Six Words, and Two

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Isaiah, Book of,” “Oracles against the Nations,” “Tarshish,” “Tyre,” “Kedar,” “Shebna,” “Eliakim.”
• Dictionary of the OT: Prophets (IVP) — “Isaiah: Book of,” “Apocalypticism,” “Nations,” “Zion.”
• NIDOTTE — מַשָּׂא, תֹּהוּ, בָּלַע, מַפְתֵּחַ, קִרְיָה.
• Dictionary of NT Use of the OT (Beale & Carson) — on 1 Corinthians 15:32 and 15:54, on Revelation 3:7, and on Revelation 14:8 and 18:2. Those entries argue for connections this page’s screen mostly cannot see, and stage 4 prints both the argument and the numbers.

The shelf’s stored note for Isaiah was marked PROVISIONAL and named one seam. Reading the three columns off the files on this disk turned up four differences, and none of them is in chapters 21–25.

The Hebrew shapes are Sefaria’s Miqra according to the Masorah; the Greek shapes are the CATSS Isaiah file; the English shapes were taken from a complete public-domain English Bible held on this disk, which carries the same versification as the ESV. The Greek column has a row for every one of the 95 verses of chapters 21–25 — no gaps, no merged rows. It is worth saying out loud even though the answer is nothing: a page that does not state its offset has not checked it.

The word means load. It is the ordinary noun for what a donkey carries, and it is also the technical heading of a prophetic oracle.

Isaiah 13–23 is built out of them: ten superscriptions, running Babylon, Philistia, Moab, Damascus, Egypt, the wilderness of the sea, Dumah, Arabia, the valley of vision, Tyre. Five of the ten are in this study, and Isaiah 23:1 is the last of the series. After it the noun is absent from Isaiah until 30:6.

And once, inside the block, the word is not a heading. Isaiah 22:25 says the peg driven in a sure place will give way, and the מַשָּׂא that was on it will be cut off — the load hanging on the peg. The Greek column renders it ἡ δόξα ἡ ἐπ' αὐτόν, the glory that was on him — which is the same noun the Greek column had already used three verses earlier at 22:22, where the Hebrew has a key. Whatever produced that, the page reports it and does not explain it.

Isaiah 22:15–25 is the only passage in these five chapters about two named individuals, and the charge against the first of them is that he built himself a tomb.

What have you to do here, and whom have you here, that you have cut here a tomb for yourself, you who cut a tomb on the height? (22:16). Shebna is over the household; by Isaiah 36:3 he is the secretary and Eliakim has the household. The demotion the oracle announces appears to have happened.

⚠️ What was not checked. A rock-cut tomb inscription from the village of Silwan, opposite the City of David, names a royal steward whose name ends in -yahu and is very often connected with this Shebna. That is an archaeological argument and this page cannot test it. No epigraphic corpus is on this disk; the identification is reported as an inference others have drawn, and it carries no weight in anything measured here.

In Isaiah it is what a besieged city says on its rooftops. In 1 Corinthians it is what Paul says people would be entitled to say if the dead are not raised.

The sentiment is not unique to Israel. Greek and Roman writers report an Egyptian custom of carrying a figure of a corpse round a banquet with the words drink and be merry, for when you die you will be like this; the theme runs through the Egyptian harper songs and through Hellenistic epitaphs. None of that material is held on this disk and none of it is measured here; it is named so the reader knows the slogan had a life outside these two verses.

What the screen can say is narrow and exact. φάγωμεν καὶ πίωμεν occurs in one CATSS verse unit out of 30,348 and one Greek New Testament verse out of 7,927, and the six-word run between them has a tie band of one. Even so, a run of six is not a proof of borrowing — it is contact. The reason this one is safe to call a quotation is not the number: it is that 1 Corinthians 15:32 is quoting a slogan and says so.

Chapters 21, 22 and 23 name their targets. Chapters 24 and 25 name a city four times and never say which one.

24:10 קִרְיַת תֹּהוּ, city of formlessness; 24:12 בָּעִיר, in the city; 25:2 you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin; 25:3 קִרְיַת גּוֹיִם עָרִיצִים, the city of ruthless nations. Commentators have identified it as Babylon, Moab, Samaria, Jerusalem, Carthage and no city at all. The page has no way to adjudicate that and does not try.

What the two columns do differently is measurable. Where the Hebrew has one unnamed city, the Greek column has cities, plural, at 24:12, 25:2 and 25:3, and at 24:10 it has ἠρημώθη πᾶσα πόλις, every city has been made desolate. The Greek column reads the singular as a generalisation. That is a description of the two texts, not a claim about which is older.

⚠️ The page prints these and explains none of them. It does not say the Greek column misread anything, does not say which reading is older, and does not say what Hebrew stood in front of whoever produced the Greek. It says what stands in each column and where.

All 95 CATSS rows of Isaiah 21–25 were screened against all 7,927 verses of the Greek New Testament. 92 reach two, 52 reach three, 13 reach four, 2 reach five, 1 reaches six, and nothing reaches seven.

One row in ninety-five reaches six, and it is a citation. One reaches five, and it is not. Everything else in this table is four or less, and most of the fours are formulas.

