A Map of Meaning
Explore model-based language similarities among chapters of the Berean Standard Bible's 66-book Protestant canon.
BibleVerse research
The Catholic and Orthodox Books on the Map
The main map uses a 66-book Protestant Bible. This companion study asks where books found in Catholic and some Orthodox Bibles appear when the same method is applied to two broader English editions.
What the wider canons add
The main map begins with the 66 books used in Protestant Bibles. This page broadens the comparison. When it calls a book or passage “additional,” it means additional to that 66-book dataset. It does not mean that the writing is later, secondary or less authoritative within traditions that receive it as scripture.
Catholic Bibles include Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees, along with longer forms of Esther and Daniel. These seven books comprise 137 chapters in the edition used here. They are outside the Protestant canon, although some Protestant editions print them as Apocrypha. Orthodox collections and arrangements vary. Brenton includes 1 Esdras, 3 and 4 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151, and prints the Letter of Jeremiah, Susanna and Bel and the Dragon separately. This study follows that edition rather than defining an Orthodox canon; it is not a universal Orthodox canon. See the USCCB overview, the Orthodox Church in America's account, and Brenton's contents.
The question is how these chapters relate to the passages already represented in the main map. The examples include similarities to narrative, poetry, wisdom writing and other passages. The model's groupings do not establish an exhaustive classification of literary forms.
The Catholic map has 73 books and 1,328 chapters, from the World English Bible's Catholic edition. Each dot is one chapter, colored by section, with the additional books assigned to the study's section scheme and a ring on every chapter of a deuterocanonical book. As on the main map, distance on the drawing is approximate; the measure behind every number on this page is the similarity of the chapters' full representations, and the tables carry it.
- Law
- History
- Poetry and Wisdom
- Prophets
- Gospels and Acts
- Letters
- Revelation
- A ring marks a chapter of a deuterocanonical book
What was measured
Five things, all in the full measure unless the text says the map:
- Where each added book lands. Its nearest books of the 66 by the average similarity of every pair of chapters across the two books; the section its language is nearest on average; and, chapter by chapter, its nearest chapter of the 66 and whether its ten nearest chapters are mostly inside its own book, in the other added books, or among the 66. The base set follows the shared book categories as represented in this edition, so Susanna and Bel, which this edition carries as Daniel 13 and 14, count as added chapters; and a nearest chapter of the 66 is never one of the four chapters where a Greek addition is about half the text or more, Esther 4, 8 and 10 and Daniel 3, which are set aside for that one measure so that it never names a passage the 66 do not have.
- Whether the 66 change. For every chapter of the 66, its ten nearest chapters computed with the added chapters present and again without them: how much the two sets overlap, how many chapters now have an added chapter among their ten nearest, and which added books do the drawing.
- Yardsticks for that change. Two here: the same chapters in two translations, the World English Bible's Catholic edition against the Berean Standard Bible for the 64 books both carry in the same form, so that the effect of the canon is not confused with the effect of the edition; and the smallest change the method can register, the rounding of the stored numbers. A third, Brenton's English translation against the BSB, comes with the Brenton source-edition map.
- The seams inside Sirach and Wisdom, by the rule the main map uses for Isaiah and Daniel: a split that leaves two halves further apart on the map than either is spread.
- The additions to Esther and Daniel. The WEB Catholic edition's Esther and Daniel, chapter for chapter, against the BSB forms, so the chapters that carry the additions show as the chapters that fall away from the translation's usual agreement.
The Brenton source-edition map repeats the first three measures for its fourteen added books, with the 39 shared Old Testament book categories in place of the 66 and Brenton's Septuagint against the Berean Standard Bible as its own translation yardstick, aligned by the Septuagint's numbering. It repeats the seam scan for Sirach and Wisdom in the second translation, places the Greek Esther and Daniel against their Hebrew counterparts again, and places Psalm 151, a chapter the Hebrew Psalter lacks, on its own.
The Catholic books, one by one
The table behind the disclosure below carries every number; this is what it says.
- Sirach has many close matches in Proverbs. Its nearest book of the 66 is Proverbs, then James and Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs holds the nearest chapter of the 66 for 32 of its 51 chapters. Sirach 20 and Proverbs 19 are the closest pair of an added chapter and a chapter of the 66 on the whole map, at 0.931. Twenty-five of Sirach's 51 chapters have their ten nearest chapters mostly inside Sirach, and 26 mostly among the 66. These are neighboring matches, not a judgment about where the book belongs. Chapters 44 to 50 are another matter, and the seams section takes them up.
- Wisdom of Solomon lands with Job: Job holds the nearest chapter of the 66 for twelve of its nineteen chapters, and Proverbs for four. Its language is nearest the poetry and wisdom books on average, with the Letters a close second, by 0.006; that result does not establish its original language; on the map it sits beside Job. Only four of its chapters have their ten nearest mostly inside Wisdom. Its book average puts Jude first, ahead of Job. Book averages and individual chapter matches answer different questions.
- Baruch sits among the prophets on the map, nearest Habakkuk by center, and its chapters have different nearest matches in the full-dimensional comparison. None has another chapter of Baruch among its ten nearest. Baruch 1 and 2, the exiles' confession, find Ezra 9 and Nehemiah 9, the other long confessions, the second at 0.918. Baruch 3, a poem on where wisdom is found, finds Job 22. Baruch 4 finds Micah 7 and Baruch 5 Psalm 68. Baruch 6, the letter against idols that the Septuagint carries as a book of its own, finds Job 36, and on the map it sits with the poetry beside Wisdom 14, which mocks the same idols.
- 1 Maccabees is a chronicle of campaigns, and it lands with the chronicles: Samuel, Kings and Chronicles hold the nearest chapter of the 66 for eleven of its sixteen chapters, 1 Maccabees 1 finds 2 Kings 17 and 1 Maccabees 3 finds 1 Kings 20. Fourteen of its sixteen chapters have their ten nearest mostly inside the book, which makes it the most self-contained of the seven: its chapters resemble one another more than anything else. By the section average, though, it leans the way 2 Maccabees does, less strongly: the Gospels and Acts are the nearest section on average for eight of its sixteen chapters and History for seven, and for the book as a whole History leads the Gospels by 0.005. The limits section says why that average leans as it does.
- Judith sits beside the Greek Esther on the map, and its chapters split between the histories and the prophets: nine have their nearest chapter of the 66 in the histories and five in the prophets. The campaign chapters that open the book find Jeremiah 52 and Isaiah 10; Judith 5, where Achior recites Israel's history to Holofernes, finds Deuteronomy 1, Moses' own recital, at 0.888; Judith 9, her prayer, finds Psalm 59. By the book average its nearest books of the 66 are Zephaniah, Obadiah and Joel, the short prophets of the nations' downfall. That ranking describes this averaging method, not the book's historical setting.
- Tobit is the first surprise. Its chapters do not keep together: six of the fourteen find their nearest chapter of the 66 in Genesis, among the stories of Isaac's bride and Joseph's brothers, two in Nehemiah and two in 2 Kings, in the household stories of Elisha. Three chapters have different neighboring matches. Tobit 4, a father's instructions to his son, sits with Sirach on the map and finds Proverbs 22. Tobit 13, a hymn, sits with the Psalms. Tobit 12, where the angel reveals himself and teaches prayer, fasting and almsgiving, sits among the Gospels, and all ten of its nearest chapters are Gospel chapters, Luke 10 first. Taken as a whole, Tobit's language is nearer the Gospels and Acts on average than any Old Testament section, for ten of its fourteen chapters, and its nearest books of the 66 by the book average are Luke, Mark and Matthew. It is a family story of one household, with a journey, a healing, an angel and prayers, and this model finds similarities to Gospel passages. That is not a claim of literary dependence or theological equivalence.
