A long time ago I was teaching myself to program in C. I needed to write a program that would interest me so this is what I came up with. Around that time I was having a conversation with Gene Higgins, a Gospel preacher that I know, about how God sometimes called people by using their name twice. For instance, “Samuel, Samuel,” and “Moses, Moses.” Since I didn’t know how often this happened, I figured that I would write a program to find out.
I used the Online Bible, sometimes called the Winterbourne Bible, since it was the King James Version, it normalized some of the names to be consistent, and it was free. As I started to test my results, I decided to expand my search to find not just names but any double words (“Unclean, unclean,” in Leviticus 13:45). Then there were some triple words (“Holy, holy, holy” in Isaiah 6:3), some “Double pairs” (“Babylon is fallen, is fallen.” in Isaiah 21:9), and some Double triples (“line upon line, line upon line” in Isaiah 28:10). So these were my final rules:
1. From the King James Version text.
2. All words were changed to lower case.
3. Punctuation and numbers were ignored.
4. Apostrophes were eliminated, as in Gen 8:16
….. “and thy sons, and thy sons’ wives”
….. This is a Double triple since the apostrophe is ignored.
5. The ends of sentences were ignored, so matches may span two sentences.
6. Double word is the same word twice in a row, as in 1 Sam 3:10
….. “Samuel, Samuel”
7. Triple word is the same word three times in a row, as in Isa 6:3
….. “Holy, holy, holy”
….. Note that this also shows up as two Double words
….. “Holy, holy, holy” and “Holy, holy, holy”
8. Double pair is the same pair of words twice in a row, as in Rev 18:2
….. “is fallen, is fallen”
9. Double Triple is the same three words twice is a row, as in Isa 28:13
….. “line upon line, line upon line”
10. There are no Triple Pairs or Triple Triples
You can see the results here.
It turned out to be much longer than I thought it would be, and I was surprised when I saw what the first result was, because I never noticed it before:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (Gen 1:1-2)
It is the first Double Triple: “…and the earth. And the earth…”
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