Nothing Reaches Six

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Jeremiah, Book of,” “Jeremiah (person),” “Anathoth,” “Cistern,” “Covenant Lawsuit,” “Foe from the North.”
• Dictionary of the OT: Prophets (IVP) — “Jeremiah: Book of,” “Call / Commission Narratives,” “Marriage and Divorce Imagery,” “Israel’s History (Josiah),” “Text and Textual Criticism.”
• NIDOTTE — שׁוב, מְשׁוּבָה, בּוֹר, עׇרְלָה, אֱמוּנָה, נְאֻם.
• Dictionary of NT Use of the OT (Beale & Carson) — on Hebrews 8:8–12, which is the book’s deepest New Testament contact and lies twenty-six chapters past this study.

Jeremiah is the hardest verse-numbering problem on this shelf, and chapters 1–5 are the easy part of it.

Every chapter number and every verse number in these five chapters is the same in all three columns. The single exception is that Masoretic and English 2:1 has no CATSS row. This was derived from the files on this disk, label by label, and not copied from a numbering table: the CATSS labels for Greek Jeremiah 2 run 2:2, 2:3, 2:4… through 2:37, so the Greek chapter simply has no verse numbered 2:1 and nothing after the gap is shifted.

⚠️ The ESV row of that table is the one row not derived from a file on this disk. No ESV text of Jeremiah 1–5 is held here — the English in the codex above was typed by hand from the printed edition — so the ESV verse counts are the printed English chapter divisions, which for these five chapters are the same as the Masoretic. The Masoretic and CATSS rows were measured; the ESV row was read.

⚠️ Past chapter 5, everything changes. Over the whole book the measured shapes are Masoretic 1,364 verses and CATSS 1,298, and 34 of the 52 chapters have different verse counts. The reason is not a scattering of small omissions but a structural difference: the Greek book puts the Oracles Against the Nations in the middle rather than at the end, and orders the nations inside them differently, so from roughly chapter 25 onward a Hebrew chapter number and a Greek chapter number are two different things.

Rather than reprint a correspondence table this page has not verified, three anchors were checked against the files here by content:

The 66-verse difference between 1,364 and 1,298 understates the gap, because the Greek is also shorter inside verses that both books have. This page did not measure the word-level difference and therefore does not quote a percentage for it. What it states is the verse-unit counts it took off the disk.

Jeremiah 3:1 argues from a case in the Torah, and every commentary names Deuteronomy 24:1–4. Measured verse against verse across the whole of Jeremiah 3 and the whole of Deuteronomy 24, the deepest shared run is three words.

Three words: and she becomes another man’s. That is a real verbal contact and it is a small one. Jeremiah 3:1 opens with לֵאמֹר, saying, with nothing said before it — the Hebrew reads as though a citation formula has been left standing without its citation. The page notes the oddity and does not repair it.

The technical noun for the certificate is rarer than the theme. כְּרִיתֻת, the writ of divorce, stands in exactly four verses of the Hebrew Bible: Deuteronomy 24:1, Deuteronomy 24:3, Isaiah 50:1 and Jeremiah 3:8 — and the last three of those are all God divorcing, or refusing to divorce, a people. Two of the four are the law; two are the metaphor.

Jeremiah 2:13 sets two water sources against each other, and the contrast only works if you know which one fails. A מָקוֹר מַיִם חַיִּים — a spring of living, that is running, water — needs no maintenance. A בֹּאר is cut out of rock and plastered, and a plastered cistern that cracks holds nothing at all. The verse’s force is that the second is more work than the first and yields less.

What was checked and what was not. No archaeological report was consulted. Nothing here rests on excavation data, lime-plaster chemistry or Iron Age water management, and the paragraph above is background a reader can find in any dictionary, not a finding. What was measured is only this: the Greek column uses one noun, λάκκος, ten times in the book, and eight of the other nine are the pit Jeremiah is lowered into at Greek 44:16 and 45:6–13 — Hebrew 37:16 and 38. The Hebrew spells the two differently.

Every Greek figure on this page was run against the same screening corpus, and it is smaller than the shelf’s holdings on purpose. The Greek Old Testament here is 64 CATSS files and 30,637 verse units. A run screen sees 30,348, because the Odes are excluded. They have to be: Ode 9 is Luke 1 and Ode 13 is Luke 2, copied into a Greek Old Testament manuscript, and ten more 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. Left in, they would hand those passages a spurious perfect match with themselves and would silently double the tie band of anything touching a canticle. No Ode is a copy of anything in Jeremiah, so on this page the exclusion changes no figure — but the number the page quotes for the corpus is the screened one, 30,348, and not the held one.

