Two Runs of Six

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Zechariah, Book of,” “Shepherd,” “Massa,” “Booths, Feast of.”
• Dictionary of the OT: Prophets (IVP) — “Zechariah, Book of,” “Apocalypticism,” “Messiah,” “Shepherd.”
• Dictionary of NT Use of the OT (Beale & Carson) — on Matthew 21:5, Matthew 26:31, Matthew 27:9–10, John 19:37 and Revelation 1:7. This is the one book of the Twelve where that volume has a great deal to say.
• NIDOTTE — מַשָּׂא, רֹעֶה, דָּקַר, יוֹצֵר.

Zechariah’s offset is real but it is confined to chapters 1 and 2.

English 1:18–21 = MT/LXX 2:1–4, and English 2:1–13 = MT/LXX2:5–17; the table and the reasoning are on the first half of this study. From chapter 3 to 14:21 all three columns agree on every number, so nothing on this page needs converting — Zechariah 9:9 is Zechariah 9:9 in a Hebrew Bible, in the CATSS Greek and in the ESV alike.

Matthew 27:9–10 quotes the thirty pieces of silver and the potter, and introduces the quotation as spoken by the prophet Jeremiah. The words are Zechariah’s.

Then was fulfilled what had been spoken by the prophet Jeremiah, saying, “And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him on whom a price had been set by some of the sons of Israel, and they gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord directed me.”Matthew 27:9–10 (ESV)

The proposals are old and well rehearsed, and this page lists them without choosing: (1) a composite citation, since Jeremiah 18–19 has the potter and the potter’s house and Jeremiah 32 has a field bought and paid for by weight, so the quotation may be Zechariah’s words in Jeremiah’s frame; (2) Jeremiah standing as the head of the prophetic collection, so that the name covers more than one book; (3) a slip somewhere in the transmission. None of these can be settled from the texts this page holds, and the page does not pretend otherwise.

The one thing the measurement adds. Whatever Matthew is doing, he is not copying this Greek column. His quotation shares one word with CATSS Zechariah 11:12 and two with 11:13. And the word potter, which is the hinge of his citation, is in the Hebrew column and not in the Greek one at all.

⚠️ The Greek of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel and Daniel was added to this shelf on 19 August 2026, and proposal (1) can now be screened. Until then the CATSS Greek of Jeremiah was not held here, so the composite-citation proposal could only be reported. It is held now, and Matthew 27:9–10 has been run against all 1,298 of its verses by the same method used everywhere else on this page. Matthew is not copying the Greek Jeremiah either: 27:9 reaches a run of 2 with a tie band of 9, and 27:10 a run of 2 with a tie band of 42. Against the Greek Zechariah the same two verses reach 2 with tie bands of 1 and 7. Bands that wide are formulas, not citations, and no run anywhere reaches three. What does fall out is vocabulary rather than sequence. Matthew’s τὸν ἀγρὸν τοῦ κεραμέως, the potter’s field, breaks into two two-word runs, and both land in Jeremiah and in no verse of Zechariah: τοῦ κεραμέως at CATSS Jeremiah 18:2, 18:3 and 18:6 — ⚠️ and, this page having under-reported it, also at Isaiah 29:16, which was on this disk when the sentence was written and was missed; the phrase stands in four verses, not three, and three of the four are Jeremiah 18 — and τὸν ἀγρόν at CATSS Jeremiah 39:7–9 and in twenty-one other verses besides, a band re-counted over all 64 files on 30 August 2026: it is an ordinary two-word phrase standing in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Judges, Samuel and Kings as well, and the page should never have let it stand unbanded, which is MT and English Jeremiah 32:7–9 — Hanamel’s field at Anathoth, bought and weighed out in silver. Those are the two passages proposal (1) names, and chapter 18 carries the same number in both columns. The noun κεραμεύς stands seventeen times in fourteen verses of the sixty-four Greek Old Testament files held here — this sentence read fifteen times in twelve verses of the forty-four until 30 August 2026, when twenty more CATSS files were fetched and the shelf went to 30,637 verse units; the two additions are Wisdom 15:7, the potter kneading soft earth and making vessels for clean uses and for the opposite out of the same clay, and Psalms of Solomon 17:23, the nations shattered like a potter's vessel — both witnesses, not Scripture — three of the fourteen verses in Jeremiah 18, and in none of Zechariah, whose row has τὸ χωνευτήριον instead. On the Hebrew side the definite הַיּוֹצֵר occurs eight times in the whole Hebrew Bible: six in Jeremiah 18–19 and two in Zechariah 11:13, and nowhere else. None of this says Matthew took his words from Jeremiah, and the page still gives no verdict on the attribution; it says the words stand there, that they do not stand in the Greek Zechariah, and that a contiguous-run screen was never going to see it.

Chapter 11 is the strangest passage in the book: the prophet is told to act out the part of a shepherd over a flock doomed to be slaughtered, and it ends badly.

He takes two staffs and names them נֹעַם, Favour, and חֹבְלִים, Union — and breaks both (11:10, 11:14). He asks for his wages and is paid thirty pieces of silver, the compensation for a slave gored by an ox in Exodus 21:32. He throws it into the house of the Lord. And the chapter closes with a worthless shepherd who does not care for the flock.

The allegory is not explained by the book, and interpretations of who the shepherds are — foreign rulers, Judean leaders, a sequence of historical figures — fill a great deal of the commentary literature. The page reports the acted sign and stops.

The last chapter ends with the nations coming up to Jerusalem year after year to keep one particular festival, and it names it: חַג הַסֻּכּוֹת, the Feast of Booths (14:16).

Of the three pilgrim feasts it is the one about living in temporary shelters, and the one Solomon dedicated the first temple at. Zechariah 14 has water going out from Jerusalem east and west and never drying up in summer — and the feast the nations come for is the one that ends the agricultural year.

