Rhyme-Like Word-Final Recurrence and Cantillation Boundaries across the Torah

This study asks whether recurrent word-final sound patterns in the received Tiberian text of the Torah are isolated local effects or a corpus-wide pattern coordinated with the hierarchical boundaries marked by the te'amim. Rhyme-like signatures were extracted from the final stressed vowel to the end of each eligible word. Under the confirmatory STRICT profile, only identical normalized transliteration segments matched. Local concentrations were identified across all five books, and their endpoints were tested against predefined operational boundary sets using separate permutation nulls. Distribution was evaluated by book, fixed block, leave-one-book-out pooling, dense-block trimming, a verse-allocation null, and controls for exact words, paseq, and the final-vowel extension rule. Burst endpoints were enriched at both minor and major boundaries in every book and in the pooled corpus. Positive alignment differences occurred in 58 of 70 fixed blocks at the minor level and 54 of 70 at the major level. Exact-word exclusion reduced but did not eliminate the pooled association. Ordinary activity coverage was near its allocation-null expectation, whereas burst-end coverage exceeded that expectation in every book. This study provides a corpus-wide inferential test of a proposal previously advanced through close reading, using a predefined boundary representation that is not used to construct matches or bursts. The study combines a historically transmitted notation with reproducible sound-pattern extraction to test distributed sound-pattern organization without presupposing regular metre, recoverable melody, or a particular historical performance.