- 2 Maccabees is the second. On the map it sits with 1 Maccabees, its nearest book, and its chapters on the campaigns keep company with 1 Maccabees chapter by chapter. But its nearest chapters of the 66 are in Acts for eight of its fifteen chapters, its nearest books of the 66 by the book average are Acts, Luke and Mark, and fourteen of its fifteen chapters have the Gospels and Acts as their nearest section on average. Among the 66's own history chapters that reading is rare: 6 of 249; the section average does lean toward the Gospels, as the limits section explains and 1 Maccabees shows, but not this far. The plainest case is 2 Maccabees 7, the seven brothers put to death for the law, whose nearest chapter of the 66 is Acts 7, the stoning of Stephen, at 0.847; 2 Maccabees 6, the martyrdom of Eleazar, finds Hebrews 10. Speeches, persecution, martyrdom and the deliverance of a community are the matter of Acts, and 2 Maccabees is written in that register.
The comparisons suggest passages worth reading together, including Tobit alongside family narratives and 2 Maccabees alongside accounts of persecution and martyrdom. No additional chapter appears in the forty closest cross-book pairs in this Catholic-edition dataset. That ranking does not assess the books' originality, literary value or canonical standing.
The named views below show each of these on the map. Each caption's claims are checked against the data, and every chapter named can be opened in the edition it comes from.
- Proverbs
- Ecclesiastes
- Job
- Wisdom of Solomon
- Sirach
- A ring marks a chapter of a deuterocanonical book
- Samuel and Kings
- Chronicles
- 1 Maccabees
- 2 Maccabees
- A ring marks a chapter of a deuterocanonical book
- Ruth
- Esther (Greek)
- Judith
- Tobit
- A ring marks a chapter of a deuterocanonical book
- Jeremiah
- Lamentations
- Baruch
- A ring marks a chapter of a deuterocanonical book
- Esther (Greek)
- Daniel (Greek) 1 to 12
- Susanna and Bel and the Dragon
- A ring marks a chapter of a deuterocanonical book
Every added book: nearest books, nearest section, and where its chapters' ten nearest fall
| Book | Chapters | Placed with | Nearest books of the 66 (mean similarity) | Language nearest to | Ten nearest: own / other added / the 66 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tobit | 14 | History | Luke (0.690), Mark (0.666), Matthew (0.652) | Gospels and Acts, by 0.023 over Prophets | 6 / 1 / 7 |
| Judith | 16 | History | Zephaniah (0.734), Obadiah (0.730), Joel (0.724) | Prophets, by 0.021 over History | 7 / 1 / 8 |
| Wisdom of Solomon | 19 | Poetry and Wisdom | Jude (0.787), Job (0.769), Ecclesiastes (0.764) | Poetry and Wisdom, by 0.006 over Letters | 4 / 1 / 14 |
| Sirach | 51 | Poetry and Wisdom | Proverbs (0.814), James (0.787), Ecclesiastes (0.784) | Poetry and Wisdom, by 0.019 over Letters | 25 / 0 / 26 |
| Baruch | 6 | Prophets | Joel (0.793), Obadiah (0.790), Micah (0.789) | Prophets, by 0.012 over Poetry and Wisdom | 0 / 0 / 6 |
| 1 Maccabees | 16 | History | 2 Kings (0.703), Acts (0.699), Judges (0.692) | History, by 0.005 over Gospels and Acts | 14 / 0 / 2 |
| 2 Maccabees | 15 | History | Acts (0.705), Luke (0.695), Mark (0.689) | Gospels and Acts, by 0.038 over Prophets | 9 / 4 / 2 |
Nearest books are by the average similarity of every pair of chapters across the two books, which favors short books. "Language nearest to" is the section whose chapters the book's chapters resemble most on average, with its margin over the second section; it favors sections whose chapters resemble one another, as the limits section explains, and a margin under 0.002 is a tie. The last column counts the book's chapters by where most of their ten nearest chapters fall; Susanna and Bel count as added chapters there.
Every added chapter and its nearest chapter of the 66
Do the added books change the map?
This comparison adds 139 chapters: the seven books' 137 chapters and Susanna and Bel. It tests neighboring matches for the other 1,189 chapters, the selected 66-book set as this edition carries it. To measure that, every chapter of the 66 had its ten nearest chapters computed twice, once with the added chapters present and once without them. For 974 of the 1,189 chapters the ten are the same ten. For 215, 18% of them, at least one added chapter has entered the ten, and for 20 the nearest chapter of all is now an added one. The average Jaccard overlap of the two sets is 0.948. Jaccard overlap divides shared neighbors by all distinct neighbors in the two sets; it is not the fraction of ten retained.
The change is concentrated. Sirach alone draws 114 of the 215 chapters, and it draws them where you would expect: every one of Ecclesiastes' twelve chapters now has a Sirach chapter among its ten nearest, as do 21 of Proverbs' 31 and 18 of Job's 42. Judith draws 42, eight of them in Judges; Baruch draws 38, eleven of them in the Psalms; 1 Maccabees draws 17; Tobit draws four. These book-level counts can overlap, so they should not be added together. The counts are of chapters: a chapter of Judges with three chapters of Judith among its ten nearest counts once. The chapter that changes most is Ecclesiastes 5, seven of whose ten nearest are now chapters of Sirach.
How large is that? Two yardsticks here, and a third with the Brenton source-edition map. The smallest change the method can register is the rounding of the stored numbers, which alone gives an overlap of 0.981 between the exact and the stored neighborhoods of the same chapters. A change of translation is much larger: the same 1,167 chapters of the 64 books that both editions carry in the same form, read once in the World English Bible's Catholic edition and once in the Berean Standard Bible, agree at a similarity of 0.980 on average, 0.984 at the median, and have an average Jaccard overlap of 0.668 between their ten-neighbor sets, with the same nearest chapter 70% of the time. Adding the seven books, then, moves the 66's neighborhoods far less than translating them differently does, and a little more than rounding does. These results compare neighboring matches; they do not demonstrate that the visual shape remains unchanged.
