When I created Mapping God’s Bloodline, I had no idea what a turning point it would be for this website. Until then, few had visited the site. Once a few influential people shared it on social media, I discovered how visualization could turn a boring, tedious subject into something people find highly engaging.
The words of scripture create a tightly knit fabric; exciting pictures emerge when we weave them together with silicon and electrons. The field of Big Data is rapidly expanding the possibilities for quantitatively and visually analyzing text as complex and rich as that of the Bible. With it we can more easily study language structures, writing styles, or discover hidden codes.
One of the more difficult areas of big data is text mining. It is “unstructured” in the sense that it isn’t arranged in a way a computer can easily understand. Machines have a very difficult time with natural language, though major search engines and other startups are making great strides in that area. For the most part, language is analyzed according to word frequency or proximity to other words of a known type. I know of at least two practical examples in biblical studies.
First is Steven Boyd’s work in the RATE project. He presented a statistical approach to determining whether a passage is prose or poetry. Specifically, he looked at the distribution of four types of finite verbs in sections that are indisputably poetic and those which are prose. We can then take a text in which the genre is controversial (Genesis 1:1-2:3 in this case) and compare the distribution of verb forms to appropriately categorize them. Boyd’s study was limited enough that it wouldn’t be put in the big data category but the techniques would be similar with a much larger set of passages.
Another project published at openbible.info explores the “sentiment” of every biblical event. In basic terms, a program calculates the frequency of words generally considered to convey a positive sentiment vs. those that are more negative. This approach is more useful to marketers studying customer reaction to their brand than serious biblical analysis but I do think it’s a good starting point and will prove more useful as language processing algorithms become more advanced and widespread.
A far more well-known and controversial field is that of Bible codes. To even approach a debate on the significance or meaning of messages some claim God encrypted in the Bible, we must have good data to back it up – and lots of it. Consider a well-known example: by taking every 50 letters of either Genesis or Exodus, it spells out the word “Torah.” To argue for or against the notion that this is evidence of divine cryptography, we must know how likely it is we’ll find the same phenomenon elsewhere. That means gathering writings in the same language from the same time period as well as books from other languages and periods. In other words, big data.
Books, software, and videos abound with claims of similar discoveries from simple to more complex and unlikely phrases. I have not gone through the statistical rigor of verifying or refuting the claims myself, but some seem quite compelling. In any case, newer technologies and mathematical discoveries are sure to shed new light on this subject as time passes.
Fresh possibilities abound, from authorship analysis to readability, n-grams and much more. It is an exciting time to be involved in big data programming and visualization. It won’t answer questions about where we come from, why we’re here, or where we’re going any better than God’s words have already spoken, but it does have some potential to expand our understanding of those words. In what ways do you think big data could aid Bible studies?
The Gospels tell the story of Jesus Christ, each one emphasizing different aspects of his time and teachings. A typical harmony of the Gospels lays out all the events and references the passages that describe them in each book. This chart takes a different approach by comparing the broader topics illuminated by those verses.
The sides of each cross are scaled according to how often a topic is dealt with in the corresponding book (as a percentage of the total number of verses in that book). The right side represents Matthew, the top is Luke, left for Mark, and the bottom line goes with John. The topics and verse references are from the topical index in MetaV which has a mashup of Nave’s Topical Bible Concordance and Torrey’s New Topical Textbook.
A Valid Approach?
It is common to hear a pastor tell how often a certain word appears in the Bible or in a particular book to support his point. But, is this an accurate representation? One can discuss the topic of faith, for instance, without ever mentioning the word directly. I could envision many ways in which the word-count approach would leave a false impression.
It may be more accurate to look at topics and to compare them against each other to see their relative prominence. But, even this approach can have its distortions. It relies on indexes produced by people in a particular culture and historical period. That could introduce some bias in assigning topics to each verse, thereby skewing the whole thing – consciously or not. Overall, however, the comparisons here line up well with what you would conclude after reading it all for yourself (by far the best approach).
