Previously only top-end software would allow students of scripture to easily find where God is called “Lamb,” “Word,” “Prince,” “Son,” “He,” “I,” etc. Timothy, the developer of Bible Analyzer, recently completed efforts to tag references like those for over 25,000 words to offer similar functionality in a low-cost program.
This is the first in a series of posts outlining the roadmap for MetaV, a database of people, places, passages, and periods of time found in the Bible. Much work has gone into developing it, but there is much work left to do. There are gaps to be filled in, new data to add, and (most importantly) applications to be developed which aid in data exploration. This roadmap provides a thorough understanding of the improvements I currently envision. It does not include any timelines for completion of these ideas.
When we study the Bible and come across a person, we’d like to know a few basic things about that individual which provide some background for understanding his life and how his experiences relate to the story we’re reading. MetaV provides that context with family relationships, some basic biographical information, and explicit identification of the person named. As an example of the latter, consider that there are 26 unique individuals in the Bible named Zechariah. MetaV makes it clear whether that passage is talking about the well-known prophet or one of the other 25. Or, the opposite problem may occur in which one person goes by more than one name such as Paul (originally Saul) or God himself who goes by many names.
To that end, some work remains in identifying names which are not always easy to process programmatically. These may include possessive forms (like “Aaron’s”) or in many cases where the name of a person is also used to describe a place (like Israel). Even more ambiguous are personal pronouns (him, hers, we, they, ours). We know they describe a person and can usually identify that person through normal exegesis. It is time we recorded that knowledge in order to build upon it.
By including that level of detail in MetaV, we will be able to find verses which refer to a group of people but never mention them by name. A good example would be Jesus’ disciples. Any place which references the “disciples”, “apostles”, “the twelve”, etc. would be a reference to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, etc. even though they are not discussed by name. Unless and until this is defined at word-level detail many of these verses would not appear in search results for “Matthew” (or another disciple for this example) meaning the search would not return some pertinent references.
Other things we’d like to know about people in a “quick reference” context window which are not yet defined in MetaV are: official title, occupation, name meanings, or even a brief summary of the person’s life. We would also like to know what books of the Bible that person may have written. Again in the case of Zechariah: are you reading about the person who wrote the book of Zechariah, or a different person with the same name? We also know the birth and death places for some people. Future revisions to MetaV will link these places to the “Places” table for more context.
The relationships defined in MetaV today are limited to family relationships. But, we interact with others outside our family in the context of work, school, and play. People of the Bible are no different. A set of data defining these relationships for people in the New Testament already exists as part of the Semantic Bible project. This data can be integrated into MetaV and then expanded upon to include Old Testament figures.
People also form groups. The disciples are a group. The Israelites are a group. Much like today’s social networks which readily find a person’s group membership, MetaV currently has identified members of the 12 tribes of Israel and the people listed in Jesus’ genealogy. Clearly many more groups must be defined, but this is a good start.
The Bible is God’s communication to man. Within that, we see God talking to prophets, people talking to each other, and writers speaking to readers. Wouldn’t it be nice to clearly identify who is the sender of a message and who is the intended recipient? Well, the folks at Crossway have tackled the first part of that using Mechanical Turk. They produced a dataset identifying all the speakers of the Bible and, thankfully, released it publicly. Once it is “translated” to work with MetaV, I can begin the process to show recipients of what is being spoken (or written).
That’s all for now. Keep an eye out here to learn how we can improve upon data describing places and periods of time, or find out about the applications being developed to explore this data.
MetaV is the name given to the underlying database used to build the visual Bible explorer on this website and several other infographics. It links together details on people, places, periods of time, and passages in the Bible at word-level detail. This database is specially structured to simplify complex “big picture” analysis or visualizing biblical information.
You can track version history here or fork the GitHub repository.
Above all, the Bible represents absolute truth given from God. The electronic source text of the Bible has been checked for accuracy against multiple other electronic sources of the King James Version using modern text comparison software. The rest of the information in MetaV is nothing more than well-studied conclusions about the Bible formulated and trusted by faithful Christians over the centuries. For more details on original sources, reference the database documentation available in the readme file (included in the downloads below).