Which books of the 66 gain an added neighbor, and the chapters that change most
| Book | Chapters with an added neighbor | Drawn by (chapters with a chapter of that book among their ten nearest; neighbors counted where more than one) |
|---|---|---|
| Ecclesiastes | 12 of 12 | Sirach (12; 35 neighbors), Wisdom of Solomon (1) |
| Jude | 1 of 1 | Wisdom of Solomon (1) |
| Daniel (Greek) | 9 of 12 | Bel and the Dragon (5), Judith (3), Baruch (2; 3 neighbors) |
| Ruth | 3 of 4 | Judith (3; 5 neighbors), Susanna (1) |
| Esther (Greek) | 7 of 10 | Judith (4; 5 neighbors), 1 Maccabees (3; 4 neighbors), 2 Maccabees (2; 3 neighbors) |
| Proverbs | 21 of 31 | Sirach (21; 61 neighbors), Wisdom of Solomon (1) |
| 2 Peter | 2 of 3 | Wisdom of Solomon (1; 3 neighbors), Sirach (1; 2 neighbors) |
| Song of Solomon | 5 of 8 | Sirach (4; 5 neighbors), Wisdom of Solomon (2) |
| Judges | 11 of 21 | Judith (8; 11 neighbors), 1 Maccabees (3; 5 neighbors), Sirach (1; 2 neighbors) |
| Job | 20 of 42 | Sirach (18; 28 neighbors), Baruch (3), Wisdom of Solomon (1) |
| Nehemiah | 6 of 13 | 1 Maccabees (3; 5 neighbors), Baruch (3; 4 neighbors), Judith (2; 4 neighbors) |
| James | 2 of 5 | Sirach (2; 5 neighbors) |
| Revelation | 8 of 22 | Sirach (4; 5 neighbors), Wisdom of Solomon (4) |
| 1 Kings | 6 of 22 | Sirach (3), Judith (2), 1 Maccabees (1) |
| 2 Chronicles | 9 of 36 | Sirach (4; 5 neighbors), Judith (3), 1 Maccabees (2) |
| Jonah | 1 of 4 | Judith (1) |
| Malachi | 1 of 4 | Baruch (1) |
| Hebrews | 3 of 13 | Sirach (3; 4 neighbors) |
| Psalms | 33 of 150 | Sirach (19; 34 neighbors), Baruch (11; 12 neighbors), Wisdom of Solomon (5; 6 neighbors) |
| Ezra | 2 of 10 | Baruch (2; 3 neighbors) |
| Lamentations | 1 of 5 | Baruch (1) |
| 1 Samuel | 6 of 31 | Judith (3), Sirach (3), Baruch (1) |
| 1 Corinthians | 3 of 16 | Sirach (2), Wisdom of Solomon (2) |
| 1 Timothy | 1 of 6 | Sirach (1; 5 neighbors) |
| 2 Kings | 4 of 25 | 1 Maccabees (2; 4 neighbors), Judith (2), Sirach (1) |
| 1 Chronicles | 4 of 29 | 1 Maccabees (1), Baruch (1), Judith (1) |
| Jeremiah | 7 of 52 | Baruch (6), 1 Maccabees (1), Judith (1) |
| Romans | 2 of 16 | Baruch (1), Sirach (1) |
| Isaiah | 7 of 66 | Sirach (2; 4 neighbors), Baruch (2), Wisdom of Solomon (2) |
| Deuteronomy | 3 of 34 | Judith (3) |
| Joshua | 2 of 24 | Judith (2; 4 neighbors) |
| Genesis | 4 of 50 | Sirach (2; 3 neighbors), Judith (1), Susanna (1) |
| Exodus | 3 of 40 | Sirach (3) |
| Hosea | 1 of 14 | Judith (1) |
| Ezekiel | 3 of 48 | Sirach (2), Baruch (1) |
| Mark | 1 of 16 | Sirach (1) |
| Numbers | 1 of 36 | Judith (1) |
The chapters whose ten nearest changed most
| Chapter | Overlap with and without | Added chapters among its ten nearest |
|---|---|---|
| Ecclesiastes 5 | 0.18 | Sirach 31, Sirach 11, Sirach 18, Sirach 40, Sirach 34, Sirach 14, Sirach 20 |
| Proverbs 31 | 0.25 | Sirach 26, Sirach 33, Sirach 40, Sirach 14, Sirach 42, Sirach 25 |
| Nehemiah 5 | 0.33 | Judith 8, 1 Maccabees 3, 1 Maccabees 2, Judith 7, Judith 4 |
| Proverbs 4 | 0.33 | Sirach 4, Sirach 6, Sirach 7, Sirach 32, Sirach 3 |
| Proverbs 5 | 0.33 | Sirach 23, Sirach 4, Sirach 33, Sirach 6, Sirach 28 |
| Proverbs 6 | 0.33 | Sirach 23, Sirach 19, Sirach 26, Sirach 14, Sirach 25 |
| Proverbs 23 | 0.33 | Sirach 4, Sirach 32, Sirach 31, Sirach 30, Sirach 7 |
| Proverbs 26 | 0.33 | Sirach 21, Sirach 20, Sirach 22, Sirach 19, Sirach 27 |
| Ecclesiastes 12 | 0.33 | Sirach 40, Sirach 33, Sirach 18, Sirach 39, Sirach 42 |
| 1 Timothy 5 | 0.33 | Sirach 7, Sirach 41, Sirach 4, Sirach 3, Sirach 42 |
| Judges 21 | 0.43 | Judith 7, Judith 5, Judith 4, Judith 8 |
| 2 Kings 7 | 0.43 | 1 Maccabees 3, 1 Maccabees 6, Judith 7, 1 Maccabees 2 |
The translation yardstick: the ten chapters that move most between the two editions
| Chapter | Similarity across the two translations | Overlap of ten nearest |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Timothy 3 | 0.896 | 0.82 |
| Psalms 136 | 0.902 | 0.43 |
| Numbers 2 | 0.910 | 0.67 |
| Jeremiah 45 | 0.911 | 0.18 |
| Ezra 2 | 0.913 | 0.67 |
| 1 Kings 6 | 0.918 | 0.67 |
| 2 Kings 7 | 0.921 | 0.33 |
| Numbers 17 | 0.922 | 0.43 |
| Nehemiah 7 | 0.925 | 0.67 |
| Leviticus 13 | 0.925 | 0.67 |
The same chapter in the two editions, by the similarity of its two representations and by the overlap of its ten nearest neighbors under each. The translations study takes this question up in full.
Inside Sirach and Wisdom
The main map finds the seams readers know inside Isaiah, Daniel and Job. The same rule, applied to every possible split of the two long wisdom books, identifies candidate divisions to compare with the text.
- Sirach, between 43 and 44. Chapters 1 to 43 are sayings and instruction, and they sit over Proverbs. Chapters 44 to 50, the praise of the ancestors, are a recital of Israel's history from Enoch to Simon the high priest, and they sit far from the rest of the book, beside the other recitals: 1 Chronicles 16, Psalm 105, Psalm 78, Nehemiah 9 and 1 Kings 8 are their nearest chapters of the 66. The closing prayer of chapter 51 sits back with the sayings, so the rule, which splits a book once, puts the seam between 43 and 44 with the praise of the ancestors on the far side of it. Of all the splits the rule accepts, this one leaves the two halves furthest apart for their spread.
- Wisdom of Solomon has no single seam. The book drifts, from the sayings on death and the righteous, nearest Job, through the praise of wisdom, nearest Proverbs 8, to the exodus retold in its last chapters, nearest Psalm 106 and Psalm 78. The rule accepts any split from chapter 8 on, and ranks the split between 17 and 18 first, before the two chapters on the plagues; the traditional division after chapter 9 holds as well.
The additions to Esther and Daniel
This edition carries the Greek Esther and the Greek Daniel in place of the Hebrew books, with the additions in their places: Mordecai's dream and its interpretation, the royal edicts and the prayers in Esther; the prayer of Azariah and the song of the three in the furnace in Daniel 3; and Susanna and Bel and the Dragon as Daniel 13 and 14. Comparing each Greek chapter with the same-numbered chapter of the Hebrew book in the Berean Standard Bible highlights differences in content and translation. The literary sources identify the additions; the scores do not establish their boundaries.