About that one in the middle…
It should be no surprise that the lines representing Jesus Christ would be the longest. If it had turned out any other way, I would have begun looking for errors in my data. What is surprising, however, is that the lines form a nicely proportioned cross. According to the topical indexes I chose, John focuses more on Jesus, Mark slightly less, and the others hit close to the average. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if this is a convenient coincidence or a divine design.
Due to space and readability limitations, only the highest-ranking topics (based on total verse count) made the list. Are you surprised to see any of them in the top 48? Which ones would you expect to be more prominent that aren’t shown on this chart? What stands out in terms of what different writers emphasize? Please leave your comments below – I’d love to hear some insights.
Christianity is too judgmental, too strict. We must drop such dogma if we are to live as free people in a just society. You have heard this said before. You may have thought it yourself. This impression is false and easily disproved by a simple comparison of the words in the Bible vs. the collection of documents that define United States law.
Suddenly the Bible does not seem to be such an oppressive rule book after all, especially when considering this chart does not account for many federal regulations, state laws, city ordinances, etc. Some point to the dietary laws penned by Moses as an example of invasive restrictions on personal freedom. This seems to be a reasonable argument until you look at Title 21 of the U.S. Code which governs food and drugs. It has 699,440 words. Moses only managed to write 174,733 words in the Bible during his entire 120 years on Earth! The FDA certainly has a lot more “thou shalt nots” limiting dietary freedom than God ever passed down to the Jews.
The same holds true for many other aspects of our lives from the time we brush our teeth to driving to and from work to watching TV at night. All of these activities are regulated, monitored, and controlled to one degree or another by one or more federal agencies somewhere along the line.
Before going further, we would be wise to understand the reasons that we write laws to begin with. Consider the words of Frederick Bastiat in his masterful book, The Law:
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place…Each of us has a natural right – from God – to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.
[amazon asin=1440446458&template=iframe image] Those things which we have a natural right to defend are those which originate from our Creator. Therefore, the words God has spoken to us in the Bible should be the foundation of our laws which protect those gifts. Then, how do we end up with so many statutes which extend far beyond this intent? Paul writes in 1 Timothy 1:8, “But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully.” When we step away from the biblical basis of natural law, we begin to use it improperly. The law fails when we turn its intent toward what Bastiat describes as “stupid greed and false philanthropy.”
We have attempted to force “false philanthropy” upon our society through legal plunder – the use of force to deny a person’s right to their property. As evidence, the longest section of the U.S. Code is the one dealing with health and welfare. It is over 8 million words which makes it longer than the entire tax code and associated regulations combined. Surely it is noble to take care of the needy and sickly, but it is unjust to forcibly confiscate someone else’s money to do so. Religion accomplishes the same task through genuine charity which is not given out of duty, obligation, or force (2 Cor 9:7). In this and many other ways, the Christian worldview is the antidote (not the source) of injustice or oppression.
When preachers step forward to explain these principles and call us to adhere to God’s standards, some will object that it’s too legalistic. But, the same folks will not cry “legalism!” when the IRS comes to enforce tax laws which are three and a half times the size of scripture. It might be easy to jest at this hypocrisy, but it raises a useful point. Is it reasonable to expect anyone to fully comply with a set of laws so voluminous we can’t even manage to read them let alone understand and follow them to the letter? Certainly not, and here the faithful critic of legalism is correct to point out our utter inability to live a sinless life (Rom 3:12).
If we fail to follow every rule and regulation codified in U.S. law, we may experience little or no consequence. Even if we are to commit the most heinous of crimes, our sentence may only be the death of our earthly bodies. In contrast, God administers eternal and infinitely more severe consequences for breaking just one of his commandments. This may be one reason that biblical guidelines are seen as less forgiving than federal laws.
While more and more people are beginning to fear our government, our deeper fear is of the one who can destroy both our body and soul in Hell (Matt 10:28). The natural desire is to ignore or deny this existence of Hell, hoping it will squash our fear. Why would God set up such severe punishment? Does he hate us? No. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son (John 3:16) to pay the debt we owe so we won’t have to suffer this awful fate.
