bsb-wikidata and the Biblical Figures Timeline
The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is packed with people. Some of them are well known even to those who have never opened the book itself. Many others are so obscure that almost nothing is known about them except their name. If you have read the Old Testament, you’ve probably wondered about who someone mentioned is and when they lived relative to other characters and historical figures. Maybe you even took the invitation that is the plethora of year numbers provided by the books of Kings and Chronicles and tried to make a timeline putting all the kings of Judah and Israel together.
I thought that sounded like fun, too, but I wanted to create something that would add to previous work rather than simply recreating it. Timelines depicting the events of the Bible abound, but as often happens when a programmer is looking for something to do, none of them quite met my expectations:
- I wanted a timeline with a high regard for the accuracy of the Bible, but also a respect for historical research. Many timelines shy away from data derived from extra-Biblical sources. If the Bible describes real events, historical research into those same events should enhance our understanding of the Bible when the information in the book itself is sparse.
- I wanted to avoid unjustified interpolation. When you start putting things on a timeline, you’d really like to have precise dates for everything so it can all fit nicely together. One particular timeline webpage with good SEO falls into the trap of needing to assign year-precision dates to every event depicted, even when the information to do so simply doesn’t exist. I wanted to represent what we actually know and how accurately we know it. This does mean some things can’t go on the timeline because there simply isn’t enough data to place them, even with uncertainty bars.
Though I certainly wouldn’t be able to place them on the timeline, I also wanted to produce a tool for studying even the most minor characters mentioned in the Bible, not just the headliners who typically make it into such visualizations.
Get Brian MacIntosh’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
So I set about coding, and gathering data, and I built this:
There are two key features I’ve tried to bring together here:
- Linking the timeline with the text. The timeline is a tool for understanding the text, so it is displayed next to and automatically synchronized with it.
- Digging deeper into a particular person. You can click on any reference to a person to see each time they’re mentioned in the entire Bible, and quickly navigate to those references.
If this is interesting to you, by all means check it out here:
Future Work
There is still a good bit of work that could be done on the tool. Here are some of my priorities:
- Interface improvements and features — for example, sourcing additional biographical information about a selected person such as their spouse, children, positions, etc.
- Additional analysis of person reference data — for example, I’d like to make view of some kind that surfaces people who are mentioned quite often in the text but whom we rarely think about.
- Completing the tagging of various minor characters that haven’t been fully tagged yet.
bsb-wikidata
In order to correlate references to a person across the text, I produced a machine-readable Biblical text where references to people are tagged using their unique Wikidata identifier. The text is the Berean Standard Bible, and it’s in a machine-readable format called USFM. Maybe you’d like to produce a cool visualization derived from this data? The data is open source and public domain; you can get it on Github:
