The Line That Comes Back

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Proverbs, Book of,” “Wisdom in the OT,” “Adultery,” “Septuagint.”
• Dictionary of the OT: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings (IVP) — “Proverbs, Book of,” “Woman, Strange,” “Adultery,” “Translations, Ancient.”
• NIDOTTE — זור, נכר, נצר, שמר.
• Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible — “Rephaim,” for the word behind γηγενεῖς at 2:18.

Every standard treatment identifies chapters 1–9 as a set of parental discourses and disagrees about how many there are — usually ten, sometimes twelve, depending on whether 6:1–19 is counted as an interruption. That is a judgement about literary units. This page did not make it and could not; there is no marker on disk that divides a discourse from the next.

What is on disk is the address and the repetition. Twelve occurrences of בְּנִי in these six chapters, and two sentences that stand twice with a band of one. The page builds on those and leaves the discourse count to the commentaries.

The Hebrew of Proverbs 6 sends the sluggard to the ant and stops there. The CATSS Greek file has three more rows, forty words, and then goes on to 6:9.

ἢ πορεύθητι πρὸς τὴν μέλισσαν καὶ μάθε ὡς ἐργάτις ἐστὶν τήν τε ἐργασίαν ὡς σεμνὴν ποιεῖται

ἧς τοὺς πόνους βασιλεῖς καὶ ἰδιῶται πρὸς ὑγίειαν προσφέρονται ποθεινὴ δέ ἐστιν πᾶσιν καὶ ἐπίδοξος

καίπερ οὖσα τῇ ῥώμῃ ἀσθενής τὴν σοφίαν τιμήσασα προήχθη

Or go to the bee, and learn how industrious she is, and how honourable a work she performs; whose labours kings and commoners take for health; she is desired by all and held in honour; and though weak in strength, she has been advanced by honouring wisdom.

The gloss above is a working translation made for this page. No published English rendering of these three rows was consulted, and none of the patristic writers who quote them was read for this study. The page states the rows exist and what they say; it does not say where they came from.

Masoretic verses against CATSS rows, for the six chapters of this study:

Nine rows carry a letter; one Hebrew verse number has no Greek row to match. That number is 4:7 — the Greek file runs 4:6, 4:8 — and it is why chapter 4 shows 26 numbered rows against 27 Hebrew verses. Nine minus one is the net eight.

“No Greek row of this number” is a statement about what Proverbs.mlxx labels, not a claim about the existence of any text anywhere. Row labels were matched anchored, so Prov 7:1a is kept distinct from Prov 7:1; read unanchored, the lettered rows fold into the numbered ones and the verse text is silently lengthened while the verse count still looks right.

Between the Greek rows numbered 7:1 and 7:2 the file carries a row labelled 7:1a.

υἱέ τίμα τὸν κύριον καὶ ἰσχύσεις πλὴν δὲ αὐτοῦ μὴ φοβοῦ ἄλλον — Son, honour the Lord and you shall be strong; and besides him fear no other.

Twelve words. It stands immediately after the row that is the Greek counterpart of the Hebrew line this page has been following since 2:1 — and it is the only lettered row in chapter 7.

It establishes concentration, and nothing else. A form that occurs four times and twice lands here is a fact about distribution. It is not evidence that one verse was written with the other in view, and this page does not say it is.

These are form counts on consonantal spellings, not lemma counts. There is no Hebrew lemmatiser in this library, so no root claim is made. The count folds final letter-forms to medial, drops vowel points and cantillation, reads the qere, and treats maqqef as a word separator. Change the maqqef rule and some of these numbers move — for instance מֵאִשָּׁה זָרָה is unaffected, but any count touching אֶת־כׇּל is not.

Counted on the CATSS form column, a word of the ἀλλότριος family stands on six of the 177 Greek rows in chapters 2–7: 2:16, 5:10, 5:17, 5:20, 6:24 and 7:5.

It does not track the Hebrew “strange woman” verses. At 2:16 it attaches to γνώμης, judgement, with no woman in the row at all; at 6:24 it attaches to γλώσσης, the tongue; at 5:3, which is one of the three Hebrew זָרָה verses, it does not appear — that row has φαύλῃ γυναικί and γυναικὸς πόρνης. Only at 7:5 do a Hebrew זָרָה and a Greek ἀλλοτρίας stand in rows of the same number with a woman in both.

That is a count of where forms sit in two files. It is not a statement that one word renders another, which would be a claim about translation rather than about counting.

All 169 verses were screened against the 39-book Masoretic corpus held here — 23,204 verse units — on contiguous runs of whole consonantal word forms, each chapter run against everything but itself. Forty-nine of the 169 share no two consecutive words with any other verse in the Bible.

Twelve verses reach four or more. Eleven of the twelve have Proverbs itself as their only partner.

Two counter-examples the page prints against its own headline. First: the deepest pair of all, 6:10 with 24:33 at eight words, leaves this study — 24:33 is in the sayings of the wise, seventeen chapters on. The section is not sealed. Second: the one row whose partner is outside Proverbs is 6:31 with Song of Songs 8:7, four words, band of one — אֶת־כׇּל־הוֹן בֵּיתוֹ, all the goods of his house. Two of those four words are the maqqef-bound clitics אֶת and כׇּל; under a tokenisation that welds maqqef rather than splitting it, that run is shorter. It is an idiom, not a quotation, and the page says so rather than letting it stand as a Proverbs–Song link.