This is how a righteous judge can also offer us the kind of liberty and peace that can be found nowhere else but in the salvation of Jesus Christ. When we approach God in repentance and ask forgiveness, it is freely granted. Ask the same of Homeland Security when you forget to leave a pocket knife in the car at the airport and you’ll find out just how “forgiving” our government can be.
It is time to recognize that when we look to God’s instructions we can be free; when we pile regulations on top of laws built on the wrong foundation, we are crushed under the weight of government power. If we are to find freedom, let us heed the words in Galatians 5:1:
Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.
When R.A. Torrey compiled his Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, I doubt he could have envisioned the ways in which those hundreds of thousands of cross references would take shape years later. Inspired by Chris Harrison’s rainbow-arc visualization which used a smaller set of cross references, OpenBible.info applied the shape to Torrey’s massive database. Using a combination of these data sources, I added my own summary level analysis of reference frequency in each chapter of the Bible.
Now, OpenBible.info has gone one step further, this time apparently inspired by a cross-reference layout illustrated at the crossway blog back in 2006. This new interactive visualization is a grid layout with books (or groups of books) along the top and left-hand side. Each grid cell represents the cross references between those books.
What makes this visualization much more interesting than previous graphics is the way each grid cell is colored. Red is a link from a New Testament book, blue for the Old Testament, green for major divisions of the Bible, gray indicates a cross-reference from a verse in one chapter to another verse in the same chapter, and purple indicates references between chapters in the same book.
As soon as you start getting “interactive” with it, you discover how the color intensity is produced, forming the heat map effect in the grid above. For instance, if you choose to show references from John to Isaiah, you see details of how the passages in those books connect to one another. More lines between them result in more color displayed in the larger grid.
Such an interactive visualization makes it far simpler to navigate and understand Torrey’s massive dataset. Even if you are not especially interested in exploring these details, everyone should be able to appreciate the message that this and earlier cross-reference visualizations share in common: that the words given to us by God are deeply woven together throughout all the times and cultures in which they were transcribed.
Early this year I discovered a fascinating visualization that mapped all the connections made between “friends” on Facebook. It quickly spread around the internet with many people pointing out how country boundaries appeared from the links themselves with no borders drawn in the background.
So, as is my tendency, I thought about what it might look like to do something similar based on the connections between people and places in the Bible. Once I set out to define these relationships, I quickly found it hard to get the data I would need. Unlike with Facebook, Moses and Aaron had no way to input their personal information in a database that makes it easy to do this kind of thing. The Semantic Bible project has come a long way in terms of explicitly defining relationships among New Testament figures, but nothing yet for the Old Testament which contains far more people and places. Chris Harrison managed a complex visualization of social networks, but it is based strictly on word proximity to generate connections.
Since MetaV contains genealogical information for everyone in the Bible and geolocation data, I was able to create a composite database of links using both definite relationships and textual proximity. Then, I mapped the data following a very handy tutorial by Nathan Yau at FlowingData. People are linked to places if that person’s name appears in the same sentence as a place name. “Sentence” connections are those which have two people mentioned by name in the same sentence. “Self” links are where one person is linked to multiple places due to travels, marriage, etc. “Spouse” and “Parent” relationships are defined according to available genealogy data.
Color variations are a function of how many times the connection appears and the distance between the places. Lines are drawn along great circle routes in keeping with the Facebook map inspiration.
What is immediately clear (though not at all surprising) is the centrality of Israel. The links within Israel and the ones going around the world are so dense that one can’t help but notice is is at the heart of all the interconnection in scripture, no matter how you slice the data. I would love to hear your thoughts on these patterns, so please leave a comment if you find something interesting!
The Bible Gateway Blog has an interesting bit of analysis today on how people share the Bible versus how they read it online (based on BibleGateway.com statistics). From the post:
When people share Bible passages on Facebook and Twitter, they share individual verses 74% of the time and chapters only 9% of the time…when people read the Bible on Bible Gateway, they read complete chapters over 50% of the time and individual verses 20% of the time.