The Greek New Testament side is the SBL edition via MorphGNT, 7,927 verses in 27 files. As of 30 August 2026 cross-corpus runs apply MorphGNT’s own spelling equivalences — ou / ouk / ouch, ek / ex, and the movable nu — so figures on this page are higher than anything a page written before that date reports. Every run here was re-measured; nothing was copied from a sibling page.

Josiah’s reform, the fall of Assyria, the Scythian question and the Babylonian advance are all outside what this page can measure. No cuneiform source was consulted. No Babylonian Chronicle, no Lachish ostracon, no bulla bearing a name from this book, no excavation report from Anathoth. The identity of the “foe from the north” in chapters 4–6 is a genuinely contested question and this page does not enter it. What the text says is that the direction is north; the text does not name the nation, and neither does this page.

The Greek column of Jeremiah 4:4 contains three consecutive words that Jesus uses in Mark 10:5 — and the same three words stand in Greek Deuteronomy 10:16, identically.

The measurement returns three in both directions and therefore cannot say which Old Testament verse Mark 10:5 is nearer. Neither can this page. What it can say is that the word is uncommon: five occurrences across the 64 CATSS files — the noun at Deuteronomy 10:16, Jeremiah 4:4 and Sirach 16:10, the adjective σκληροκάρδιος at Ezekiel 3:7 and Proverbs 17:20 — and three in the New Testament, all of them on Jesus’ lips, twice about divorce and once about unbelief.

And note what the Hebrew of Jeremiah 4:4 and Deuteronomy 10:16 actually says: circumcise the foreskin of your heart. The Greek word is not a translation of that image; it replaces the image with the idea. A reader in Greek is hearing about hardness where a reader in Hebrew is hearing about a surgical removal.

The three consonants שׁוב carry chapter 3 the way הוֹי carries Isaiah 5.

Counted on the consonantal forms and hand-separated from the three other roots that share letters in this passage — ישׁב to dwell (7), שׁבר to break (6) and שׁבע to swear / to be sated (5) — which together account for the other 18 hits a blunt letter search returns. The separation was done by eye, verse by verse, and is the one number on this page that a machine did not produce unaided.

The Greek column carries the play, but not to the same depth. Forms of the στρέφω family — ἐπιστρέφω, ἀποστρέφω, ἀναστρέφω and their nouns — stand 20 times in CATSS Jeremiah 1–5, 8 of them in chapter 3. So the Hebrew puts nearly two-thirds of its turn-words in chapter 3 and the Greek puts under half, chiefly because three of chapter 3’s four מְשֻׁבָה epithets are not turn-words in the row at all.

All 1,298 CATSS rows of Jeremiah were screened against all 7,927 verses of the Greek New Testament for this page. Sixteen rows reach six consecutive words or more. Every one of the sixteen lies outside this study.

Look at what the seven sixes are. They are all the same phrase — ἰδοὺ ἡμέραι ἔρχονται λέγει κύριος καί, behold, days are coming, says the Lord, and — standing in seven different Jeremiah rows and matching one New Testament verse, Hebrews 8:8. The tie band on the New Testament side is one, and the tie band on the Jeremiah side is seven. A run of six that seven verses of the same book can produce is a formula, and the page labels it one.

The book’s two runs of 23 are studied on their own page: Jeremiah 31:31–34, the New Covenant.

Jeremiah 1–5 tops out at five, three times.

Two of the three are not connections in any sense, and the page says so plainly. ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις ἐκείναις καί is a date formula; Luke 4:2 is the wilderness temptation and has nothing to do with Jeremiah 3:17. τοῖς ἔργοις τῶν χειρῶν αὐτῶν, the works of their hands, is the standard idiom for idols in both testaments. What is faintly interesting is that one New Testament verse, Acts 7:41, reaches five with two different Jeremiah rows — and Acts 7:41 is the golden calf, which is the topic of one of the two rows, 1:16. The other, 3:17, touches Acts 7:41 on the date formula alone and has nothing to do with a calf. The page prints that as an observation about vocabulary, not as an argument that Stephen is quoting Jeremiah, because the measurement cannot support the second claim.

And the third — the caves — the page corrects itself on.

The deepest Greek contact in Jeremiah 1–5 is beaten, inside the very same New Testament verse, by a row from another book. Isaiah 2:19 goes one word further. The page prints this beside its own headline number precisely so that the five is not read as more than it is, and asserts nothing about which Old Testament verse Revelation 6:15 has in view — or whether it has either.