Across the 64 books both editions share, a chapter agrees with its counterpart at 0.984 at the median. The Greek Esther's ten chapters average 0.893, and the fall is where the additions are. Esther 10, three verses in the Hebrew and fourteen in the Greek, where the dream is interpreted, scores 0.619 against its Hebrew chapter, the lowest of any; Esther 4, with the prayers of Mordecai and Esther, forty-six verses against seventeen, scores 0.813; Esther 1 and 3, which carry the dream and the first edict, score 0.910 and 0.889. The Greek Daniel averages 0.965 over the twelve chapters both have, and eleven of the twelve score above 0.96; Daniel 3, ninety-seven verses against thirty, scores 0.803. Those four chapters, Esther 4, 8 and 10 and Daniel 3, are the ones where the Greek text runs to between 1.95 and 3.74 times the Hebrew chapter's length in words, while no other chapter is more than 1.56 times it; they are the chapters this page sets aside when it names a nearest chapter of the 66, This is a screening rule based on these English editions, not a direct measurement of how much Greek text was added. Susanna and Bel and the Dragon have no Hebrew chapter at all, and this page counts them as added chapters, as Brenton's edition makes them books. On the map they sit among the histories; in the full measure Susanna's nearest chapter of the 66 is Joshua 2, the story of Rahab and the two men, and Bel's is Daniel 6, the lions' den, then, outside Daniel, 1 Kings 13, the man of God and the old prophet.
Every chapter of the Greek Esther and Daniel against the Hebrew
| Chapter | Verses in the Greek | Verses in the Hebrew | Length against the Hebrew chapter, in words | Similarity to the Hebrew chapter | Nearest chapter of the 66 outside its book |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Esther (Greek) 1 | 22 | 22 | 1.56 | 0.910 | Daniel (Greek) 5 (0.807) |
| Esther (Greek) 2 | 23 | 23 | 0.90 | 0.941 | 2 Samuel 14 (0.713) |
| Esther (Greek) 3 | 15 | 15 | 1.42 | 0.889 | 2 Chronicles 28 (0.777) |
| Esther (Greek) 4 | 46 | 17 | 2.67 (set aside) | 0.813 | Nehemiah 1 (0.851) |
| Esther (Greek) 5 | 14 | 14 | 1.43 | 0.961 | 2 Kings 6 (0.756) |
| Esther (Greek) 6 | 14 | 14 | 1.01 | 0.966 | 2 Samuel 19 (0.768) |
| Esther (Greek) 7 | 10 | 10 | 0.88 | 0.952 | 2 Samuel 14 (0.750) |
| Esther (Greek) 8 | 17 | 17 | 1.95 (set aside) | 0.920 | 2 Chronicles 34 (0.762) |
| Esther (Greek) 9 | 30 | 32 | 0.80 | 0.958 | 2 Chronicles 35 (0.752) |
| Esther (Greek) 10 | 14 | 3 | 3.74 (set aside) | 0.619 | Psalms 105 (0.775) |
| Daniel (Greek) 1 | 21 | 21 | 1.11 | 0.969 | 2 Chronicles 36 (0.749) |
| Daniel (Greek) 2 | 49 | 49 | 1.07 | 0.979 | Zechariah 6 (0.797) |
| Daniel (Greek) 3 | 97 | 30 | 2.62 (set aside) | 0.803 | Psalms 68 (0.869) |
| Daniel (Greek) 4 | 37 | 37 | 1.02 | 0.990 | Ezekiel 31 (0.833) |
| Daniel (Greek) 5 | 31 | 31 | 1.05 | 0.983 | Esther (Greek) 1 (0.807) |
| Daniel (Greek) 6 | 28 | 28 | 1.09 | 0.988 | 2 Kings 6 (0.725) |
| Daniel (Greek) 7 | 28 | 28 | 1.01 | 0.970 | Revelation 17 (0.837) |
| Daniel (Greek) 8 | 27 | 27 | 1.07 | 0.977 | Isaiah 6 (0.819) |
| Daniel (Greek) 9 | 27 | 27 | 1.05 | 0.981 | Ezra 9 (0.893) |
| Daniel (Greek) 10 | 21 | 21 | 1.03 | 0.982 | Ezekiel 3 (0.816) |
| Daniel (Greek) 11 | 45 | 45 | 1.09 | 0.975 | Isaiah 10 (0.883) |
| Daniel (Greek) 12 | 13 | 13 | 1.03 | 0.984 | Mark 13 (0.843) |
| Daniel (Greek) 13 | 64 | no counterpart (added chapter) | no counterpart | Joshua 2 (0.804) | |
| Daniel (Greek) 14 | 42 | no counterpart (added chapter) | no counterpart | 1 Kings 13 (0.795) |
Brenton's English Septuagint
This source-edition map uses Brenton's English Septuagint, an Old Testament collection of 53 book entries and 1,116 chapter representations. Its baseline comprises 942 representations in the 39 book categories shared with the selected Protestant Old Testament, including the Greek forms of Esther and Daniel and Psalm 151. Those are dataset categories, not a count of chapters in the Hebrew Bible. The other 174 chapters fall in fourteen separately listed books. The file includes Nehemiah twice, within Ezra 11–23 and as Nehemiah 1–13. The figures and tables in this section retain those entries for transparency; they must not be read as counts of distinct canonical chapters.
- Law
- History
- Poetry and Wisdom
- Prophets
- A ring marks a chapter of a deuterocanonical book
In this source edition, the seven books also included in Catholic Bibles have many familiar chapter matches. The comparison differs in translation, source text and available chapters, including the absence of a New Testament. Proverbs holds the nearest chapter of the 39 for 33 of Sirach's 51 chapters, and Sirach 30 and Proverbs 23 are the closest pair of an added chapter and a chapter of the 39 on this map, at 0.938. Job holds the nearest chapter for nine of Wisdom's nineteen chapters and Proverbs for five, with Proverbs and Job tied as its nearest book by average. Sirach's seam falls between 43 and 44 again; for Wisdom, the rule ranks the traditional division after chapter 9 first in this edition. 1 Maccabees keeps to the histories: all sixteen of its chapters have their nearest chapter of the 39 there, twelve of them in Samuel, Kings or Chronicles. Tobit's chapters still find Genesis, eight of the fourteen; without the Gospels to go to, Tobit 12 finds Job 33, Elihu on the angel who speaks for a man, and Tobit 13 finds the same hymn as before, Psalm 67 in this numbering, Psalm 68 in the Hebrew. 2 Maccabees, with no Acts to find, keeps company with the other books of Maccabees: eight of its fifteen chapters have their ten nearest mostly among the other added books, and none mostly among the 39.