What I enjoy about these images (like the one above) is seeing how we can take massive amounts of data – thousands upon thousands of Tweets, Facebook shares, and website hits, then plot them out in a way that makes larger patterns readily recognizable. Those who know nothing of statistics or data gathering can visually compare social network activity with other types of online activity. This is possible because our brains more easily recognize patterns visually than in a massive spreadsheet.
I’m especially encouraged when I see this taking place with regard to biblical interests. It is God, after all, who gave us these communication skills and the cognitive abilities to interpret things with our eyes. When art and architecture was all the rage, we got the Sistine Chapel and Notre Dame – both of which are explicity meant to honor God. Today, information is the dominant cultural theme but it most often lacks any Christian concepts. It’s about time we started catching up to those trends, and this kind of analysis is a good step.
UPDATE: The author of the Bible Gateway post has expanded on his methods and provided futher analysis on his website, OpenBible.info. If you’re a data “viz wiz”, you can also download the raw data for your own analysis (thanks for making that available!).
I’m a little late joining the bandwagon on celebrating the 400th anniversary of the KJV, but here’s my contribution to the mix. I found an interesting web site called Bible Reader’s Museum which, among other things, has extensive listings of Bible versions throughout time. Being the chart junkie that I am, I converted their English Bible version list (used by permission) to an interactive graph of versions over time. It begins at quarter-century intervals and then changes to smaller intervals as you filter out the years. The list at the bottom filters along with it, making it simple to find one or several, then click the name to go to that version’s website. It’s amazing to see just how many translations there have been over the years. Take a look!
Follow the genealogy of Jesus from the creation of Adam and Eve through Noah, the tribes of Israel, King David, and finally Joseph and Mary. Zoom out for a broader perspective or zoom in to examine finer details.
One central idea behind this new tool called MetaV is to link everything in the Bible to a period of time, then use that to perform a search or put a passage in greater context. Today, this is one step closer to being real.
R.A. Torrey compiled the Treasury of Scripture knowledge which contains the most cross-references of any concordance available. It also contains a year associated with each passage. I have taken this data and plotted it along a timeline (below) in a way that I believe will be simple to understand and use when combined with other panes of information.
The concept comes from atomic mass spectroscopy. A simple strip with bars on it of varying colors or line densities indicates particular wavelengths of an element.
The same layout can be used for a timeline, substituting years for wavelengths and verses for particles of light where BC is denoted with a negative number and the darkness of the color indicates how many verses deal with that year, as seen above.
This graphic is based on Torrey’s book, but in its electronic form it must be checked for data quality and completeness before being incorporated into anything more detailed. The simplicity of such a view, when combined with details from associated passages and other useful information has a real potential to make a complex, interrelated whole more understandable.
There are numerous claims about the readability of various English Bible translations. The chart below is the result of my own calculations using the standard Flesch-Kincaid grade level formula. Many other readability calculations do not specify whether sentence lengths are based on punctuation or verse divisions. This tool allows you to see it either way. In some sections, the results are wildly different.
This tool also makes it easy to find readability levels for each author, book and chapter (on the advanced tab), unlike the more general readability comparisons you may have seen already. Due to copyright restrictions, it is difficult to obtain electronic versions of the entire text of translations other than the KJV, so at the moment we do not have a simple tool available for comparing readability accross different versions.
(chart may take a moment to load)
A lot of bloggers are using word clouds for various features now, mainly to make common post tags stand out. I happen to think it’s a fad. Like Microsoft’s WordArt, it can do some nifty things but doesn’t really rise to the level of artwork that would be required for a valuable design aesthetic.
That said, it can be fun to play around with these ideas to see just how far you can go or perhaps lead to a better idea later. In that spirit, I present to you my word cloud made using Wordle and the text of the KJV (with words like thee, thou, ye, etc. removed).
The Christian scriptures are interconnected in deep and meaningful ways which can sometimes be hard to discover. Scholars have compiled hundreds of thousands of cross-references over time, and modern computer whizzes have charted these references in beautiful and engaging displays. I have taken a new approach, which you can see below. It displays three measures: the number of verses in each chapter, the number of cross references in each chapter, and the ratio between the two.
