Hope When Death Surrounds

I didn't grow up with death.

My dad's father passed away when I was relatively young, but I did not know him very well. Nobody else I was remotely close to died or even suffered from a major illness.  However, in the past two years, death has been a regularly repeated refrain.  My grandmother passed away late in 2017 after a stroke.  In the summer of 2018, a beloved uncle passed away suddenly, likely from a heart attack caused by a biologically pre-determined bad heart.  Earlier this year, a best friend of my wife lost her battle with cancer after a life of fighting with cystic fibrosis.  A month later, my mom's dad, a man who hiked mountains and scoured beaches well into his old age, passed away; he could hardly move in his final days.  We recently learned that the mom of another best friend of my wife, a woman we both know, was diagnosed with stage four cancer and given 3 months to live.

I meet with a group of men regularly throughout the year.  These men are mostly older and retired.  The concerns and struggles they share increasingly involve illness and death of loved ones.  A few I have known have also passed away.  I have reached the age when many of the people I know and love are increasingly facing illness and death.  The adults I have looked up to and continue to seek guidance from are closer to the end than the beginning, and it is starting to show.

For all the wonders that humankind has created, for all the achievements and improvements in quality and length of life we have achieved, we still have not conquered death and ultimate bodily degradation.  It is the irresolute fact that threatens to destroy and erase any meaning we find or have created here.  And if nothing lasts, if everything we have done in our lives will someday be forgotten, if everything the human race has accomplished will ultimately be wiped away through environmental destruction, the expansion and death of the sun, or the heat death of the universe, what was the point?

Some Philosophy

It seems that for something to have ultimate meaning, it has to last, be permanent, and endure. Forever.

If that is true, then we are faced with two possibilities.

• The first possibility: nothing ultimately has meaning or matters, because there is no life after death.  Nothing endures or is permanent.  What we do in this life will be forgotten or destroyed. Life has no ultimate meaning.  We have no ultimate meaning.  
• The second possibility: something ultimately has meaning.  Something will survive.  If that something includes us, then we have ultimate meaning too.

I would bet that most people feel that there is meaning and purpose to life in general and to their life specifically.  We may not know how to express it or account for it, but we know it and feel it.  We do ultimately matter.  Our lives ultimately matter.  What we do matters and is meaningful in some ultimate and enduring way.  If so, by a simple modus ponens, then we have to last, endure, be permanent.

Some Theology

Such an argument can be used to argue for an afterlife of some sort.  But of what sort?  Most people, if they believe in an afterlife, might imagine being up in "heaven" in a sort of disembodied immaterial state.  But if this is what actually happens in a permanent way, then notice what this implies about our bodies: if our bodies have ultimate meaning, then they will last; they do not last; therefore, they do not have ultimate meaning.  A similar argument could be made for all of material existence.

This sort of soul escapism has similarities to Gnosticism or Manichaeism, in which the material world and our bodies are something to escape.  And wouldn't it follow that, since we are escaping our bodies and this world, which will not last, we can use our bodies or this world in any manner we choose?  There might be some restrictions insofar as this impacts what will last (our souls), but any respect for bodies or the material world would derive from this relationship and not in virtue of what our bodies or this world are for their own sake, that is, in virtue of their own intrinsic value.  And wouldn't it follow that there is a lack of ultimate meaning for our bodies except in a derivative sense?  What then should we make of our bodily sufferings or the environmental destruction and material chaos that surrounds us?  Doesn't that matter, have importance, for its own sake?

On the contrary, our bodies do matter.  What happens to our bodies, our world, matters.  We don't just need salvation for our souls.  Our bodies, indeed, the whole world, needs and requires redemption and renewal.

This is what the Christian tradition advocates.  Not an escape from our bodies or material reality, but a redemption of them.  Not that the material reality will ultimately be destroyed, but that it will be renewed and endure.  The Apostle's Creed proclaims a belief in "the resurrection of the body" and the "life everlasting".  The Nicene Creed states that "we look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come."  The Christian belief professes that after death, souls will be reunited with healed, restored, and redeemed bodies (see here),  and the material world itself will be freed from corruption and renewed (see here).   Our bodies, and all of created reality, will endure forever, having been healed and restored from all material degradation and decay.

