A Chapter English Bibles Don’t Number

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Joel, Book of,” “Locust,” “Day of the Lord,” “Jehoshaphat, Valley of.”
• Dictionary of the OT: Prophets (IVP) — “Joel: Book of,” “Day of the Lord,” “Locusts,” “Spirit of God.”
• Dictionary of NT Use of the OT (Beale & Carson) — on Acts 2:17–21 and Romans 10:13.
• NIDOTTE — אַרְבֶּה, רוּחַ, שָׁפַךְ, מָלַט.

Only two of the twelve Minor Prophets have different chapter counts in Hebrew and English. Joel is one of them.

The mapping:

Established from content at both seams rather than assumed. The Hebrew and the CATSS Greek agree with each other exactly, verse for verse, across all 73. Malachi is the other book whose chapter count differs — three in Hebrew, four in English — and it is later on this shelf.

Every CATSS row of Joel, measured against every verse of the Greek New Testament for the longest run of consecutive identical word forms.

The five rows reaching seven or more are Hebrew 3:1, 3:2, 3:3, 3:4 and 3:5 — every verse of that chapter and no other verse of the book. There is no run of 6 anywhere in Joel: the distribution steps from eight rows at five straight to five rows at seven. The separation is not marginal.

CATSS Joel 3:1 has 34 words; Acts 2:17 has 38; nineteen of them run together in the same order with nothing between.

ἐκχεῶ ἀπὸ τοῦ πνεύματός μου ἐπὶ πᾶσαν σάρκα καὶ προφητεύσουσιν οἱ υἱοὶ ὑμῶν καὶ αἱ θυγατέρες ὑμῶν καὶ οἱ

One verse in each band, from both directions, with a long gap to whatever comes second: on the New Testament side the next is Acts 2:18 at 5, and those two are the only verses of the 7,927 reaching even 4 against this row; on the CATSS side the next are 2 Chronicles 29:9 at 8 and Deuteronomy 12:12 at 7. And the string is as rare as it is long: it stands in exactly one of the 18,183 CATSS verse units and one of the 7,927 New Testament verses — in fact it is already unique in both corpora by its sixth word, ἐκχεῶ ἀπὸ τοῦ πνεύματός μου ἐπί. Depth and rarity agree here, which on the previous study of this shelf they did not.

⚠️ Nineteen is the deepest run in Joel, and not the deepest on this disk. Run the identical screen over all 18,183 CATSS verse units against all 7,927 New Testament verses and at least three pairs go deeper — Deuteronomy 6:5 with Mark 12:30 at 21, and Psalm 2:2 with Acts 4:26 and Psalm 44:8 with Hebrews 1:9 at 20 (CATSS Psalm numbering). The boundary of this study is doing work and the page says so.

The twentieth word is πρεσβύτεροι in the CATSS row and νεανίσκοι in Acts 2:17. Each column is printed here as its own file has it.

That opening οἱ is the run’s own last word, repeated in each line to show where each column picks up. Both files give the lemma ἐνύπνιον; the row has ἐνύπνια and Acts has ἐνυπνίοις. A contiguous-run test can go no further than the point where two columns stop reading the same, and here that point is the twentieth word. Nothing measured here bears on how either column came to stand as it does.

The two columns also open differently: the CATSS row begins καὶ ἔσται μετὰ ταῦτα καί, and Acts 2:17 begins καὶ ἔσται ἐν ταῖς ἐσχάταις ἡμέραις λέγει ὁ θεός. The word standing immediately before ἐκχεῶ is καί in the one and θεός in the other.

What the measurement is, and is not. It counts 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. It says nothing about which text is prior and nothing about citation. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel are not among the Greek files here.

Joel names four devourers in 1:4 and the same four in 2:25, and the second list is not in the order of the first. Both columns rotate identically.

Read the columns downward: the pairing גָּזָם–κάμπη, אַרְבֶּה–ἀκρίς, יֶלֶק–βροῦχος, חָסִיל–ἐρυσίβη holds in both verses, through a rotation that moves the first name to the end. Whatever the four Hebrew words denote — and that is disputed — the Greek row treats them as four fixed counterparts rather than as four words for the same thing.

And one of the four Greek words is not an insect: ἐρυσίβη is rust or mildew, a crop disease.

The Greek New Testament files carry a surface word column and the edition’s own normalised column. Every figure on this page is read off the surface column. Recomputed on the normalised one, the chapter-3 result holds — five rows still separate out, and they are still the five rows of Hebrew chapter 3.