- 1 Esdras retells the end of 2 Chronicles, much of Ezra and material from Nehemiah, with an additional guardsmen's debate. The United Bible Societies introduction explains these parallels and the debated relationships between the texts. Ezra holds the nearest chapter of the 39 for six of its nine chapters. 1 Esdras 1 finds 2 Chronicles 35, Josiah's Passover, at 0.936, and 1 Esdras 6 finds Ezra 5 at the same score: with two pairs from Sirach and Proverbs, these are the four closest pairs of an added chapter and a chapter of the 39 on this map. No chapter of 1 Esdras has its ten nearest mostly inside 1 Esdras. It sits inside the books it retells, Nehemiah and Ezra its nearest books by center and all but tied, and for ten chapters of the 39, seven of them in Ezra, the nearest chapter of all is now a chapter of 1 Esdras. The exception is its own story: 1 Esdras 3 and 4, where three guardsmen debate before Darius what is strongest, wine, the king, women or truth, find Daniel 5 and Proverbs 24.
- 3 Maccabees is a story of a decree against the Jews of Egypt and its reversal, with two long prayers, and its chapters keep with the other books of Maccabees: five of its seven have their ten nearest mostly among the other added books. Among the 39, its nearest chapters are the recital of Israel's history in Psalm 105 of this numbering, Psalm 106 in the Hebrew, for four of the seven, and Nehemiah 9, the other long confession, for 3 Maccabees 2 at 0.886; 3 Maccabees 3, the king's letter ordering the Jews' destruction, and 3 Maccabees 5, the day appointed for it, find Ezra 15, which is Nehemiah 5 in this edition's doubled book, and 2 Samuel 19. With the four addition chapters in the running, both would find Esther 8, which in this edition is mostly the king's second letter, in the same court style as the letter in 3 Maccabees 3; that is the kind of match the rule exists to set aside.
- 4 Maccabees lands furthest from where the arrangement places it. It stands with the histories, since it retells the martyrdoms of 2 Maccabees, but it is a discourse on reason ruling the passions, and every reading says so: the poetry and wisdom books are its nearest section on average, for thirteen of its eighteen chapters; Job holds the nearest chapter of the 39 for nine of them, Job 15 alone for six; and on the map its nearest book is Wisdom of Solomon, with Job next. It is not the only book that lands away by one reading or another: the Letter of Jeremiah, placed with the prophets, has Wisdom of Solomon as its nearest book on the map, and by the section average Bel and the Dragon lands with the histories, by a tie, and 1 Esdras with the prophets, by 0.003. 4 Maccabees is the book where every reading agrees. 4 Maccabees 14 and 15, on the mother who watched her seven sons die, find Song of Solomon 8, where love is as strong as death; 4 Maccabees 18, her last words to them, finds Deuteronomy 32.
- Five one-chapter texts each land with the story or the song they belong to. The Prayer of Manasseh sits with the Psalms, and its nearest chapter is a prayer for pardon, Psalm 24 in this numbering, Psalm 25 in the Hebrew, at 0.884, with all ten of its nearest chapters among the 39. Psalm 151, in David's voice on his youth and the fight with Goliath, finds not the Psalms but the story: 1 Samuel 17, then 1 Samuel 24 and 2 Samuel 1, ahead of any psalm. Bel and the Dragon, which ends with Daniel in the lions' den a second time, finds Daniel 6, the first time, at 0.864. Susanna, where the young Daniel exposes two false witnesses, finds 1 Kings 3, Solomon's judgment, another young judge's first case. The Letter of Jeremiah finds Jeremiah 10, the passage against idols that the letter expands, and on the map it sits beside Wisdom of Solomon, whose own chapters against idols drew Baruch 6 on the Catholic map.
The Septuagint is a different text, and some of the main map's findings survive the change of text as well as the change of translation. Deuteronomy 32 is again the chapter most like the whole, and Psalm 132 of this numbering, the Hebrew Psalm 133, is again among the chapters least like any other. The copies of Nehemiah inside 2 Esdras fill 14 of the map's forty closest pairs of chapters from different books; set them aside and the closest pair is again the song of 2 Samuel 22 and its psalm, Psalm 17 here and Psalm 18 in the Hebrew, at 0.991, with 2 Kings 19 and Isaiah 37 next.
In the unnormalized source edition, adding 174 chapters to the selected 942 changes more neighborhoods than adding 139 to the Catholic edition's 1,189. This is not an isolated effect of canon: the base differs in size, content and translation and retains the duplicate entries. The added chapters comprise 18% of this base, against 12% in the Catholic-edition comparison. For 651 of the 942 chapters the ten nearest are the same ten with the added chapters present or absent; for 291, 31% of them, at least one added chapter has entered the ten, and for 31 the nearest chapter of all is now an added one. The average overlap of the two sets is 0.904. Sirach draws 118 chapters, against 114 on the Catholic map; 1 Esdras draws 79, 17 of Ezra's 23 chapters among them; Baruch draws 52 against 38, 1 Maccabees draws 36 against 17, Judith draws 38, and Tobit draws 10 against four. The chapter that changes most is Proverbs 3, seven of whose ten nearest are now chapters of Sirach; Ezra 6 has six chapters of 1 Esdras among its ten.
The translation yardstick is a different thing here, because the Septuagint is a different text. Setting Brenton's chapters beside the Berean Standard Bible's needs the Septuagint's numbering against the English numbering the Berean follows: the Psalms are numbered one lower than the Hebrew from Psalm 10 to Psalm 146, with a few joined or divided, Jeremiah's oracles against the nations stand in the middle of the book in another order, Joel 4 is the English Joel 3, Nehemiah lies inside 2 Esdras, and a few chapters are divided or arranged differently; the table behind the disclosure below sets it out. The 885 chapters of the 37 books that both editions carry as whole chapters, aligned that way, agree at 0.940 on average and 0.947 at the median, have an average Jaccard overlap of 0.517 between their ten-neighbor sets, and have the same nearest chapter 55% of the time. The World English Bible's Catholic edition, a translation of the Hebrew, gave 0.980, 0.984, 0.668 and 70%. The alignment is checked from the other side too: for 878 of the 885 pairs, the Berean chapter the table names is also the chapter of its book that the Greek chapter most resembles. These results describe the aligned English editions, not a controlled comparison of canon alone. Source texts, translation, chapter divisions and the set of available candidates differ.
Brenton's English Esther and Daniel, compared chapter for chapter with the BSB as before, tell the same story as the Catholic edition's. The Greek Esther's ten chapters average 0.872 against the Hebrew, with Esther 10, fourteen verses against three, lowest at 0.750; the Greek Daniel averages 0.941 over its twelve chapters, eight of them above 0.96, with Daniel 3, ninety-five verses against thirty, at 0.755. Susanna and Bel and the Dragon are books of their own in this edition, and the list above places them.
- 2 Chronicles 34 to 36
- Ezra 1 to 10
- Nehemiah
- 1 Esdras
- A ring marks a chapter of a deuterocanonical book
- Psalms
- 1 Samuel
- Daniel (Greek)
- Wisdom of Solomon
- A ring marks a chapter of a deuterocanonical book
Every added book on the Brenton source-edition map: nearest books, nearest section, and where its chapters' ten nearest fall
| Book | Chapters | Placed with | Nearest books of the 39 (mean similarity) | Language nearest to | Ten nearest: own / other added / the 39 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tobit | 14 | History | Malachi (0.672) and Obadiah (0.670), a tie; Haggai (0.668) | Prophets, by 0.013 over Law | 7 / 2 / 5 |
| Judith | 16 | History | Obadiah (0.759), Zephaniah (0.750), Jeremiah (0.729) | Prophets, by 0.019 over History | 7 / 1 / 8 |
| Wisdom of Solomon | 19 | Poetry and Wisdom | Proverbs (0.784) and Job (0.783), a tie; Habakkuk (0.783) | Poetry and Wisdom, by 0.026 over Prophets | 5 / 6 / 8 |
| Sirach | 51 | Poetry and Wisdom | Proverbs (0.828), Ecclesiastes (0.804), Job (0.783) | Poetry and Wisdom, by 0.035 over Prophets | 30 / 0 / 21 |
| Baruch | 5 | Prophets | Obadiah (0.820), Malachi (0.808), Zephaniah (0.807) | Prophets, by 0.017 over Poetry and Wisdom | 0 / 0 / 5 |
| Epistle of Jeremiah | 1 | Prophets | Habakkuk (0.793), Malachi (0.787), Nahum (0.773) | Prophets, by 0.009 over Poetry and Wisdom | 0 / 0 / 1 |
| Susanna | 1 | Prophets | Ruth (0.729), Obadiah (0.720), Lamentations (0.716) | Prophets, by 0.027 over History | 0 / 1 / 0 |
| Bel and the Dragon | 1 | Prophets | Daniel (Greek) (0.754), 2 Kings (0.699), 2 Samuel (0.695) | History, a tie with Prophets | 0 / 0 / 1 |
| 1 Maccabees | 16 | History | Obadiah (0.741), 2 Kings (0.728), Nehemiah (0.721) | History, by 0.015 over Prophets | 14 / 1 / 1 |
| 2 Maccabees | 15 | History | Obadiah (0.709), Malachi (0.704), 2 Kings (0.699) | Prophets, by 0.011 over History | 7 / 8 / 0 |
| 3 Maccabees | 7 | History | Obadiah (0.733), Zephaniah (0.729), Habakkuk (0.723) | Prophets, by 0.029 over History | 2 / 5 / 0 |
| 4 Maccabees | 18 | History | Habakkuk (0.727), Proverbs (0.718), Job (0.714) | Poetry and Wisdom, by 0.010 over Prophets | 12 / 4 / 2 |
| 1 Esdras | 9 | History | Haggai (0.761) and Ezra (0.759), a tie; Obadiah (0.754) | Prophets, by 0.003 over History | 0 / 2 / 7 |
| Prayer of Manasseh | 1 | Poetry and Wisdom | Psalms (0.777), Habakkuk (0.749), Malachi (0.724) | Poetry and Wisdom, by 0.068 over Prophets | 0 / 0 / 1 |
As for the Catholic map: nearest books by the average similarity of every pair of chapters across the two books, which favors short books, with a tie noted where the first two are within 0.002; "language nearest to" is the section whose chapters the book's chapters resemble most on average, with its margin over the second, a reading that favors cohesive sections and files most of the narrative books here under the Prophets; the last column counts the book's chapters by where most of their ten nearest fall. Chapter numbers follow this edition.
Every added chapter on the Brenton source-edition map and its nearest chapter of the 39
Which books of the 39 gain an added neighbor, and the chapters that change most
| Book | Chapters with an added neighbor | Drawn by (chapters with a chapter of that book among their ten nearest; neighbors counted where more than one) |
|---|---|---|
| Ecclesiastes | 12 of 12 | Sirach (12; 41 neighbors), Wisdom of Solomon (1) |
| Ezra | 21 of 23 | 1 Esdras (17; 40 neighbors), 1 Maccabees (5; 7 neighbors), Baruch (4; 5 neighbors) |
| Esther (Greek) | 9 of 10 | 3 Maccabees (5; 8 neighbors), 1 Maccabees (4; 8 neighbors), 1 Esdras (3; 4 neighbors) |
| Song of Solomon | 7 of 8 | Sirach (7; 9 neighbors) |
| Nehemiah | 11 of 13 | 1 Esdras (8; 14 neighbors), 1 Maccabees (3; 4 neighbors), Baruch (3; 4 neighbors) |
| Ruth | 3 of 4 | Judith (3; 6 neighbors), Susanna (2) |
| Judges | 15 of 21 | Judith (11; 12 neighbors), 1 Maccabees (5; 8 neighbors), Tobit (2) |
| Proverbs | 20 of 30 | Sirach (20; 64 neighbors), Wisdom of Solomon (4; 5 neighbors) |
| Daniel (Greek) | 8 of 12 | Bel and the Dragon (5), 1 Esdras (3; 6 neighbors), Baruch (2; 3 neighbors) |
| 2 Chronicles | 22 of 36 | 1 Esdras (17; 26 neighbors), 1 Maccabees (4; 6 neighbors), Judith (3) |
| Job | 23 of 42 | Sirach (21; 34 neighbors), Baruch (3), Wisdom of Solomon (2) |
| 2 Kings | 13 of 25 | 1 Esdras (8; 9 neighbors), 1 Maccabees (6; 10 neighbors), 2 Maccabees (1) |
| Jonah | 2 of 4 | 2 Maccabees (2; 3 neighbors), Tobit (2) |
| 1 Kings | 9 of 22 | Sirach (4), 1 Esdras (2), 1 Maccabees (1; 2 neighbors) |
| Malachi | 1 of 3 | Baruch (1) |
| 1 Chronicles | 8 of 29 | 1 Esdras (5), Sirach (3), Baruch (1) |
| 1 Samuel | 8 of 31 | Sirach (4), Judith (3), Baruch (2) |
| Joel | 1 of 4 | Sirach (1) |
| Isaiah | 16 of 66 | Baruch (7), Sirach (5; 10 neighbors), 1 Esdras (2) |
| Psalms | 35 of 151 | Sirach (24; 39 neighbors), Baruch (11; 12 neighbors), Tobit (4) |
| Jeremiah | 12 of 52 | Baruch (9), 1 Maccabees (2; 5 neighbors), 1 Esdras (2) |
| Numbers | 8 of 36 | 1 Esdras (5), Judith (2), Sirach (1) |
| Lamentations | 1 of 5 | Judith (1) |
| Deuteronomy | 5 of 34 | Baruch (3), Judith (2) |
| Ezekiel | 7 of 48 | Sirach (3; 5 neighbors), 1 Maccabees (2), 3 Maccabees (1) |
| Genesis | 7 of 50 | Sirach (3; 5 neighbors), 1 Esdras (2), Judith (2) |
| Joshua | 3 of 24 | 1 Esdras (2), Judith (1; 3 neighbors), 1 Maccabees (1) |
| Exodus | 3 of 40 | Sirach (3) |
| Hosea | 1 of 14 | 1 Esdras (1) |
The chapters whose ten nearest changed most
The Septuagint yardstick: how the chapters were aligned, and the ten that move most
Where the Septuagint's chapter numbers differ from the Berean Standard Bible's
| Book | Septuagint chapters as chapters of the Berean's numbering | What differs |
|---|---|---|