Four lines from these chapters are quoted from pulpits every week. Here is what the same screen that produced the table above does with them.

Jeremiah 5:21 is the sharpest of these and the most useful. Screened against the whole Greek New Testament its deepest run is 2, and 225 other verses tie it there. Against Mark 8:18 in particular the shared run is 2. Yet Mark 8:18 says having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? to men in a boat, and no honest reader thinks that is a coincidence. The measurement is correct and the conclusion a reader would draw from it alone would be wrong. That is what a tie band of 225 is for: it says these two words are everywhere; stop counting and start reading.

On the Hebrew side 5:21’s nearest relatives are not in the New Testament at all. עֵינַיִם לָהֶם וְלֹא יִרְאוּ — four words, tie band 3 — stands at Psalm 115:5 and Psalm 135:16, where the eyes that do not see belong to idols. Jeremiah says of the people what the psalms say of statues. The page prints the measurement and leaves the sermon to the reader.

Screened against every other verse in the 23,204-verse Masoretic corpus, the deepest rows in Jeremiah 1–5 are Jeremiah against Jeremiah.

Three of the four deepest are this book repeating itself, and the fourth is a formula out of Kings. The 4:4 / 21:12 pair is the deepest single contact in the passage: ten consecutive words, and no third verse in the Hebrew Bible has them. The two verses are addressed to different people — 4:4 to the men of Judah, 21:12 to the house of David — and the threat is identical.

The 1:19 / 15:20 pair is the one worth sitting with. Eight words, tie band one. They are said to Jeremiah at his commissioning, and they are said to him again in chapter 15, immediately after he has told God you have become to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail. The measurement shows only that the sentence is repeated verbatim in the book and nowhere else. What that repetition is doing is a reading, and the page marks it as one.

Nine of the 143 verses in this passage share no two consecutive words with any other verse in the Hebrew Bible.

⚠️ What that zero means, exactly. The Hebrew screen on this shelf runs with unigram_fallback=False, so 0 means “shares no two consecutive words with any other verse” — not shares no words. Jeremiah 1:5 shares plenty of individual words with the rest of the Bible; what it does not share is any two of them side by side.

That the list opens with 1:5 is the finding. The verse most often printed on a card, read at an ordination and quoted in an argument is, measured, one of the nine most verbally isolated verses in these five chapters. Nobody in the Hebrew Bible says it the way Jeremiah 1:5 says it.

Jeremiah 5:1 reads like Abraham bargaining over Sodom. It was measured against Genesis 18, verse by verse, over both chapters.

The two chapters share a shape — a city, a search, a number of righteous people, a possible pardon — and they do not share sentences. Genesis 18 counts down from fifty; Jeremiah 5 starts at one and does not find it. The resemblance is real and it is not verbal, and a run screen is the wrong instrument for it. The page prints the numbers so that the resemblance is not smuggled in as a measurement.

The Hebrew screen reported Jeremiah 5:29 and Jeremiah 9:8 sharing ten consecutive tokens. Nine of them are words. The tenth is a scribal mark.

The Masoretic edition used here — Sefaria’s Miqra according to the Masorah — prints the section markers {ס} and {פ} in the text stream. The normaliser strips the markup around them but the bare letter survives tokenisation, and both Jeremiah 5:29 and Jeremiah 9:8 end with a samekh. So the raw figure for that pair is 10 and the honest figure is 9, which is what this page prints.

This matters for one reason: the 4:4 pair and the 5:29 pair both came back as ten, and only one of them is really ten. Had the page not checked, it would have printed a tie at the top of its own table. The deepest verbatim contact in Jeremiah 1–5 is 4:4 with 21:12, alone, at ten. The normaliser is frozen and is not being changed to fix this; the page reports around it. Every other Hebrew figure on this page was checked the same way.

No Dead Sea material was consulted, and for Jeremiah that is not a footnote — it is the centre of the scholarly conversation this page is standing next to.

The Hebrew and Greek books of Jeremiah differ by roughly a sixth in length and by a wholesale relocation of the Oracles Against the Nations. Cave 4 produced Hebrew fragments that are discussed in the literature as witnesses to a shorter Hebrew edition, and not one of them is held on this shelf or has been checked here. Every statement on this page about the two texts is therefore a two-column statement: the Masoretic edition as printed, and the CATSS file as digitized. There is no third column.

