21 September 2011

Cruelty in the Bible: An analysis by book

Here are the plots for Cruelty.

Revelation and Leviticus have the most cruelties in the New and Old Testaments, respectively. But notice that there are a few cruelty-free books in each. These won't show up in the log-log plot, since it is bad luck to take the log of zero.

Here is a plot of the Cruelty Index, which is defined in the usual way (Cruelties / 100 verses).

Revelation and Leviticus stay in first place even after adjusting for their relatively large sizes. These two are blood-red with cruelty.

And here's the log-log plot (without the cruelty-free books).

Next up: Family Values.

5 comments:

LIve In Stereo News said...

Your charts are fascinating and I can tell you are intelligent. It is too bad. It is too bad that someone as driven and smart as you is so bored that he cannot figure out a more productive use of time.

mikespeir said...

I'm surprised Galatians ranked so low. This verse alone should have improved its score:

Gal 1:9 As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed.

Steve Wells said...

You're right, mikespeir. I have Gal 1:9 listed as an injustice, but it should be a cruelty too.

I've made the change at the SAB and I'm in the process of revising the graphs, as well. Thanks for the comment.

Daniel Rosenberg said...

Shouldn't an analysis like this take into account level of cruelty not just number of verses that can be seen as cruel?

For instance Leviticus gets one point for a verse like this:

"Take of the blood of the bullock, and sprinkle it ... seven times."

and the following section also gets one point and thus using this metric are considered equally cruel:

Under God's direction, Moses' army defeats the Midianites. They kill all the adult males, but take the women and children captive. When Moses learns that they left some live, he angrily says: "Have you saved all the women alive? Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." So they went back and did as Moses (and presumably God) instructed, killing everyone except for the virgins. In this way they got 32,000 virgins -- Wow! (Even God gets some of the booty -- including the virgins.)

Not to mention that the sprinkling of blood is mentioned numerous time and thus is counted numerous times, resulting in the top subject to be counted many times over that of the latter point.

Perhaps I am over analyzing or this has been taken into account, but I wouldn't base number of verses that contain cruelty to be the only basis of determining what is the cruelest book(s) in the bible

Unknown said...

Great information you are a very knowledgeable of the Bible and this is a great information for someone like me where I read the Bible form the Cristianity angle ....and don't born in Christianity....Thanks...