| Psalms | 1 to 8 as 1 to 8; 10 to 112 as 11 to 113; 116 to 145 as 117 to 146; 148 to 150 as 148 to 150 | Greek Psalm 9 is the Hebrew 9 and 10, Greek 113 is 114 and 115, Greek 114 and 115 divide 116, Greek 146 and 147 divide 147, and Psalm 151 has no Hebrew chapter; the rest shift by one from Psalm 10 to 146 |
| Jeremiah | 1 to 24 as 1 to 24; 26 as 46; 27 to 28 as 50 to 51; 31 as 48; 33 to 51 as 26 to 44; 52 as 52 | the oracles against the nations, chapters 46 to 51 in the Hebrew, stand after Greek chapter 25 in a different order; Greek 25 and 29 each join parts of two Hebrew chapters and Greek 30 and 32 each carry part of one (49 and 25), so those four are left out; Greek 51 carries the Hebrew 44 with the five verses of 45 and is aligned to 44 |
| Joel | 1 as 1; 4 as 3 | the Hebrew Joel has four chapters, as the Greek does; the English numbering has three. Greek Joel 2 and 3 divide the English chapter 2, and Greek 4 is the English 3 |
| Malachi | 1 to 2 as 1 to 2 | the Hebrew Malachi has three chapters, as the Greek does; the English numbering has four. Greek Malachi 3 is the English 3 and 4 |
| Ezra | 1 to 10 as 1 to 10 | Greek Ezra, the Septuagint's 2 Esdras, carries Nehemiah as its chapters 11 to 23; the edition also carries Nehemiah on its own, which is where Nehemiah is aligned |
| 1 Kings | 1 to 19 as 1 to 19; 20 as 21; 21 as 20; 22 as 22 | Greek chapters 20 and 21 are the Hebrew 21 and 20 |
| Exodus | 1 to 35 as 1 to 35; 40 as 40 | Greek Exodus 36 to 39 arrange the making of the tabernacle in a different order |
| Numbers | 1 to 15 as 1 to 15; 18 to 36 as 18 to 36 | Greek Numbers 16 and 17 follow the Hebrew division; the English numbering divides those two chapters differently |
| Proverbs | 1 to 23 as 1 to 23; 25 to 29 as 25 to 29 | the Septuagint arranges Proverbs 24, 30 and 31 differently: its chapter 24 carries, after verse 22, most of the Hebrew 30 and the first nine verses of 31 (81 verses against 34), so it is left out; the edition's chapter 30 has no text of its own and its chapter 31 begins at verse 10 |
The ten chapters that move most between the two editions
| Septuagint chapter | Berean chapter | Similarity across the two editions | Overlap of ten nearest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Psalms 130 | Psalms 131 | 0.803 | 0.25 |
| Jeremiah 46 | Jeremiah 39 | 0.810 | 0.25 |
| Psalms 119 | Psalms 120 | 0.819 | 0.18 |
| 2 Chronicles 22 | 2 Chronicles 22 | 0.820 | 0.54 |
| Zechariah 3 | Zechariah 3 | 0.821 | 0.00 |
| Psalms 132 | Psalms 133 | 0.830 | 0.11 |
| 1 Kings 6 | 1 Kings 6 | 0.831 | 0.54 |
| Psalms 133 | Psalms 134 | 0.835 | 0.18 |
| 1 Kings 14 | 1 Kings 14 | 0.836 | 0.43 |
| 2 Chronicles 26 | 2 Chronicles 26 | 0.837 | 0.33 |
The Berean Standard Bible follows the English chapter numbering, which is the Hebrew's except in Joel, Malachi and Numbers 16 to 17, where the English divides the chapters differently and the Greek follows the Hebrew; the notes say "English" where that is what is meant. A book not listed in the first table aligns by chapter number throughout, and a chapter is kept only where the chapter it is set beside is most of its text. The second table gives the same chapter in the two editions by the similarity of its two representations and by the overlap of its ten nearest neighbors under each; the Septuagint chapter is linked, with the Berean chapter it is set beside.
The Septuagint's Esther and Daniel against the Hebrew
| Chapter | Verses in the Greek | Verses in the Hebrew | Length against the Hebrew chapter, in words | Similarity to the Hebrew chapter | Nearest chapter of the 39 outside its book |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Esther (Greek) 1 | 39 | 22 | 1.60 | 0.872 | Daniel (Greek) 5 (0.758) |
| Esther (Greek) 2 | 23 | 23 | 0.93 | 0.906 | 2 Samuel 14 (0.710) |
| Esther (Greek) 3 | 22 | 15 | 1.50 | 0.858 | 1 Kings 21 (0.730) |
| Esther (Greek) 4 | 40 | 17 | 2.79 (set aside) | 0.897 | 2 Kings 6 (0.724) |
| Esther (Greek) 5 | 22 | 14 | 1.50 | 0.882 | 2 Samuel 14 (0.748) |
| Esther (Greek) 6 | 14 | 14 | 1.05 | 0.851 | 2 Samuel 19 (0.730) |
| Esther (Greek) 7 | 10 | 10 | 0.91 | 0.874 | 2 Samuel 14 (0.754) |
| Esther (Greek) 8 | 38 | 17 | 1.99 (set aside) | 0.918 | 2 Chronicles 30 (0.779) |
| Esther (Greek) 9 | 30 | 32 | 0.84 | 0.911 | 2 Chronicles 35 (0.763) |
| Esther (Greek) 10 | 14 | 3 | 3.94 (set aside) | 0.750 | 2 Chronicles 36 (0.669) |
| Daniel (Greek) 1 | 21 | 21 | 1.12 | 0.920 | Ezra 8 (0.778) |
| Daniel (Greek) 2 | 49 | 49 | 1.10 | 0.967 | 1 Kings 3 (0.802) |
| Daniel (Greek) 3 | 95 | 30 | 2.72 (set aside) | 0.755 | 1 Chronicles 16 (0.889) |
| Daniel (Greek) 4 | 37 | 37 | 1.03 | 0.950 | Ezekiel 31 (0.844) |
| Daniel (Greek) 5 | 30 | 31 | 1.05 | 0.921 | 1 Kings 3 (0.799) |
| Daniel (Greek) 6 | 29 | 28 | 1.07 | 0.973 | 1 Kings 21 (0.737) |
| Daniel (Greek) 7 | 28 | 28 | 0.99 | 0.973 | Ezekiel 1 (0.822) |
| Daniel (Greek) 8 | 27 | 27 | 1.07 | 0.964 | Isaiah 5 (0.829) |
| Daniel (Greek) 9 | 27 | 27 | 1.14 | 0.966 | Jeremiah 14 (0.883) |
| Daniel (Greek) 10 | 21 | 21 | 1.09 | 0.975 | Ezekiel 3 (0.815) |
| Daniel (Greek) 11 | 45 | 45 | 1.11 | 0.964 | Isaiah 10 (0.890) |
| Daniel (Greek) 12 | 13 | 13 | 1.08 | 0.961 | Malachi 3 (0.804) |
What this cannot tell you
- It measures language, as one model reads a translation. Where a book lands says what kind of writing it resembles in English, in this model's reading. It says nothing about when or where a book was written, in what language, or whether it belongs in a Bible. Tobit's kinship with the Gospels is a kinship of story shape, and the page says so; it is not a claim about Tobit's date or its standing.
- Two translations, not one. The main map reads the Berean Standard Bible; these maps read the World English Bible's Catholic edition and Brenton's Septuagint, as the editions selected for this experiment. The comparisons above describe those editions; they do not isolate translation from every other difference.
