{"id":10,"date":"2007-03-30T23:54:12","date_gmt":"2007-03-31T03:54:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/2007\/03\/name-weights-for-biblical-characters\/"},"modified":"2016-02-06T11:36:02","modified_gmt":"2016-02-06T15:36:02","slug":"name-weights-for-biblical-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/2007\/03\/name-weights-for-biblical-characters\/","title":{"rendered":"Name Weights for Biblical Characters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sean at Blogos is sharing his work on a Bible Knowledgebase he\u2019s creating. He recently wrote about how to prioritize people in the Bible<\/a> for the project.<\/p>\n

The method he discusses combines the number of times people are mentioned with the number of books they\u2019re mentioned in.<\/p>\n

I propose a different method\u2014it\u2019s not better or worse, just different.<\/p>\n

The idea is, first, to rank occurrences by chapter popularity: weighting an occurrence in John higher than an occurrence in Zephaniah, for example. (I don\u2019t have anything against Zephaniah, but people don\u2019t read it as often as John.) Second, I want to rank people associated with certain prominent people more highly.<\/p>\n

Method<\/h3>\n

The ESV blog published a list of the most popular verses in the Bible<\/a>. They also share their figures on how often people look at each chapter. I used this data as the basis for the popularity figure.<\/p>\n

I then subjectively picked twelve of the most prominent people in the Bible (in my opinion): Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, Saul, David, Solomon, Elijah, Jesus, Peter, and Paul. Names that appear in the same chapter with these people got extra weight.<\/p>\n

Then it was just a matter of going through all the names and weighting them based on the chapters they appeared in. I didn\u2019t have access to Sean\u2019s person-disambiguation data, so I needed to make some approximations, but the general trend holds.<\/p>\n

Results<\/h3>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

Twenty-three of the fifty people overlap between Sean\u2019s list and my list. Let\u2019s look at the ones that don\u2019t overlap:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
On My List<\/th>\nOn Sean\u2019s List<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
John the Baptist<\/td>\nJoshua<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Joseph (father of Jesus)<\/td>\nHezekiah<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
James (son of Zebedee)<\/td>\nJosiah<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Andrew<\/td>\nAhaz<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
James (brother of Jesus)<\/td>\nSimeon<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Philip (the apostle)<\/td>\nManasseh<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Judas Iscariot<\/td>\nUzziah<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Herod (Antipas)<\/td>\nJeremiah<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Barnabas<\/td>\nZedok<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Mary (mother of Jesus)<\/td>\nEleazar<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Pilate<\/td>\nBalaam<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Sarah<\/td>\nJoab<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Bartholomew<\/td>\nNebuchadnezzar<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Rahab<\/td>\nDan<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Zebedee<\/td>\nLevi<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Abel<\/td>\nNun<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Mark<\/td>\nPhinehas<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Enoch<\/td>\nSihon<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Tiberias<\/td>\nMerari<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Cain<\/td>\nAbsalom<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Thomas<\/td>\nReuben<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Silas<\/td>\nBenjamin<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Apollos<\/td>\nIssachar<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
John (father of Peter)<\/td>\nNaphtali<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Stephen<\/td>\nAsher<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Gideon<\/td>\nEphraim<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Barak<\/td>\nZebulun<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

I can\u2019t honestly say that either of these lists is superior overall. I like parts of my list better than Sean\u2019s and parts of his better than mine.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the raw data<\/a> (Excel 2007 file) if you want to look at it in more detail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sean at Blogos is sharing his work on a Bible Knowledgebase he\u2019s creating. He recently wrote about how to prioritize people in the Bible for the project. The method he discusses combines the number of times people are mentioned with the number of books they\u2019re mentioned in. I propose a different method\u2014it\u2019s not better or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1223,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions\/1223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}