Death will not have the final word.

A Hope

What if spring never came?  What if after the flowers bloomed in summer and the trees dazzled us with their many colors in the fall, they would slowly die or be reduced to skeletons of bark and wood alone, never to return to fullness of life?  We might remember what once was, but what did it matter if that was the end?  However, we know that spring will come, and new life will shoot up from the ground in a burst of sights and smells.  The earth will be fresh, healthy, and alive once more.

The resurrection of the body is the hope for spring.  It is the hope that a winter of death is not the end, but a never ending spring of new and restored life will come.  It is the hope that my wife's friend will breathe fully and freely for the first time. It is the hope that my mom's dad  will have the youthful and outdoor vigor I remember him for.  It is the hope that I may carve another bowl from wood by my uncle's side.  It is the hope that all will ultimately follow in the footsteps of He who did in fact conquer death.

“Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”

(1 Corinthians 15:55)

Text Mining the Quran

Note: For the original jupyter notebook file, code, and data upon which this post is based, please visit my GitHub.

Introduction

I am interested in learning more about what Islam teaches and what exactly is in the text of the Quran(/Koran/Qu'ran), especially because of its current political relevance both in the United States and abroad. Consequently, to begin to do this, I will focus on text mining the text of the Quran. I intend to scrape the entire text from available sources online, grouping the text by chapter and verse. For each chapter, I will find the top words, keywords, and sentiment. I will also find meaningful clusters of words (i.e., bigrams and trigrams). These analyses will be visualized, along with any trends or patterns I find. Finally, I will summarize my conclusions.

I should note that my intentions in performing this analysis are purely descriptive with some inferences as to the meaning of my findings. I make no judgments on the truth of what the Quran contains or the correctness of its teachings, and nothing below should be construed as such. Also, as I am not a Quranic scholar, and as there are different traditions and methods of interpretation of the Quran, my conclusions below should be considered as an exploratory starting point in understanding the Quran, and not as representing any authoritative interpretation or conclusions.

The Quran

Before beginning, a quick introduction to the nature and structure of the Quran may be helpful. The Quran is the primary religious text used by Muslims, similar to the Bible (especially New Testament) for Christians and the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) for Jews. It contains revelations and instructions from God (in Arabic, "Allah") given to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, from between 610 AD through 632 AD when Muhammed died (reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam). The original and authoritative text is in Arabic, although there are translations into other languages as well (e.g., English). However, these would not be considered authoritative, and, as is a danger in all translations, may not convey the full and intended meaning due to cultural, textual, and historical differences. The Quran contains 114 Chapters ("Surahs") and is organized roughly according to length, from the longest chapter to the shortest chapter. However, the chronology of the chapters is also known, so one can also analyze chapters in their historical order, which I will do so below.

Packages

The below modules include the packages I will be using for this project. In particular, I will use:

• Beautiful Soup - text extraction
• re - regular expressions
• numpy - arrays
• pandas - data storage and transformation
• matplotlib - data visualization

Get Text

The below code blocks get the text from the chosen website (http://www.clearquran.com). The first three define functions that:

• get the website links
• get the website HTML
• get the text from the website HTML

Note: I chose the website above because it was one of the first returned in a search and because the structure of the website provided a relatively easy way to scrape and parse the data. I make no claim that this translation is better or more authentic than other English translations. Consequently, any conclusions I derive from the text depend on the accuracy of the textual translation itself.

The fourth code block uses the three functions above to get the website link for each chapter ("Surah") of the Quran, get the HTML for the website, get the text for each website (i.e., the verses for the chapter), clean the text (e.g., remove punctuation, numbers), split the words, do additional clean up, and then assign the chapter number, verse number, and words to a dataframe. The final result is a dataframe of Chapter, Verse, and Word for all of the words in the Quran.

The data is then saved to a CSV file for future use.

Clean Up

Before analysis, we need to clean up the data. I add column names to the dataframe and remove stopwords. Before removal, there are 146,279 words. After removal, there are 63,145 words.

Analysis

Word Counts

Now we can analyze the data. First, we can see that, indeed, the chapters are roughly organized from longest to shortest by looking at word counts for each chapter. There is a short introductory chapter, but this is followed by the longest chapter. Apart from occasional dips downward and then back up, the overall trend is from longer chapters to shorter chapters.

How does this compare with the Chronological Ordering of the chapters? Below, we first read in the chronological ordering from a website. Then, we compare the Chapter order with the Chronological order using the number of verses. As you can see, they are very different.

The chronological order begins dipping right at the beginning, but then climbs to an average maximum about 50 chapters in. This decreases on average until the upper 80s when there are several very large spikes, including the longest chapter of the Quran, before continuing a downward trend. There is a spike in long verses at the end as well. It is reasonable to conclude that these spikes relate to important periods in Muhammad's life when longer revelations would be necessary. For example, it would make sense to have longer revelations prior to Muhammad's death to guide the people after he had died.

The spike in the upper 80s appears to be related to the location of the revelation. The spike occurs at chronological order 87 (marked by a green vertical line), and corresponds to the first revelation in Medina following Muhammad's leaving Mecca. Such a lengthy revelation would be necessary to guide the community of believers in a new way of life in a new town, away from the persecution faced in Mecca.

Term Frequency

On to the actual text. Which words occur the most? When we look at term frequency over the whole of the Quran, we see that the word "God" ("Allah") occurs the most, over 2500 times. "Lord" is second with just under 1000. We also see "people", "believe", "earth", "merciful", "messenger", "punishment", "heavens", and "truth".

From this, we can infer that the Quran is foremost about God, whose most commonly ascribed attribute is mercy. It is addressed to a people or people in general, calling them to believe in God's truth, which is conveyed via a messenger (i.e., Muhammad). For those who believe, heaven awaits. For those who do not, punishment.

Normalized Term Frequency

Suppose we look at individual chapters. To compare across chapters, we should normalize the word counts within a chapter by dividing a word's total counts in a chapter by the chapter's total word count. The below plot shows the top 30 word-ratios, along with the associated word and chapter. We can see that "God" appears quite a bit. Other interesting words include "worship", "serve", "evil", "deny", "marvels", "condemned", and "shocker".

TFIDF

What we are really trying to get at are keywords. A useful way of getting at keywords is to use TFIDF, that is Term Frequency (and) Inverse Document Frequency. The Term Frequency, which we already have, is the number of times a word appears within a document. Since some words occur quite a bit but are not particularly important in determining what a document is about (e.g., "said"), it is useful to prioritize unique words within the collection of documents as indicative of what each document contains. This is done through the IDF. However, since many rare words may not really be that important, one can combine TF andf IDF to score words according to how often they occur and their uniqueness. Thus, one can pick out words that truly are key for any particular document.

However, when we look at the top words by Chapter and TFIDF, we do not have any new discoveries. "God" is still the most important keyword. We also see "marvels" again, along with "said" and "say".

    WordUpper  Chapter       TFIDF
148       GOD      2.0  249.000000
48        GOD      4.0  212.000000
84        GOD      3.0  189.000000
44        GOD      9.0  156.000000
15    MARVELS     55.0  143.765171
92        GOD      5.0  137.000000
128      SAID     12.0  120.274019
971      SAID      2.0  117.023370
577      SAID      7.0  113.772721
784    JOSEPH     12.0  111.302068
448       SAY      6.0   99.788023
619    PEOPLE      7.0   93.973035
23        GOD     33.0   84.000000
368       GOD      6.0   83.000000
13      LORDS     55.0   81.999836

What if we normalize TFIDF? That is, we use the normalized word counts for TF in the TFIDF equation. Does this bring new insight? Yes. We see lots of new words in the top 15: "loser", "hates", "crusher", "plenty", "sacrifice", and "encourage". It is important to note that many of these come from the same chapters, 108 and 109. It would appear that these chapters have very strong keywords in them compared to the rest of the Quran's chapters.