The second-deepest run in these five chapters has a tie band of one and means nothing whatever.

Isaiah 22:24 is about everything in Eliakim’s father’s house being hung on him; Acts 7:20 is about Moses being nursed three months in his father’s house. Five consecutive words, a tie band of one, and no relationship at all. ⚠️ And the tie band of one is itself misleading here. The same five Greek words stand in thirteen places across the CATSS files held here — Genesis 31:14, 34:19 and 38:11 (which has it twice), Numbers 30:4, Joshua 2:12, Judges 6:15, Judges 11:2 (which is held in both the A and the B text), 2 Samuel 24:17, 1 Chronicles 21:17, Psalm 151:1 and Isaiah 22:24. A band of one inside the New Testament is not the same thing as a rare phrase. It is a stock expression that happens to occur once on the New Testament side.

Paul quotes Isaiah 22:13 at 1 Corinthians 15:32 and Isaiah 25:8 at 1 Corinthians 15:54. Against the same Greek column the two quotations measure six and two.

1 Corinthians 15:54 introduces its quotation with then shall come to pass the saying that is written. It is announcing a citation, and the Greek column in front of us is not what it is citing. The direction of the swallowing is opposite, and the verb form differs: the passive κατεπόθη stands in three CATSS verse units held here and Isaiah 25:8 is not one of them.

⚠️ What the page will not say. It will not say Paul was reading Hebrew, or translating for himself, or using a lost Greek text, or correcting anything. Other Greek versions of Isaiah existed and none of them is held on this disk — there is no Aquila, no Symmachus, no Theodotion of Isaiah here, and the readings of those versions are exactly what would bear on this verse. All the page can report is that against the one Greek column it holds, the run is two.

Three connections out of these chapters are in every commentary. Measured against the Greek column, they run 1, 2 and 2.

⚠️ Read that table carefully, because it is easy to over-read. What the numbers show is that at these three places the New Testament wording is not the wording of the Greek column. That is a fact about word forms. It is not evidence about which text anybody used, in which language, or in what order — and the page asserts none of that. A verbatim screen finds contact, not allusion. All three of these are almost certainly real allusions; the screen simply cannot see them, and a page that only printed its deep runs would leave the reader thinking these connections do not exist.

Isaiah 25:8 against Revelation 7:17 — run 4, tie band 1.

πᾶν δάκρυον stands in one CATSS verse unit out of 30,348 and two verses of the Greek New Testament, Revelation 7:17 and 21:4. With ὁ θεός in front of it the run is four and the tie band is one, because Revelation 21:4 does not have ὁ θεός in that clause and so measures two. The same verse of Isaiah that the resurrection quotation does not match is the verse whose second half Revelation does. One verse; two clauses; two very different measurements.

The Hebrew-side screen puts the strongest tie of the whole study not in the New Testament but in the oracle against Moab.

★ And the top row has an edge. פַּחַד וָפַחַת וָפָח stands in exactly two verses of the Hebrew Bible, and the shared sentence runs five words — terror and pit and snare are upon you, O inhabitant of — and then stops on the sixth. Isaiah has the earth; Jeremiah has Moab. The run breaks at precisely the word that decides whether the oracle is about one country or about everybody. The next verse repeats the pattern: run 4, band 1, and then Isaiah ends with the windows of heaven opened and the foundations of the earth shaking, where Jeremiah ends with the year of their punishment.

⚠️ And the Greek columns of the two books do not match each other the way the Hebrew columns do. CATSS Isaiah 24:17 has φόβος καὶ βόθυνος καὶ παγίς; CATSS Jeremiah 31:43 — which is Jeremiah 48:43 in a Hebrew Bible, because the Greek Jeremiah is differently arranged — has παγὶς καὶ φόβος καὶ βόθυνος. Same three nouns, different order, and the measured run drops from five to three. The page reports the difference and does not say which order came first.

Isaiah 24:19 shares no two consecutive words with any verse unit of the Masoretic corpus outside its own chapter.

רֹעָה הִתְרֹעֲעָה הָאָרֶץ פּוֹר הִתְפּוֹרְרָה אֶרֶץ מוֹט הִתְמוֹטְטָה אָרֶץ
“The earth is utterly broken, the earth is split apart, the earth is violently shaken.”Isaiah 24:19 — Masoretic text; ESV

Nine words, three of them אֶרֶץ, and three infinitive-plus-verb pairs of the same root stacked one on another. Every word in it is common; not one adjacent pair occurs anywhere else. ⚠️ Say what the zero means. This is the Hebrew-side screen, which does not fall back to single words, so nought here means no two consecutive words shared, not no word shared. Against the Greek New Testament the same row reaches a run of three with a tie band of two.

Seventeen of the ninety-five rows in this study come out at nought on that screen: 21:5, 21:7, 21:12, 21:13, 22:3, 22:6, 22:7, 22:19, 23:2, 23:3, 23:10, 24:7, 24:12, 24:19, 24:22, 25:5 and 25:11. Across the ninety-five: 78 reach two, 26 reach three, 11 reach four, 3 reach five, and nothing reaches six. ★ And the Greek column of 24:19 is shorter than the Hebrew: it has two clauses where the Hebrew has three.