⚠️ But the number 19 is not column-stable, and it depends on a filter this page must declare. At Acts 2:17 the surface column reads προφητεύσουσιν and the normalised column reads προφητεύσουσι(ν). Parentheses are not Greek letters. This screen filters both sides to Greek letters — a step needed on the CATSS side to clear the beta-code markers, and applied to the New Testament side as well — so the parentheses fall away and the run reads 19 on either column. Without that filter on the New Testament side the normalised column gives not 19 but two runs of 9, a tie band of two.

Three of the 73 rows change value between the columns when the filter is withheld from the New Testament side — Joel 3:1 (19 against 9), Joel 2:21 and Joel 4:9 (3 against 2) — and the count of rows reaching 3 moves from 49 to 47. The stability claimed here is therefore this: on the Greek-letter-filtered comparison used throughout this page, all 73 rows return the same run on both columns. Stated any other way it would not be true, and on the previous study of this shelf the same two columns changed the run on 5,292 of 478,516 pairs.

Three texts, ten words each, and the differences are tiny.

Acts 2:21 differs from the row in one word out of ten — ἐάν where the row has ἄν — and that word sits in the middle, so the ten-word agreement is cut into four and five and the run returns 5. Romans keeps ἄν and inserts γάρ earlier, so its tail runs seven unbroken.

Romans 10:13 is this row’s single deepest partner in the whole Greek New Testament, and the maximum is not a tie. Which is worth stating plainly: on this measurement the verse standing in the Pentecost speech scores lower than the verse in Romans, because of one particle. A contiguous-run test measures wording. It is not a detector of citation and this page does not use it as one.

Same pattern, different cause.

CATSS Joel 3:3: …ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς…
Acts 2:19: …ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ ἄνω καὶ σημεῖα ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς κάτω…
Revelation 5:13: …ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς…

Acts 2:19 returns 6; Revelation 5:13 returns 7, and it is the only verse of the 7,927 reaching 7 against this row. Revelation 5:13 is not saying anything about Joel — it is describing every creature in heaven and on earth. It wins the screen because it happens to carry the seven words without interruption.

So of the five verses, three have their Acts 2 counterpart as their deepest partner and two do not. 3:1 (19), 3:2 (9) and 3:4 (11) do; 3:3 goes to Revelation 5:13 and 3:5 to Romans 10:13. The page reports the screen’s answer rather than the expected one.

Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3 both have swords beaten into ploughshares. Joel 4:10 has ploughshares beaten into swords.

The Greek row reads συγκόψατε τὰ ἄροτρα ὑμῶν εἰς ῥομφαίας καὶ τὰ δρέπανα ὑμῶν εἰς σειρομάστας. Micah is later on this shelf and its row will be set beside this one there. Which direction is prior is not something these columns settle, and the page notes the pair without ordering it.

A run of 19 is unusually strong evidence of shared wording and still says nothing about direction. Nothing on this page states which text is prior, that anyone quoted or adapted anything, or why any reading stands as it does.

The screen’s two failures are more informative than its success. At 3:5 a single particle costs two words of run; at 3:3 three inserted words cost one. If this measurement were treated as a citation detector it would rank Romans above Acts for a verse standing inside the Acts speech. It is reported here as what it is — a count of identical consecutive forms.

Scope, twice. 35 CATSS files and 27 Greek New Testament files, and those only. The “unique in both directions” result for Joel 3:1 and Acts 2:17 is scoped to 18,183 verse units and 7,927 verses; the “nothing else reaches six” negative is scoped to the 73 rows of Joel on the surface column.

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. No Targum, Syriac, Vulgate, Aquila, Symmachus or Theodotion. No text-critical work on the Acts citation, where the manuscript tradition varies at more than one of the points measured above.

And nothing about the date, or the locusts. Whether Joel is pre-exilic or post-exilic, and whether chapter 1 describes an infestation, an army, or an infestation read as an army, are questions a word count cannot touch. Even the four Hebrew names are disputed — whether they are four species, four stages of one insect, or four words chosen for their sound.

Open an English Bible at Joel and there is no chapter 3 where the Hebrew has one. The five verses are still there — they are simply printed as the end of chapter 2. And those five verses are the five deepest rows in the book against the Greek New Testament, by a margin the rest of Joel never approaches.

Nineteen words of Joel 3:1 stand unbroken in Acts 2:17, a string found once in eighteen thousand Greek Old Testament verse units and once in eight thousand New Testament verses. Then eleven at 3:4, nine at 3:2, seven at 3:3 and seven at 3:5. Then nothing in the other sixty-eight verses reaches six.

And two of the five have their deepest partner outside Acts — one to Revelation, one to Romans, and that one over a single particle. The measurement found the chapter. It did not find the quotation, and the difference between those two things is most of what this page is for.

Fourth study on the Minor Prophets shelf, and the whole of Joel in one page. Amos is next, and Joel 4:16 and Amos 1:2 open with the same line.