    WordUpper  Chapter  NormalizedTFIDF
2       SERVE    109.0       736.307505
21    SHOCKER    101.0       627.502961
33      LOSER    108.0       582.681321
31      HATES    108.0       582.681321
15    MARVELS     55.0       570.294902
20  CONDEMNED    111.0       562.494348
70     BEGETS    112.0       509.846156
82    CRUSHER    104.0       502.002369
4     MANKIND    114.0       490.658890
37     PLENTY    108.0       471.084614
35  SACRIFICE    108.0       471.084614
1     WORSHIP    109.0       458.559404
5    SECURITY    106.0       451.093997
3        EVIL    113.0       436.671046
60  ENCOURAGE    103.0       425.495780

How often is a word the most important keyword in a chapter in the Quran? We can find the maximum normalized TFIDF word for each chapter, and then by grouping on each distinct word, we can get a count for each keyword. In the plot below, we see that "God" is the most important keyword in 32 of the 114 chapters.

There are 73 distinct words that the most important keyword in a chapter. Most only occur once, in fact, only the top 5 shown below are the most important keyword in a chapter more than once. The only word we haven't seen yet is "ease".

 

Bigrams

Let's move on from single words to bi-grams, that is, a pair of consecutive words. From these we can get a better sense of the context or meaning of words, since we know what other words surround them. In the below code, I find the bi-grams after having removed the stop words. The top 30 most commonly occurring bi-grams are then plotted.

How might we interpret the bigrams below? Looking at the plot, we see the most common bi-gram is "heavens earth". We have seen both words previously. This may refer to "[the] heavens [and the] earth", which could be a way of expressing God's power and dominion over both "the heavens and the earth". "Everything [in the] heavens" "belongs [to] God", who is the "Lord [of the] worlds".

We also see "God gracious", "gracious merciful", and "forgiving merciful", suggesting that God is gracious and merciful and forgiving. Another aspect of God is that "God knows", perhaps referring to God's omniscience or knowledge of all things.

Finally, we see "day [of] resurrection", referring to end times and one's eternal status. For those who "turn away" and do not "believe God" or worship gods "besides God" there is "painful punishment" awaiting. Thus, one should "fear God" and "know God" and listen to "God['s] messenger" and the "good news". Such news may be especially directed at the "children [of] Israel", that is, the Jewish people.

Trigrams

Now let's look at trigrams, that is, consecutive groupings of three non-stopwords. Using the same process as above, we can see similar groupings of words and infer a similar overall message.

For example, we see "God [is] gracious [and] merciful", "[in the] name [of] God [the] gracious", and "God [is] forgiving [and] merciful". "God [is all] hearing [and all] knowing", "God [is] mighty [and] wise", and God "knows best". We may infer that God "created [the] heavens [and] earth" and "everything [in the] heavens [and] earth " belongs to God. We are called to "believe [and to do] good deeds" or "righteous deeds". We must "fear God [and] obey", and as a "people [we should] worship God." We will face "God [on the] last day" to be assigned a place of "abiding" "forever". Those that the "Lord[']s marvels deny" should heed these warnings.

Something new and very interesting is "Jesus son [of] Mary". This refers to Jesus, who instead of being considered divine as Christian's do, is one of the prophets of Islam but is not considered divine.

Sentiment Analysis

A common textual analysis is to look at sentiment. So we can ask, what is the sentiment over the course of the Quran? We can look at this by actual chapter ordering, as well as chronologically. I adapt from an approach located here: https://mran.microsoft.com/posts/twitter.html. In essence, for each chapter, I do a count of the positive words and a count of the negative words, find the difference, and return that difference as the sentiment score. While such an approach has obvious problems (e.g., "not funny" is counted as positive since "not" is ignored and "funny" is a positive word on its own), it is a useful starting point.

The list of positive and negative words I used can be found here: http://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub/FBS/opinion-lexicon-English.rar.

Now we are ready for analysis. First, what does the sentiment look like by traditional chapter order? We can see that there are wide swings in sentiment, but these stabilize as time goes on. Why? After some exploration, we can see that, since the Quran is roughly ordered by chapter length, there are more opportunities for positive or negative words to occur, and this makes the longer chapters more likely to have higher or lower sentiment.

To adjust for this, we can normalize the sentiment by chapter length, that is, by calculating the average sentiment per verse in the chapter. When we do so, the sentiment looks a lot more balanced. There are some low points in the middle and some high points at the end, but overall, the sentiment appears to go back and forth.

We can do the same thing chronologically. In the absence of normalization, it would appear that until about the 40th chronological chapter, the sentiment is fairly stable and mostly positive. About chronological chapter 40, the sentiment swings back and forth wildly before settling out again. This stability ceases right after the change from Mecca to Medina (the red vertical line) in which the sentiment swings to positive and negative extremes again. The lowest sentiment in the whole Quran appears near the very end in chronological chapter 112 (traditional chapter 5).

When normalized, the first part of the Quran in chronological order has the strongest sentiment, and it is mostly positive. The middle stabilizes and is almost flat until the transition from Mecca to Medina, when the strong sentiment re-emerges. While it is mostly positive, the lowest normalized sentiments occur in chronological chapters 104 and 105 (traditional chapters 63 and 58).

Which words are in the chapters that have the strongest sentiment, both positive and negative? We can see which chapters have the highest and lowest sentiment and normalized sentiment in the tables below.

On the positive side, traditional chapter 28 is a longer chapter and has words like "given", "land", "guidance", "know", and "resurrection". Traditional chapter 103 is very short and has the words "good", "gracious", "merciful", "patience". Traditional chapter 110 is also short, and has words like "praise", "merciful", "celebrate", and "victory".

On the negative side, traditional chapter 5 is a longer chapter and has words like "fear", "disbelieve", "punishment", "hostile", and "hunger". Traditional chapter 58 has words like "punishment", "Satan", "oppose", "estrange", and "lie". Traditional chapter 63 has words like "hypocrites", "repel", "deluded", and "evil".

Obviously, to really understand what these chapters are about and why they have very positive or very negative sentiment, one must read them to understand the context of the positive/negative words that determine the sentiment.

 

Conclusion

So what is the Quran really about? While the above analysis can't provide any nuanced or really specific conclusions, we can say that the Quran (and Islam) is generally about:

• God, who is gracious, merciful, forgiving, powerful, knowledgeable, and creator of the heavens and the earth
• God's instructions on how to live one's life in proper obedience and worship to God
• The eternal reward or punishment due to humans depending on how they live their lives in obedience or disobedience to God

In this, we can say that the Quran (and Islam) is in very general agreement with the other Abrahamic faiths of Judaism and Christianity in these general teachings of the religion. That is, at a very general level, these three faiths appear to be in agreement on the general nature of God and the purpose and destiny of humanity. However, a more detailed comparison of these religions would likely reveal great and important differences. For example, on the question of "who is Jesus?", each gives a very different and important answer.

While such differences should not be minimized or ignored, nor should they detract from the commonalities and agreement that these faiths have with each other. Hopefully, a greater understanding of these similarities and differences can lead to common cause and coordination in confronting the challenges the world faces today. My hope is that the above analysis has provided at least a small and initial step forward in that greater understanding, not just for me, but for you as well.

Text Mining the Bible

Introduction

What is the Bible about?  There are many ways one could answer this question, and even more ways one could go about finding an answer to the question.  One could read the Bible or read books about the Bible.  One could look at the scriptural text, the theological formulations, the historical narrative, or adopt another lens by which to make sense of what the book as a whole is all about.

In what follows, I offer a data science approach to begin to answer this question through the use of keyword relevance analysis and data visualization.  Such an analysis can provide quick insights into the key words and themes that can then be understood visually.  While extremely simplistic and nowhere near as rich, complete, or meaningful as actually reading the Bible or reading books on the Bible, such an analysis can provide guidance as to what is important.  I detail the method and show the results of this analysis in what follows.

The Method

I wrote a Python script that scraped the Biblical text book by book, chapter by chapter from Biblegateway.com.  I selected the NRSV translation and used the Catholic selection and ordering of books in the Bible.  Once the book text was parsed and cleaned (ok, not perfectly, but good enough for demonstration purposes), the whole book was submitted to the Alchemy API for keyword relevance analysis.  The output of the API was a keyword (or key phrase) (e.g., "God") with the relevance or importance of the keyword within the context of the book (e.g., 0.95).  The higher the relevance, the more important the keyword was.  After compiling the results, I had a list of about 50 keywords by relevance for each book of the Bible.

I took the results and brought them into Tableau for interactive filtering and visualization.  Screenshots below of the results are taken from the resulting workbook.