The single biggest hole is the one the page’s best finding depends on: this shelf holds one Greek column of Isaiah and no others. There is no Aquila, no Symmachus, no Theodotion, no Lucianic recension and no critical apparatus on this disk. The reading of Isaiah 25:8 that 1 Corinthians 15:54 corresponds to is precisely the sort of thing the later Greek versions are cited for in the literature. The page reports that the run against the one column it holds is two, and it cannot tell you what any other Greek column of Isaiah says. Anyone reading this as evidence about Paul’s source is reading more than the measurement supports.

No Qumran material was consulted. The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ) is a complete Hebrew Isaiah roughly a thousand years older than the Masoretic manuscripts, and it is not on this disk. Every Hebrew figure on this page is against one printed edition — Sefaria’s Miqra according to the Masorah — and differs from a claim about “the Hebrew text” in general.

The date and unity of Isaiah 24–27 is not addressed. Two of the five chapters here belong to the most argued-over section of the book. The page quotes them without entering the question, which is a real limitation on anything said about them as Isaiah’s.

Nothing here identifies the unnamed city. The literature has identified the city of 24:10 and 25:2 as Babylon, Moab, Samaria, Jerusalem, Carthage and as a deliberate non-identification. This page has no method that can decide it and prints the four references without a candidate.

The Silwan royal-steward inscription was not examined. The connection with Shebna is reported in stage 2 as an inference others have drawn. No epigraphic corpus is held here and no weight rests on it.

The Greek Old Testament figures on this page were run over all 64 CATSS files held here, but the screening corpus is 30,348 verse units, not the 30,637 the files contain. The Odes are excluded from run screens, and they should be: Ode 9 is Luke 1 and Ode 13 is Luke 2 copied into a Greek Old Testament manuscript, and ten further Odes are second copies of Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 32, 1 Samuel 2, Habakkuk 3, Isaiah 26, Jonah 2, Daniel 3, Isaiah 5 and Isaiah 38. Leaving them in would have counted the same text twice and, worse, would have produced Greek-Old-Testament ‘matches’ for Luke that are Luke. Every “stands in N verse units” figure on this page is against 30,348. Note that three of the excluded Odes are second copies of Isaiah (Isaiah 26, Isaiah 5 and Isaiah 38), and none falls inside chapters 21–25, so nothing in this study is affected either way.

Twenty of the sixty-four files are deuterocanonical — witnesses, not Scripture on this shelf, and named as such wherever one carries a hit. Three counts on this page include such a file: the eleven CATSS verse units carrying βασιλεῖς τῆς γῆς include 1 Maccabees 1:2; Psalm 151:1 is among the thirteen places carrying ἐν τῷ οἴκῳ τοῦ πατρός; and Bel and the Dragon 1:11 is one of the five places carrying the noun κλείς. All three are named here so no reader has to take the totals on trust.

The Hebrew screen was run chapter by chapter, each of the five chapters against every verse unit of the Masoretic corpus outside that chapter — between 23,179 and 23,192 target verses depending on the chapter’s own length. That means a match between, say, Isaiah 24 and Isaiah 25 would have been counted, and a match inside a single chapter would not. None of the findings reported above turns on that.

Nothing here is an argument from silence about Hebrew or Greek outside these corpora. “The only verse in the Hebrew Bible” means the 23,204 verse units of Sefaria’s Miqra according to the Masorah held on this disk, and nothing more.

• Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1–39 (Anchor Yale Bible 19).
• John N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 1–39 (NICOT).
• Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 13–27 (Continental Commentary).
• J. Alec Motyer, The Prophecy of Isaiah.
• Ronald L. Troxel, LXX-Isaiah as Translation and Interpretation — on the kind of divergence this page prints and refuses to explain.
• Christopher R. Seitz, Isaiah 1–39 (Interpretation) — on chapter 22 and the two officials.
• None of these were consulted for the measurements on this page, which were run on the text files named in the footer.

Ninety-five verses were screened against the whole Greek New Testament. One of them reaches six shared words, and it is a party on a rooftop in a city under siege. Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

Isaiah 22 is the one oracle in this run of five aimed at the prophet’s own people. The wall has been breached, the water supply has been engineered, the armouries have been inventoried — but you did not look to him who did it (22:11) — and the response is a feast. Three chapters later, on a mountain, there is another feast: the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food. Eating and drinking again; a different host; and at the second one the thing that gets swallowed is death.

And then there is the run that stops. Isaiah 24:17 and Jeremiah 48:43 share five consecutive Hebrew words — terror and pit and snare are upon you, O inhabitant of — and split on the sixth. Jeremiah says Moab. Isaiah says the earth. The oracles against the nations have been naming somebody else for eleven chapters; at chapter 24 the superscriptions stop, the names stop, and the same sentence turns round.

⭐ Five chapters that were dark on this shelf are now quoted. Isaiah is a long book and much of it is still untouched here; this page does not close it. What it does do is put Isaiah 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25 on the record with their runs and their tie bands attached, including the three famous connections its own screen cannot see.