All 177 CATSS rows were screened against the 7,927 verses of the SBL Greek New Testament. Across the 177 rows: 154 reach two, 42 reach three, 6 reach four, 3 reach six, 2 reach nine, 1 reaches eleven, and nothing reaches twelve.

Every run above four in these six chapters is in chapter 3, and every one of the three is a New Testament citation. Chapters 2, 4 and 6 never reach four at all: their ceilings are three. Chapter 5 reaches four once and chapter 7 twice, and none of the three is a citation.

The two fours with a band of one, printed so they are not misread. Proverbs 5:19 and Ephesians 6:18 share ἐν παντὶ καιρῷ ἐν — at all times in a marriage poem and at all times in an exhortation to pray. Proverbs 7:3 and Revelation 20:9 share ἐπὶ τὸ πλάτος τῆς — the breadth of a heart and the breadth of the earth. A band of one means only that no other New Testament verse reaches the same length; it does not make the contact meaningful. That is exactly why the shelf reports the band and then reads the verse.

The spelling fold moves one figure here, and the page says which. Cross-corpus runs on this shelf now apply MorphGNT’s own equivalences — οὐ / οὐκ / οὐχ, ἐκ / ἐξ, and the movable nu. Re-run without the table, every figure in the six-row table above comes back identical: 11, 9, 6, 4, 4, 4, with the same bands. One figure on the page does move: without the fold 41 rows reach three rather than 42. On other pages the fold raises the deep runs; here it raises nothing above three.

Six of the Hebrew repetitions above have Greek rows of the same numbers on both sides. Four shrink; two grow.

This is the page’s finding, and it runs both ways. The two repetitions that frame this section in the Hebrew all but vanish in the Greek file; two other repetitions, at 6:20 and 5:7, run deeper in the Greek than in the Hebrew. The set of sentences that binds these six chapters together is not the same set in the two files. The page does not say which arrangement is older and has no way to tell.

One of the twelve Hebrew pairs has no Greek row of the same number: 6:15 ↔ 29:1. The CATSS labels for Proverbs run 1–24 and then 30–36, with no labels 25–29, because after 24:22 the Greek file carries this material in an order different from the Masoretic text. That is a real difference between the two files, not a bare labelling artefact, and this page makes no claim about how either order arose. The Greek of Masoretic 29:1 is in the file, at row 36:1 — chapter 36 carries 27 rows against the 27 verses of Masoretic 29, and 36:1 and 36:27 are the Greek of 29:1 and 29:27. Measured that way the pair reaches one word, ἐξαπίνης.

No verse of Proverbs 2–7 reaches six or more consonantal words with any verse outside Proverbs. The ceiling outside the book is four, reached once, at 6:31 with Song of Songs 8:7 — and two of those four words are maqqef-bound clitics.

No Greek row in chapters 2, 4 or 6 reaches four words with the Greek New Testament. Their ceilings are three — and six of those threes sit in a band of one (2:21, 4:27, 4:27b, 6:3, 6:13 and 6:27), which is why the band is printed and never the run alone.

The Greek NT screen was run against 7,927 verses; the Greek Old Testament held here is 64 CATSS files and 30,637 verse units, of which a run screen sees 30,348. The difference is the Odes, which are excluded: 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 5, Isaiah 26, Isaiah 38, Jonah 2 and Daniel 3. Screening against them would return the same text twice and inflate every band.

No Hebrew or Greek critical apparatus was consulted. No Qumran manuscript of Proverbs, no Cairo Geniza fragment, no Syriac, no Vulgate, no Aquila, Symmachus or Theodotion. No manuscript evidence of any kind bearing on the nine lettered rows in these chapters, or on the missing row numbered 4:7.

No patristic citation of the bee passage was read, although the rows are known to be quoted in antiquity. No commentary on Proverbs was opened for the measurements; the works listed at the foot of this page are the standing scholarly frame for the passage, not sources for any number printed here.

And no published English rendering of Proverbs 6:8a–c or 7:1a was consulted — those glosses are working translations made for this page.

First: the headline rests on two pairs, and two pairs is a small number. 2:1↔7:1 and 2:16↔7:5 are striking because their bands are one, but a band of one on a four- or five-word run is not rare in a book that repeats itself as much as Proverbs does. Eleven of the twelve deepest rows in this passage point back into Proverbs; that is the frame in which the two pairs should be read, and it makes them less exceptional than they look in isolation.

Second: the Greek comparison is a comparison of one modern edition against one digitised Hebrew text. It says what Rahlfs as digitised by CATSS reads beside what Sefaria’s Miqra according to the Masorah reads. It is not a text-critical result and cannot be used as one.

Third: the structure diagram is a description, not a proof. The frame A B … A′ B′ is measured — the runs and the bands are printed. The labelling of 3:1–4:27 and 5:1–6:19 as the material between the frames is editorial, and no test was run that would divide those chapters into discourses.

A father tells a son to keep his words. Five chapters later he tells him again, in the same words, and warns him about the same woman in the same words. Nothing between the two statements has been forgotten; the second is not a correction. It is the same sentence, again.

Instruction that is worth giving once is worth giving twice, and Proverbs is not embarrassed about it. The measurement here simply shows how exact the repetition is: four words and five words with no third verse in the Bible reaching them.

And it shows something about translation, without judging it. In the Greek file the two framing sentences no longer match each other — but two other sentences in the same six chapters match more closely there than they do in the Hebrew. Whatever the reader takes from that, the page has no way to tell you which came first, and does not guess.