The page notes the feast because the book names it and for no other reason. No Second-Temple liturgical source was consulted, and the connections often drawn between Booths and John 7 are not measured here.

Six consecutive words, and then Matthew goes his own way.

Matthew keeps the six words and πραΰς and ἐπιβεβηκὼς ἐπί, drops righteous and saving, opens with a line that is not from this verse, and moves ὑποζύγιον off the first animal and onto the second — the row has ὑποζύγιον καὶ πῶλον νέον, Matthew ὄνον καὶ… πῶλον υἱὸν ὑποζυγίου. John keeps five of the six and replaces the opening with fear not. This is what a real citation looks like when it is measured: deep in one place and free everywhere else.

All 90 CATSS rows of Zechariah 9–14 were screened against all 7,927 verses of the Greek New Testament. Two rows reach six, which is the maximum for the whole book, and each has a tie band of one.

The numbers are identical. The measurement cannot tell these two apart, and nothing about the measurement was ever going to. What tells them apart is that Matthew announces a quotation and Luke is describing a scene. That is the whole method in one table: the screen finds where words coincide, and a reader decides what a coincidence is.

Across the 90 rows: 88 reach two, 75 reach three, 33 reach four, 5 reach five, 2 reach six.

The Passion narratives use four passages from these chapters. Against the Greek column printed here, one of them matches and three do not.

The 12:10 line is the sharpest. Revelation 1:7 shares four words with the row — καὶ κόψονται ἐπ' αὐτόν, and they will mourn over him — which is the second half of the verse, where the two columns agree. John 19:37 shares one, because John’s whole point is the first half, and there the row has κατωρχήσαντο where John has ἐξεκέντησαν. So the two New Testament verses that use Zechariah 12:10 stand in completely different relations to this Greek column, and the difference falls exactly on the word the verse is famous for.

⚠️ What this does and does not show. It shows that John 19:37’s wording is not the wording of the CATSS Greek row. It does not show where John’s wording did come from. The later Greek versions associated with Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion are the usual candidates and no later Greek version of Zechariah is held on this disk, so that half of the question was not checked. ⚠️ Corrected on 19 August 2026. This note used to say that none of the three is held here at all. That is no longer true — the Theodotionic Greek of Daniel was added to this shelf on that date — but no Aquila, no Symmachus and no Theodotion of Zechariah is held, so the finding is unchanged and only the statement of scope was wrong. The page reports the divergence and names what it could not test.

Zechariah 14:9: יִהְיֶה יְהוָה אֶחָד וּשְׁמוֹ אֶחָד — ἔσται κύριος εἷς καὶ τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ ἕν. The Lord will be one and his name one. The sentence Israel had said daily about God since Deuteronomy 6:4 is here said about a day, and about all the earth. Both columns carry it the same way, and no New Testament verse quotes it.

The authorship of chapters 9–14 is the standing question about this half of the book, and the page does not enter it. The absence of dates, of named contemporaries and of the interpreting angel is real and this page notes it; what follows from it is argued at length and turns on evidence a word count cannot weigh.

The Matthew 27:9 attribution is reported with three proposals and no verdict. That is deliberate. The page can show that Matthew is not copying the CATSS Greek of Zechariah — and, since the Greek Jeremiah reached this shelf on 19 August 2026, that he is not copying that column either, both now screened and neither reaching a run above two — and it cannot show what he is doing instead. What the Jeremiah screen adds is vocabulary rather than sequence, and stage 2 sets it out.

And John 19:37’s source was not identified. Only that it is not this row. The versions that would settle it are not held here.

No Hebrew or Greek critical apparatus. No Qumran material — Zechariah is present in the Minor Prophets finds, and none of it was consulted. No Aquila, Symmachus or Theodotion of Zechariah — the shelf holds Theodotion for Daniel only — which is a real gap on 12:10 specifically. No Targum, Syriac or Vulgate. No rabbinic material on the shepherd allegory or on the mourning of 12:11.

And chapter 11 was not interpreted. Who the three shepherds of 11:8 are has been answered dozens of ways since antiquity, and this page adds none of them.

• Carol L. Meyers and Eric M. Meyers, Zechariah 9–14 (Anchor Bible 25C).
• Mark J. Boda, The Book of Zechariah (NICOT).
• Paul L. Redditt, Zechariah 9–14 (International Exegetical Commentary).
• Joyce G. Baldwin, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi (Tyndale OT Commentaries).
• None of these were consulted for the measurements on this page, which were run on the text files named in the footer.

A screen ran every verse of Zechariah against every verse of the Greek New Testament and came back with two results at the top, tied. Zechariah 9:9 and Matthew 21:5: six words, one match in the whole New Testament. Zechariah 13:3 and Luke 2:33: six words, one match in the whole New Testament.

One of them is Palm Sunday. The other is a verse about a father and mother killing their own son for prophesying falsely, sitting next to a verse about a father and mother marvelling over their son in the temple. The numbers are identical and the two are nothing alike.

That is why this shelf prints the tie band and the run together, and why it says over and over that a run is not an argument. The screen is very good at finding where words coincide. It cannot tell you which coincidences mean anything, and on this book it produces its clearest citation and its clearest accident at exactly the same depth.

And where the citations do run deep, the columns often do not. Matthew’s thirty pieces of silver come with a potter the Greek does not have. John’s pierced one is pierced in the Hebrew and mocked in the Greek. The shepherd is struck by a plural crowd in one column and by God himself in the Gospels. The New Testament writers were reading this book closely and they were not reading only this column of it.

⭐ This page completes the Book of the Twelve on this shelf. All twelve Minor Prophets now stand as whole-book studies: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi.