Fourteen Pairs

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Ecclesiastes, Book of,” “Time,” “Chapter and Verse Divisions.”
• Dictionary of the OT: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings (IVP) — “Time,” “Carpe Diem,” “Retribution.”
• NIDOTTE — עֵת, עוֹלָם, זְמָן.

This is the single most likely thing to go wrong in a study of this passage, so it is settled first, from content.

Chapter verse counts: Hebrew and CATSS both 22 / 17 / 19 / 12 for chapters 3–6; the ESV 22 / 16 / 20 / 12. The same seventy verses, broken one verse earlier. The shift is uniform: every verse of Hebrew chapter 5 is one lower than its ESV number.

Fourteen of the twenty-eight are plain עֵת and fourteen carry the conjunction, and they alternate plain-joined-plain-joined through all seven verses without an exception.

Twenty-six of the twenty-eight members are verbs; two are nouns. The two are war and peace, at the very end. The Greek column matches exactly: 26 infinitives, then πολέμου and εἰρήνης at 3:8. Twenty-three of the twenty-six Hebrew verbal heads carry the ל prefix; the three that do not are at 3:4 and 3:5.

The one verse that runs long is 3:5, at eleven words, and it is long because it is the only pair that names its object — stones, twice.

The test. A verse fires for a word if that word stands four or more times in it. A run is a stretch of consecutive verses all firing for the same word. A run is constant if the count never varies across it. Every word reaching four is flagged, so no tie is ever broken arbitrarily.

The screen does not flatter Ecclesiastes. Its outright winners are and in Judges and the object particle in Chronicles, both by a wide margin. What Ecclesiastes 3:2–8 holds is the longest run in which the repeated word means something and the count per verse never moves.

Four things a reader should be able to check. (1) The Hebrew result requires stripping one leading ו before comparing, so that עת and ועת count as one word. Without that step nothing in Ecclesiastes reaches four and the passage does not appear in the Hebrew screen at all. That step is load-bearing and is stated rather than buried. (2) “Content word” is a judgement, not a measurement — the article τοῦ also stands four times in each of 3:2–7, a constant run of six, and is excluded as a function word. (3) At six of the seven verses καιρός ties with τοῦ at four apiece and is the sole holder only at 3:8, so the screen must flag every word reaching the threshold and never take a single most-frequent one. (4) The count of runs is threshold-bound: at four repetitions there are two in the Greek, at three there are five, at five there are none. Ecclesiastes holds the longest at every threshold that returns anything — that ordinal claim is what is published, not the count.

Scoped to the 25 CATSS files on this disk and the exact form counted, and to the 39 books of the Masoretic text as printed in the edition consulted, on the waw-stripped consonantal skeleton. A catalogue built on synonyms, or one whose frame word changes form across its members, is invisible to a surface test like this — its absence from the results is not evidence of its absence from the corpus.

“He has put eternity into man’s heart” is the ESV. The word is also read as the world, and as what is hidden. The Greek row carries τὸν αἰῶνα.

What the counting can establish, and it is less than the commentaries want. The consonants העלם stand in four verses of the thirty-nine books, and as stored they are four different strings — Leviticus 20:4, 1 Samuel 17:56, Ecclesiastes 3:11 and 1 Chronicles 16:36. Ecclesiastes 3:11 and 1 Chronicles 16:36 differ in accent alone, so the “distinct vocalisations” claim holds for the pointing, not for the stored token, and it is scoped that way here.

This page does not adjudicate the meaning. It reports what each column reads and leaves the choice where the commentaries have left it.

“The Hebrew word and the Greek αἰών correspond one to one — seven tokens in the same seven verses.” True, and worthless. In two files that agree 222 verse numbers to 222, a same-verse co-location test has no other answer available: ἄνθρωπος/אדם passes the identical test at 49 tokens, seven times the volume.

What survives is the part that never mentioned the Greek — that the token at 12:14 is a verb, not the noun, and so is not a fifth instance. That is settled from the Hebrew column alone.

The construction traced on the previous study runs through this one: σύν governing an accusative, which no other Greek book on this disk does once. Thirteen of the book’s thirty-four stand in chapters 3–5, and 3:11 alone carries two — σὺν τὰ πάντα and σὺν τὸν αἰῶνα.

But not “the densest stretch in the book.” Chapters 2–4 also hold exactly thirteen, so on raw count the maximum is a tie of two windows; chapters 3–5 lead only on per-word density. And thirteen of thirty-four is about 1.45 times the expected share, which does not reach significance on any test run here. The construction is a fact about the book; its distribution inside the book is not a finding.

“As he came from his mother’s womb he shall go again, naked as he came, and shall take nothing for his toil” — Hebrew and CATSS 5:14, ESV 5:15. 1 Timothy 6:7 says we brought nothing into the world and can take nothing out; Job 1:21 says naked I came and naked I shall return.

The three are a family of thought, and the shared wording between them is thin. This page prints the runs it measured rather than the resemblance it felt, and the runs are short. Where a shelf page has claimed a connection on one shared lexeme before, it has been withdrawn on the next page; the same standard is applied here in advance.

Ecclesiastes is not quoted in the Greek New Testament with a citation formula. Scoped to the SBL edition and to a search for the standard introductory formulae. Allusion is a different question and is not settled by a word-run test.

A surface-form screen finds surface forms. A catalogue built on synonyms — or one whose frame word inflects across its members — would be invisible to it. That Ecclesiastes 3:2–8 comes out on top says it is unusually regular, not that no comparably designed passage exists.

And the two columns are not independent witnesses. The Greek screen matches exact surface forms and the Hebrew screen a normalised skeleton; they are different tests, and they run on parallel texts. Their agreement is a robustness check, not confirmation.

No Hebrew or Greek critical apparatus. No Qumran fragment. No Targum, Syriac, Vulgate, Aquila, Symmachus or Theodotion. Nothing on the origin or date of the catalogue, and nothing on whether it was composed for this place.

Nor is anything claimed about how the two columns came to agree. The page says what each carries at the number they share, and stops.

Fourteen pairs, four words to a verse, seven verses, and the count never moves. It is the most carefully built thing in the book. And three verses after it ends, 3:11 says a man cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

The list is exact and the seeing is not. Ecclesiastes puts those two facts next to each other and does not resolve them.

Then 4:9 says the first good thing in three chapters — not wisdom, not wealth, but that two are better than one. After a poem about time and a chapter about oppression, the book’s first plain commendation is company.