Findings on this page that a third witness could bear on directly:

• 2:1 — the verse with no CATSS row.
• 1:1 — the words of Jeremiah against τὸ ῥῆμα τοῦ θεοῦ.
• 1:10 — six destructive-and-constructive verbs in one column and five in the other.
• 3:6, 3:8, 3:12 — מְשֻׁבָה against ἡ κατοικία.
• 4:22 — my people against the leaders of my people.

What is claimed about all five is only this: the Masoretic column as printed in the edition used has one thing, the CATSS row as digitized has another. No claim is made about which is earlier, what either witness once read, or what produced the difference.

No Hebrew or Greek critical apparatus — not BHS, not BHQ, not the Göttingen Jeremiah, which is the edition a specialist would insist on for exactly the questions this page raises. The Greek here is Rahlfs as digitized by CATSS, one edition and not a critical reconstruction, and where this page says “the row does not have it” it means that file and no more. No Targum Jonathan, no Peshitta, no Vulgate, no Aquila, Symmachus or Theodotion. No rabbinic material and no patristic reception.

The versification correspondences outside chapters 1–5 are four verified anchors, not a table. Greek 38:31–34 = Hebrew 31:31–34, Greek 44:16 = Hebrew 37:16, Greek 45:6 = Hebrew 38:6, Greek 28:52 = Hebrew 51:52 — each checked by reading the Greek row and matching its content. Everything between and around those anchors is left unstated on this page. A printed correspondence table exists in every commentary; this page does not reproduce one it has not derived.

The word-count separations in stage 3 were made by eye. The figure of 25 for the root שׁוב required separating it from ישׁב, שׁבר and שׁבע, which a letter search cannot do. That number is a hand-checked count of 43 machine hits, and it is the one figure on this page a reader should treat as human work rather than machine output. The 43 raw hits and their references are reproducible from the tooling.

Two questions this page deliberately does not answer. Who or what the foe from the north is, and whether the Greek book’s shorter form represents an earlier Hebrew edition. Both are live in the literature; neither can be settled from the text files this page measures. A page that answered them would be repeating something it had read.

The run screen finds verbatim contact. It does not find allusion, and Jeremiah 1–5 is a passage where almost everything worth noticing is allusion. It gave Mark 8:18 a 2 against the verse Mark is obviously echoing. It gave Galatians 1:15 a 1 against Jeremiah 1:5. It gave John 4:14 a 1 against the fountain of living waters. Every one of those low numbers is correct as a measurement and misleading as a conclusion, which is why they are printed in their own table rather than omitted.

Conversely, a high number is not automatically a citation. The seven Jeremiah rows that reach six against Hebrews 8:8 all do it on behold, days are coming, says the Lord, which is simply how this prophet starts a sentence. Where a text does not signal a citation, this page reports shared words and stops.

• William L. Holladay, Jeremiah 1 (Hermeneia) — chapters 1–25.
• Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 1–20 (Anchor Yale Bible 21A).
• Leslie C. Allen, Jeremiah (Old Testament Library).
• Robert P. Carroll, Jeremiah (Old Testament Library).
• Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible — for the two editions of Jeremiah, which this page describes but does not adjudicate.
• Georg Walser, Jeremiah (Septuagint Commentary Series) — for the Greek column.
• None of these were consulted for the measurements on this page, which were run on the text files named in the footer.

In chapter 2 Jeremiah accuses his people of hewing out cisterns that hold no water. Thirty-six chapters later, men lower him on ropes into a cistern in the court of the guard, and there is no water in it, only mire, and he sinks in it.

In the Greek column those are the same word. Ten occurrences of λάκκος in the book; one is the accusation at 2:13 and eight are the prophet in the hole at Greek 44:16 and 45:6–13, which are Hebrew 37:16 and 38. The Hebrew does not spell them the same — בֹּארֹת in chapter 2, הַבּוֹר in chapter 38 — so a reader in Hebrew sees two related nouns and a reader in Greek sees one word used twice.

The page states the measurement and stops there. Whether the Greek column’s single word is making a point or simply doing its job is not something a word count can decide, and this page does not decide it.

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.

Screened against all 23,204 verse units of the Hebrew Bible, Jeremiah 1:5 comes back zero. No two of its words stand side by side anywhere else. Not in the psalms of formation, not in the servant songs, not in the other call narratives. The sentence Christians most often reach for when they want to say that God knew a person before there was a person is a sentence the rest of the Hebrew Bible does not know how to say.

This study closes the last dark chapters at the front of the book of Jeremiah on this shelf — 1–5, alongside the existing study at 31:31–34, the new covenant, which holds the two deepest verbatim runs in the whole book.