Here are some links for those who may be interested regarding the nuts and bolts of the analysis:

• BibleGateway:
• source for text
• GitHub
• The code for web scraping and submitting to Alchemy API.
• You will need your own API key.  Modify the code as necessary to suit your needs.
• Documentation for Alchemy API
• Tableau workbook

Here are some high level results of the analysis with some simple conclusions.

Results: Most Import Keywords

So what is the Bible about?  From the above method, we can look at keywords and phrases by total counts and relevance.  We'll look at these in turn.

Total Counts

What are the most common keywords?  With 73 books in this Biblical list, a keyword could have a total count of 73 if it was a keyword in every book of the Bible.  According to the Alchemy API, the top 10 keywords by total count in the Bible are:

1. God (48)
2. Lord (46)
3. people (44)
4. house (26)
5. things (22)
6. Lord God (22)
7. Israel (22)
8. son (21)
9. land (20)
10. king (19)

Not surprisingly, the Bible is about "God" or the "Lord".  It is also about a "people", namely, the Israelites, and the story of their establishment in the "land" of Israel.  Much of the Old Testament talks about the various rising and falling of "king"s and the establishment of the "house" of the Lord (i.e., the temple) or being a member or descendant of a "house" (e.g., the house of David).   As lineage is important, "son" is used a lot to explain ancestry, and in the New Testament, this word takes on a special meaning as part of the phrase "son of God". 

Here are the top 3 keywords (God, Lord, people) over the range of the Bible.  While not categorized as relevant in every book of the Bible, "God"/"Lord" is very relevant throughout most of the Bible.  The word "people", though less relevant on average, is also found throughout the Bible.  This would suggest that the Bible is fundamentally about "God" and the relationship of "God" to a "people".

Noticeably absent from this list, is "Jesus", whose top entry is "Lord Jesus Christ" tied at #12 with a total count of 15.

Maximum Relevance

What are the most relevant keywords?  A keyword may only occur a few times but be extremely relevant in context, while another word may occur more often but may not be relevant at all.  So while total count does give an indication of relevance, it is not exhaustive.  According to this Quora post, the Alchemy API calculates relevance by using word position, context of other words, how many times it is used, and other statistics.  However, the specific details are not documented anywhere that I could find.

What are the most relevant keywords/phrases?  I looked at the maximum relevance for a keyword in the whole Bible.  In order of most relevant, the top 10 keywords/phrases are:

1. Lord Your God (0.998)
2. God (0.996)
3. beloved speaks (0.992)
4. son (0.990)
5. savior Jesus Christ (0.989)
6. shall (0.989)
7. Lord (0.988)
8. Judas (0.988)
9. Jesus Christ (0.984)
10. Holy Spirit (0.984)

Again, we can infer that the Bible is about "God", or more specifically (as addressed to the Israelites) the "Lord Your God".  "Beloved speaks" is interesting in that it comes from the Song of Solomon, in which Solomon writes poetry to his "beloved".  We also see again the importance of "son".  But now we also see "Jesus Christ" enter into the picture as important, as is the "Holy Spirit".  Thus, each person of the trinity is considered relevant.

The occurrence of "Judas" is also very interesting.  However, it is not a reference to the Judas who betrayed Jesus, but a reference to "Judas Maccabeus" from the book of 1 Maccabees.  The word "shall" comes from the book of Micah, who is a prophet and speaks of many things that "shall" happen.

Here are the top 5 (Lord Your God, God, beloved speaks, son, savior Jesus Christ).  We have seen that "God" is used throughout the Bible.  "Lord Your God" is used primarily in the early part of the Old Testament and then again in the prophets.  The word "son" is used heavily in the historical books of the Old Testament, and then again in the 4 gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  "Savior Jesus Christ" only makes one appearance in 2 Peter.

Total Counts and Maximum Relevance

We have seen that some words have high counts but lack relevance, while others have relevance but lack high counts.  Which keywords have both?  I increased the Total Counts filter and the Max Relevance filter until I had 10 keywords.  Choosing different thresholds would result in a slightly different combination, but my selection requires each keyword to have a max relevance above 0.90 and a Total Count greater than 12.    This results in the following list:

• Father
• God
• Holy Spirit
• Israel
• Jesus Christ
• King
• Lord
• Lord God
• Lord Your God
• Son

We have seen most of these already.  The exception is "Father".  It is a keyword 13 times and has a max relevance of 0.933.  It occurs throughout the Bible, but reaches a high point in Matthew.   Matthew opens up with a genealogy of Jesus in the form of "X was the father of Y, and Y the father of Z, and Z...", and this goes on for many lines. 