- Each map is a new drawing. A map is laid out from its own chapters' neighborhoods, so a map with more chapters is not the main map with dots added; it is drawn afresh, and its islands sit in different places. Compare positions within a map, not between maps. The numbers in the full measure are what carry across.
- Book averages can obscure variation. A one-chapter book and a long book contribute different amounts of textual variety to an average. No general bias toward short books has been established here. Read the chapter-level examples alongside the averages.
- Section averages favor cohesive sections. "Nearest section on average" compares a chapter with every chapter of each section, so a section whose chapters resemble one another scores well against any plain chapter of its kind: the Gospels' chapters average 0.793 with one another, the History chapters 0.678, which carry genealogies and lists. This may contribute to the Gospels and Acts coming first by this reading for eight of 1 Maccabees' sixteen chapters as well as for Tobit and 2 Maccabees, and why, on the Brenton source-edition map, the Prophets come first for eight of the fourteen added books, Tobit, Judith, 2 and 3 Maccabees and 1 Esdras among them, all five placed with the histories, which is a fact about the measure before it is a fact about the books. The nearest-chapter counts provide another perspective, not a bias-free control. Both depend on the model, section definitions and available chapters.
- The Septuagint is a different text, not only a different translation. Brenton's Old Testament has Psalms numbered the Greek way from Psalm 10 on, Joel and Malachi divided as the Hebrew divides them rather than as English Bibles do, Jeremiah's chapters in the Greek order, and Ezra and Nehemiah as one book of 23 chapters with Nehemiah also on its own, so that thirteen chapters appear twice. The Brenton source-edition map places what that edition carries; the chapter numbers in its links follow that edition, and the page says which chapter of the Berean's numbering a Greek number answers to where it matters.
- Nearness is not agreement. Two chapters sit close because they use similar language and ideas. Judith 5 beside Deuteronomy 1 means two recitals of the same history in similar words, nothing more.
How these maps were made
The texts. The World English Bible, Catholic edition, 73 books and 1,328 chapters, public domain; Brenton's translation of the Septuagint, 53 books and 1,116 chapters, public domain, an Old Testament only (its table of contents counts 1,117, but the edition's chapter 30 is an empty marker directing readers to chapter 24, so there is no chapter to place); and the Berean Standard Bible, 66 books, as the comparison edition, not a direct measurement of Hebrew or Aramaic text.
The numbers. Exactly as on the main map: each chapter cut into overlapping windows of four verses, 11,787 windows for the Catholic edition and 9,610 for the Septuagint, each window turned into numbers by Google's EmbeddingGemma, the model the site's search uses, with the first 256 of its 768 numbers kept, and the chapter taking the average of its windows, scaled to unit length. This is the one place the page uses what is usually called AI: a model that turns a passage into a list of numbers such that passages with similar ideas get similar numbers. Every similarity on this page is the cosine between two such lists.
The maps. Each edition's chapters were laid out on their own with UMAP, with the same settings and the same fixed random seed as the main map, 50 neighbors and a minimum distance of 0.5, then aligned the same way, so a rebuild reproduces each file exactly. The section scheme is the seven sections with the additional books assigned to the study's section scheme, and, for the Brenton source-edition map, using the study's chosen section labels: 1 Esdras and 3 and 4 Maccabees with the histories, the Prayer of Manasseh with the poetry, the Letter of Jeremiah, Susanna and Bel and the Dragon with the prophets; the New Testament sections are empty there because the edition has none. The Septuagint yardstick aligns chapters by the Septuagint's numbering where it differs from the Hebrew, and the alignment table is on the page.
The measures. Nearest books by the mean similarity of every chapter pair across two books; nearest chapters and ten-nearest sets by similarity; the change to the 66 by computing each chapter's ten nearest with and without the added chapters and taking the overlap of the two sets; the yardsticks by aligning the same chapter across two editions, and the exact numbers against their stored rounding; the seams on the map coordinates by the main map's rule; the additions by aligning each Greek chapter with the same-numbered Hebrew chapter. The Greek Esther and Daniel stand in for Esther and Daniel wherever the 66 are counted, with two classification rules. The base set uses the shared book categories as represented in each digital edition, including Greek additions within Esther and Daniel and Psalm 151; it is not identical to a Hebrew-text corpus, so Susanna and Bel and the Dragon are added chapters on both maps, as Daniel 13 and 14 on the Catholic map and as books of their own on the Brenton source-edition map. And a chapter's nearest chapter of the 66 or the 39 is never one of the four chapters where a Greek addition is about half the text or more, Esther 4, 8 and 10 and Daniel 3, which are set aside for that measure alone; the additions section gives the lengths. An average decided by less than 0.002 is called a tie.
The data. Three files carry everything: the Catholic map, the Brenton source-edition map, each in the main map's format, and the study's measures, with a list of every claim this page makes and the value behind it. The texts they derive from are public domain; if you use them, a link to this page is welcome.
This page was made with AI assistance and human review.
To cite a figure elsewhere, say which measure it is, a similarity in the full measure or a position on a drawn map, and carry the edition and the model with it. Corrections are welcome through the contact page.
Sources
- The World English Bible, Catholic edition, public domain, read on this site at /bible/webc/.
- Lancelot Brenton's translation of the Septuagint (1851), public domain, read on this site at /bible/bre/.
- The Berean Standard Bible, released into the public domain, read on this site at /bible/bsb/.
- Google, EmbeddingGemma (embeddinggemma-300m), the sentence embedding model, and the Gemma Terms of Use it is released under.
- Leland McInnes, John Healy and James Melville, UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction, 2018.
- USCCB, Introduction to Esther and Introduction to Daniel, on the Greek additions.
- The parent page, A Map of Meaning, for the method in full, and its companions on the translations and what is not there.
Questions people ask
Does this page say which canon is right?
No. It measures language. It shows which chapters of the added books use words and ideas similar to which chapters of the 66, as one model reads a translation, and it takes no position on which books belong in a Bible.
Why is the map here different from the main map?
It is a new layout of a different set of chapters from a different translation. Chapters are placed by their nearest neighbors, so adding chapters and changing the text move things. The similarity lists and the drawing answer different questions. A position on a drawing should not be treated as an exact similarity score.
Why are two of the books nearest the New Testament?
Tobit and 2 Maccabees are short narratives with prayer, healing, angels, martyrdom and speeches, and by this model's reading their chapters are on average nearer the Gospels and Acts than any Old Testament section. That is a statement about the kind of writing, not about their origin or their standing.
Where is the New Testament on the Brenton source-edition map?
The Brenton source-edition map is drawn from Brenton's translation of the Greek Septuagint, which is an Old Testament. Its 53 books are all Old Testament books, so that map has four sections and no New Testament.
Where does Psalm 151 sit?
With the story it tells. Its nearest chapters of the 39 are 1 Samuel 17, 1 Samuel 24 and 2 Samuel 1, ahead of any psalm, and on the map it sits with 1 Samuel rather than the Psalms. It is a chapter of the Psalms in this edition and is counted as one.
Can I use these coordinates and numbers?
Yes. The method section links to the three data files: the Catholic map, the Brenton source-edition map and the study's measures. The texts they derive from are public domain; carry the translation and the model with any figure you quote.
Explore related research
Books of the Bible
Explore the books and their place in four scriptural traditions.
Does the translation change the map?
The King James Version and three other editions against the Berean Standard Bible, chapter by chapter.