:13 beating Acts 2:19 for Joel 3:3). The measurement is the same in both cases.
What could not be checked at all
No Hebrew or Greek critical apparatus. No Qumran material — there is a fragmentary Amos among the finds, and the Minor Prophets scroll from Nahal Hever bears directly on the Greek of these books; neither was consulted. No Targum, Syriac, Vulgate, Aquila, Symmachus or Theodotion. No text-critical work on Acts 15:17.
And nothing on the meaning of אֲנָךְ. Whether the third vision shows a plumb line, a lump of tin, or something else is a lexical question this page cannot decide, and it reports only what each column has.
Fourteen words, and the clause before them.
The strongest match in the book sits beside its widest difference
Fourteen consecutive words of CATSS Amos 9:12 stand in Acts 15:17 — a string found once in eighteen thousand Greek Old Testament verse units and once in eight thousand New Testament verses, and each verse is the other’s deepest match in either corpus. Nothing else in Amos comes within three words of it.
And the clause immediately before the run is where the Hebrew and the Greek column part furthest: in one, Israel possesses what is left of Edom; in the other, what is left of mankind seeks. The measurement never touches that clause. It starts just after it.
Both Amos studies end on a speech in Acts standing on an Amos row, and in both places the two Old Testament columns read differently at the very point that matters most — Sikkuth and Kiyyun against Moloch and Raiphan at 5:26, Edom against mankind at 9:12. The page prints all of it and orders none of it.
Sixth study on the Minor Prophets shelf, and the second of two on Amos. Amos is now complete: 146 verses, no verse offset, and two runs above six in the whole book.
Every Deep Research page traces its passage across the whole sweep — the Old Testament, the Second-Temple world between the testaments (historical witnesses, not Scripture), and the New Testament. Follow the thread:
Pleasant Springs Church — Deep Research
Research method after Michael S. Heiser’s Bible Research Method (examine dictionaries → ancient literature → important words → textual connections → academic publications → share), with the Pleasant Springs “Author & Audience” foundation. Scripture set in the Hebrew, the Greek editions named on each page and the ESV (Old Testament), and the Greek New Testament and the ESV (New Testament), per the practice of Pleasant Springs Church. Amos research grounded in Wolff (Joel and Amos, Hermeneia), Paul (Amos, Hermeneia), Andersen & Freedman (Amos, Anchor) and Smith (WBC). Text: Hebrew from the Masoretic text as printed in the editions consulted — Sefaria’s Miqra according to the Masorah; no critical apparatus was consulted for the Hebrew. Greek from Rahlfs’ Septuaginta as digitized by CATSS; Greek New Testament from the SBL edition. The standing caution for this shelf applies: these pages say “the CATSS Greek row reads…” and never call a Greek reading early or late. ✅ VERSE NUMBERING — checked, and clean throughout Amos. Masoretic, CATSS and ESV all run 15 / 16 / 15 / 13 / 27 / 14 / 17 / 14 / 15, 146 verses. Verified against content, not assumed. ⚠️ The run measurement, in full. Greek against Greek. Both sides reduced to plain lowercase letters — accents and breathings dropped, final sigma folded, CATSS beta-code transliterated first — then filtered to Greek letters, the same filter applied to both corpora. Compared as contiguous runs of whole word FORMS, never lemmas. Corpus: 18,183 CATSS verse units across 35 .mlxx files and 7,927 verses of the SBL Greek New Testament across 27 files. Exhaustive and deterministic — nothing sampled, so no seed applies. ⚠️ Every maximum is printed with its tie band, checked on both sides. Amos 9:11 / Acts 15:16 at 6 and Amos 9:12 / Acts 15:17 at 14 are tie bands of one in both directions. The fourteen-word string stands in exactly one CATSS verse unit and one New Testament verse. ⚠️ “Deepest” here means deepest in Amos, and the wider screen is printed beside it. The same screen over all 18,183 verse units goes deeper elsewhere — Deuteronomy 6:5 against Mark 12:30 at 21, Joel 3:1 against Acts 2:17 at 19. Across the 146 Amos rows: 102 reach three or more, 41 four, 19 five, 7 six, none between seven and ten, 2 eleven, 1 fourteen. ⚠️ Depth is reported beside rarity, and one case fails. Amos 8:11 and 9:13 each reach 6 against Hebrews 8:8 on the formula ἰδοὺ ἡμέραι ἔρχονται λέγει κύριος. That string stands in only 2 CATSS verse units here — but Jeremiah, where the formula is frequent, is not among the 35 files, so the rarity figure is an artefact of scope and the page says so rather than printing it as a finding. ⚠️ Direction of influence is never asserted. Nothing here says which text is prior, that anyone quoted, adapted, followed or altered anything, or why any reading stands as it does — including at 9:12 (Edom and possess against mankind and seek), 7:7–8 (plumb line against adamant), 8:2 (summer fruit against fowler’s vessel) and 9:1 (capital against ἱλαστήριον), where the page prints the readings side by side and stops. Typology is handled per the house position: what the text says, what the New Testament itself draws, and what we see from this side of the cross — with the seeing left to the reader.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. ESV Text Edition: 2016. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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