Most Relevant Keyword In Book Total Counts

Which words are consistently the most relevant in a book?  If we find the most relevant word in a book and then find the total counts of these words, which ones are on top?  The top 8 (those occurring more than once) are:

1. Lord (17)
2. God (14)
3. Son (4)
4. Christ (4)
5. King (4)
6. Christ Jesus (3)
7. Jesus Christ (3)
8. Jesus (2)

Again, "Lord" and "God" are consistently the most important.  We have also seen "son" and "king" before, as well as "Jesus".  Of note is that "Christ" now appears on its own in addition to being attached to Jesus as we have seen before.  The word "Christ" means "Messiah" who is the awaited savior and king of the Jews.  So there is the notion that Jesus is the "king" and savior of the Jewish people.

Keyword Category Total Counts

Many of these keywords could be further categorized or similarly grouped.  For example, "Jesus Christ" and "Christ Jesus" could be grouped with "Jesus".  After performing such groupings, what are the total counts now?  The top 10 are:

1. God (228)
2. Lord (150)
3. Family (149)
4. People/Israel (146)
5. Jesus (117)
6. Virtue (102)
7. Covenant/Law (61)
8. Body Part (58)
9. Land/Earth (56)
10. Humans (51)

"God" and "Lord" are still at the top, but next we have familial terms like "father", "son", "brother", "sister", and "child".  Then we have terms related to "Israel" or "People".  Next, any terms related to "Jesus".  After that, terms of virtue: peace, love, mercy, faith, hope.  Covenant/Law refers to terms related to the Old Testament law: priests, offering, covenant, and law.  Body Part refers to a mention of a body part like hands, heart, and eyes.  Land/Earth refers to the land, Earth, world, hill country, or some other generic description of location.  Lastly, humans refers to any non-familial term for humans: woman, man, and young men.

So we can see that this grouping still characterizes the Bible as about God, but perhaps it is about a relationship to people spoken of in largely familial concepts.  At the very least, family relationships are important and spoken of often.  Jesus is important too (more on that below).  A life of virtue in reference to (or perhaps in contrast with) the law/covenant of Israel is how one ought to live.  Such a vision has a broad scope, applying to the land and the Earth and humans of every kind on the Earth.

Specific Comparisons

Other specific comparisons could made of keywords and categories, but here are two interesting ones I saw.

Trinity: God/Lord, Jesus, Spirit/Holy Spirit

As we know, "God"/"Lord" is important throughout the Bible.  Once entering the New Testament, "Jesus" becomes equally important.  "Holy Spirit" has lesser importance, but is still prominent in the New Testament.  It is highest in the book of Acts, when it is more relevant than either "Jesus" or "God".

Virtue, Covenant/Law, Sin

The categories of Covenant/Law and Virtue seem to trade off in relevance.  In the beginning of the Bible, Covenant/Law keywords are most relevant.  In the prophetic books, Virtue keywords are more relevant.  In the beginning of the New Testament, both are important, but Covenant/Law is emphasized over Virtue. For the rest of the New Testament, however, Virtue is most important.  "Sin" appears here and there, but is only ever about as relevant as Virtue.

Other Insights?

While I could go on and on with more insights, I will leave that to you!  I have embedded the Tableau dashboard below.  You can also go here to view and use the dashboard.

Conclusion

So what is the Bible about?  From this simplistic keyword and relevance analysis, we can sum up the above findings and say that the Bible is broadly about:

• God (the Lord)
• The history of God's interaction with the people of Israel through the use of law and a covenant.
• The coming of Jesus, who is considered to be the Christ and king of the Jewish people, followed by the coming of the Holy Spirit.
• A shift towards a life focused on living by virtue instead of living (merely) by the law.

Much more can obviously be said here, but I think the main goal has been achieved.  That is, I have shown that a keyword and relevance analysis using data science methods (e.g., web scraping, APIs, data visualization) can reveal much about the important themes in a text, in particular, the Bible.