In a moment I will share a few examples of the insights this visualization affords, but first I’ll explain how I arrived at the idea for making this particular interactive tool. I began working several months ago to compile available data into what I call MetaV. The eventual goal is to link descriptive information to every word in the Bible and to help users interact with it in such a way that they can see the “big picture” of any passage, including people, places, things, and even cross-references. Naturally, this led me to google “bible cross reference data.” Hit #1: Chris Harrison’s visual showing over 63,000 references with colors indicating the canonical distance between the chapters and bars showing the length of each chapter.
Immediately, I was hooked on it. I’ll confess: it still graces the background of my computer desktop. The reason I was so mesmerized is that he has packed a lot of information into a display that is simple at first glance then grows more complex and informative as you zoom in. It conveys the fact that the Bible is an interconnected whole. The density in some areas gives a general sense of which books may be interesting to us because they were meaningful enough for many other books to refer to it. And that nice, long, thin line towards the middle representing Psalm 119 just begs for attention while happily providing an axis of symmetry. It is art that fulfills it designer’s stated goal:
…we set our sights on the other end of the spectrum –- something more beautiful than functional. At the same time, we wanted something that honored and revealed the complexity of the data at every level –- as one leans in, smaller details should become visible.
Mr. Harrison was kind enough to get me in touch with his collaborator, Christoph, who in turn provided the data behind the graphic (which had been updated to include over 80,000 records). Yet, I was also aware that this many cross references might not be enough for me. Further searching brought me to two more visualizations of a much larger data set – over 340,000 cross references. The first is from OpenBible.info, the same site which is the source for my Bible Places explorer. The second is found on the ESV Blog. Both of these are interesting in their complexity and verse-level detail, which adds a degree of information not contained in Chris Harrison’s work. However, they both have a lot of redundancy – one could easily cut the visuals in half and get just as much information.
All of these are more useful in terms of artwork than for visual analysis and in-depth exploration. My expertise is in crunching numbers, not so much in making beautiful displays of them. I wanted to modify the idea of graphing hundreds of thousands of pieces of information in a way that makes certain aspects of it stand out. Just to make it a challenge, I combined the two data sets I found into one massive table containing 412,100 references once I filtered out duplicate records. The outliers you see above are chapters of the Bible which stand out here but would be lost in the haystack within the visualizations I’ve mentioned. While mine is nothing more than an interactive version of common graphical displays, it makes it easy for our eyes and minds to identify interesting points.
Right away, you can see that Psalm 119 lies lonely at the top-right because it is by far the longest chapter of the Bible and consequently has the most cross-references related to it. The orange circles stand in contrast because they have proportionately fewer cross references than other chapters. We might expect those to be the ones which are nothing more than long, detailed genealogical records. Two of the noticeable outliers fits that expectation (1 Chronicles 7&8) , but the others do not.
1 Chronicles 3, the brightest orange circle, is the chapter which details the construction of Solomon’s Temple. Exodus 36&37, two other orange marks, give specifics about making the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant. The dimensions and construction materials of these things are rife with metaphors. Perhaps their symbolism is linked to other portions of scripture in ways we do not yet know an have not catalogued, or maybe they should continue to stand alone due to their uniqueness. On the other end of the spectrum, Romans 12 has more cross references for each verse than any other chapter. When you read it, you’ll understand why. On average, every single verse has more then one reference associated with it. In all, 77 chapters of the Bible fir in that same category.
These are just some of the things that can lead a student of the Lord to discover more about him. We can search out the things we may normally pass over but which stand out in an analysis such as this. What can you find by searching through, selecting, and zooming in on these plots? What might you learn that you would otherwise overlook? Please leave a comment if you happen upon something interesting or the Lord blesses you in some way as a result of your studying these visuals.
Long genealogies in the Bible are far from boring or unnecessary. In many cases, they serve to authenticate the inspiration and authority of the text. Find out the meaning behind the names in Genesis 5 and how this points to our Lord Jesus Christ.
Your Questions Answered By Chuck Missler Meanings Of The Names In Genesis 5 – Chuck Missler – Koinonia House.