This database is structured so that anyone familiar with spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel can make good use of the information in a variety of ways. Those who have experience with data manipulation and queries will find it simple to perform more advanced analysis. The readme file and schema diagram included in these downloads give an overview of the tables and fields as well as how they are related to each other.
Please do! Our goal is to get the Bible and helpful related information into the hands of as many people as possible. MetaV was built using data obtained from those who have generously shared it with others. In that same spirit, MetaV is free to use and copy under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. All we ask is that you let us know where and how the data will be used. Please see the details on individual source files (available at the links below) for more specific usage guidelines.
Click below to download all files.
You can also fork the GitHub repository or, choose individual files from the table below.
| File Name | Size | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Readme.txt | 8 KB | Complete source and licensing details and field names for all tables. |
| Schema Diagram.pdf | 30 KB | Visual Layout of the relationships between the tables listed below. |
| BookAliases.csv | 4 KB | Correlates all known book titles and abbreviations to a specific book ID |
| Books.csv | 1 KB | Standardizes all Bible book names with a given numerical ID |
| CrossRefIndex.csv | 6.4 MB | Compilation of cross references obtained from R.A. Torrey’s Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (Public Domain). Duplicate cross-references have been excluded. |
| MainIndex.csv | 70.9 MB | The main index associating the various tables in this database with individual words. Text used: 1769 Cambridge Edition of the King James Version, also known as the Authorized Version (Public Domain). Tags with references to deity are provided with permission from Bible Analyzer’s AVp module. |
| People.csv | 96 KB | Listing of all people in the Bible and key facts about them. this is a mashup of data found at complete-bible-genealogy.com and www.marshallgenealogy.org/bible. Name spelling has been updated to match the source bible text. |
| PeopleAliases.csv | 61 KB | All known aliases by which a person is referred to in the KJV. |
| PeopleGroups.csv | 21 KB | Groups to which individuals in the People table belong. |
| PeopleRelationships.csv | 223 KB | All known relationships between people listed in the KJV. Note: “Father” may refer to a more distant ancestor. |
| PlaceAliases.csv | 26 KB | All names by which a particular place is referred to in the KJV. |
| Places.csv | 70 KB | All identifiable places mentioned in the bible. Locations may be approximate. Source: openbible.info/geo (Creative Commons Attribution License). Place references in time periods prior to Noah’s Flood have been removed. |
| Strongs.csv | 2.6 MB | Strong’s Concordance in Hebrew and Greek. Source: openscriptures.org (https://github.com/openscriptures/strongs) License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 |
| StrongsIndex.csv | 6.2 MB | Correlates Stong’s Number(s) with individual words in the KJV. |
| Topics.csv | 1.6 MB | Mashup of Nave’s Topical Bible and Torrey’s New Topical Textbook. Public Domain. |
| TopicIndex.csv | 1.5 MB | Correlates topics with each verse in the KJV. |
| Verses.csv | 4.9 MB | Full text of each verse in the King James Version of the Holy Bible. |
| Writers.csv | 1 KB | Lists authors of each book of the Bible. Where one book may have had more than one writer, the primary author’s name is used. |
A lot has progressed since I first posted the central parts of MetaV. At that time, I had only converted and indexed the text of the Bible itself. Since then, I’ve managed to add cross references, topics, time lines, readability info, Strong’s Concordance, and locations. I’ve even made a number of tools to explore each “module,” and one to explore the timeline, places, and text all in one place. But, what’s next? The diagram below shows the modules I have envisioned so far to include in the database. Black outlines indicate areas of future development; white outlines are completed modules (tables).
Each sub-group has at least the main part of it complete, with one exception: People. What can I say? People are messy. I know there are a number of genealogies out there and a number of tools produced to explore them, but finding an openly available one in an appropriately structured file that’s free for public use is proving difficult. Therefore, I expect it will take significantly longer to compile such a reference on my own using what I’ve scraped together so far.
I have chosen not to upload the updated database until I at least have people identified and tagged with basic relationship information (father/son, husband/wife). After that iteration is complete, I’ll make that available and begin work on the remaining modules and other refinements at the same time as producing new, simple tools to explore the database. Any estimate on how long that will take would only be a guess.