Four Lines After the Last Verse

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Proverbs, Book of,” “Wisdom in the OT,” “Septuagint,” “Arianism.”
• Dictionary of the OT: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings (IVP) — “Proverbs, Book of,” “Woman Wisdom and Woman Folly,” “Fear of the Lord,” “Translations, Ancient.”
• NIDOTTE — חכמה, יראה, מוסר, זרה.

Every standard treatment says the Greek of Proverbs is a freer translation than most of the Greek Old Testament, and that its arrangement of the collections after chapter 24 differs from the Hebrew. The second half of that is visible in the file: the Greek chapter labels run 1–24 and then 30–36, with no chapters numbered 25–29 at all.

The first half is a judgement about translation technique, and this page does not make it. What is printed here is the count of rows and labels in the two files. That the Greek runs longer in chapters 1–9 is a fact about the files; why it does is not.

Here is every row the Greek file carries under the label Prov 9, in file order, against the eighteen verses of Masoretic Proverbs 9:

Eighteen numbered verses, eight lettered rows, twenty-six rows in all. The eight cluster at three points, and four of them stand after the chapter’s last numbered verse.

Nineteen of the thirty-one chapter labels in the file carry at least one lettered row; twelve carry none. Ranked by lettered rows per numbered verse:

The band at the maximum has exactly one member. And chapter 9 is also first by raw count, at eight against five.

Stated against itself: Masoretic Proverbs 9 is the shortest chapter in the book — eighteen verses against a mean of 29.5 — so a small denominator does flatter the ratio. That is why the raw count is given beside it: on raw count, with no denominator at all, chapter 9 still comes first.

9:18a — ἀλλὰ ἀποπήδησον μὴ ἐγχρονίσῃς ἐν τῷ τόπῳ μηδὲ ἐπιστήσῃς τὸ σὸν ὄμμα πρὸς αὐτήν

9:18b — οὕτως γὰρ διαβήσῃ ὕδωρ ἀλλότριον καὶ ὑπερβήσῃ ποταμὸν ἀλλότριον

9:18c — ἀπὸ δὲ ὕδατος ἀλλοτρίου ἀπόσχου καὶ ἀπὸ πηγῆς ἀλλοτρίας μὴ πίῃς

9:18d — ἵνα πολὺν ζήσῃς χρόνον προστεθῇ δέ σοι ἔτη ζωῆς

Forty-three words: leap away, do not linger, do not fix your eye on her; keep from another’s water and another’s spring; that you may live long. The English here is a working gloss made for this page and checked against no published version, because no English translation of these four rows was consulted.

Counted on the CATSS lemma column, the word ἀλλότριος stands on eleven rows in Greek chapters 1–9 — and four of those eleven are inside these last four rows: ὕδωρ ἀλλότριον and ποταμὸν ἀλλότριον at 9:18b, ὕδατος ἀλλοτρίου and πηγῆς ἀλλοτρίας at 9:18c.

The same word stands in the Greek rows at 2:16, 5:20 and 7:5, where the Hebrew verses carry זָרָה and/or נׇכְרִיָּה.

Two things this page will not say about that. It will not say the Greek renders one Hebrew word by another — that is a claim about translation, not about counting. And it will not say that every “strange woman” verse in the collection carries the word: it does not. Of the four Masoretic verses with זָרָה as a noun (2:16, 5:3, 5:20, 7:5), the Greek row at 5:3 carries no ἀλλότριος-family form at all, reading φαύλῃ γυναικί and γυναικὸς πόρνης; and at 6:24 the ἀλλοτρίας attaches to γλώσσης, not to a woman. An earlier draft of this page asserted the universal and it was false.

חׇכְמָה, wisdom. Counted prefix-aware on the consonantal stem, the form stands 37 times in Proverbs — 16 of them in chapters 1–9 and 21 in 10–31. Proverbs 4:7 is the only verse in all 915 that carries it twice, and it is one of the two verses with no Greek row of the same number.

יִרְאַת, the fear of. Fifteen tokens end in that form across the book, and all fifteen are immediately followed by יְהֹוָה. Five of the fifteen stand in chapters 1–9.

Both are form counts on consonantal spellings with prefixes allowed, not lemma counts — there is no Hebrew lemmatiser in this library, so no root claim is made.

Rahlfs’ Greek Proverbs 3:12 and Hebrews 12:6 stand as the same eleven word-forms in the same order — the whole of each verse.

ὃν γὰρ ἀγαπᾷ κύριος παιδεύει, μαστιγοῖ δὲ πάντα υἱὸν ὃν παραδέχεται

No other verse among the 7,927 in the SBL Greek New Testament held here holds that run. And the measurement does not depend on the elision table: it returns eleven with the table and eleven without it.

A tie band is reported as the set of New Testament verses that reach a verse’s maximum run — not as the number of verses holding one particular n-gram. The two definitions differ by factors of three to twelve, and a page that prints a band without saying which it used is not reporting anything.

Under that definition Proverbs 3:7 reaches three words, and fifteen New Testament verses reach it. So no single verse is named for it here. Proverbs 3:11 reaches nine with Hebrews 12:5, band of one; Proverbs 3:34 reaches six, band of exactly two — James 4:6 and 1 Peter 5:5.

Proverbs 3:34 is inside this study: Masoretic Proverbs 3 runs to 35 verses and the Greek chapter has 35 numbered rows.

An earlier version of this study reported that Proverbs 1–9 is bound more tightly to its own book than to the rest of the canon — that measured against the rest of Scripture it sits unusually low. That claim is withdrawn.

It was produced by using the Psalter as the yardstick. Run on the identical pipeline, the share of chapters whose deepest contact with the other thirty-eight books reaches four or more consonantal words is:

Proverbs 1–9 is indistinguishable from the rest of its own book and from Job. The Psalter is the outlier, not Proverbs. Measured against the wisdom books, the effect the earlier draft reported is simply absent, and this page reports the withdrawal rather than quietly dropping it.

No verse of Proverbs 1–9 reaches a five-word run with any verse of the other thirty-eight books. The ceiling is four, and it is reached once. Scoped to the Masoretic text on disk and to consonantal forms as spelled under the shelf rule, which splits on whitespace and maqqef.

That ceiling is created by the word rule and the page says so. Two of the four words in the deepest pair are אֶת and כׇּל, maqqef-bound clitics. Re-run with maqqef treated as a joiner rather than a separator, the ceiling for Proverbs 1–9 drops from four to three. A number that moves when the tokenisation moves is a number that has to be printed with its tokenisation.

No Hebrew or Greek critical apparatus. No Qumran manuscript of Proverbs and no Cairo Geniza fragment. No Syriac, no Vulgate, no Aquila, Symmachus or Theodotion. No manuscript evidence of any kind bearing on the lettered rows or on the two Hebrew verses without a Greek row of the same number.

And no published English rendering of the eighteen lettered rows was consulted — the glosses in stage 3 are working translations made for this page.

Proverbs 1–9 is a single sustained appeal, and both files end it in the same place: a house, a table, and guests who do not know where they are. What differs is what stands in the gap before the next collection begins.

In the Hebrew, a title. In the Greek file, four more lines — and they are not a summary or a moral, but an instruction to leave: leap away, do not linger, do not look at her, keep away from the water that is not yours.

That is a description of two files, not an account of how either came to read that way. This page has no way to tell you which arrangement is older, and does not guess.