Explore 341,282 cross-references between the 31,102 verses of the King James Bible, then test the "Bible code" claims against a whale novel.
Each arc joins two verses that readers have voted as cross-references. The bar along the bottom is the Bible in canonical order, one segment per book. Arc color shows how far the reference travels. Click a book on the bar to isolate its links.
Total votes on references pointing at the verse.
Total votes on references between two different books.
The fewest cross-reference hops from one verse to another. Links with fewer votes than the minimum are ignored. At each hop the strongest link wins a tie.
Climb from the start verse to the goal using only cross-references with 5 or more votes. Today's ladder is the same for everyone. Par is the shortest possible route.
Popular beliefs about what the Bible says, checked against the King James text. The counts on each card are computed live from the text on this page.
Computed from the 1769 King James text used throughout this page.
Each tick is a verse containing the word, laid out from Genesis to Revelation.
Hebrew Genesis uses two main names for God: YHWH and Elohim. The American Standard Version (1901) keeps them apart as "Jehovah" and "God". Chapter 1 never uses YHWH, and chapter 2 switches to "Jehovah God". In the 1700s and 1800s, shifts like this led scholars to propose that the first five books combine older sources. The best-known form, the documentary hypothesis, was set out by Julius Wellhausen in 1878.
The pattern is real. Whether it shows separate written sources is still debated, and many scholars today prefer other models of how the books were composed. Counts of whole words in the ASV; "Lord" (Adonai) is not counted.
Matthew, Mark and Luke share a great deal of material, often word for word. The most common explanation is that Mark was written first and Matthew and Luke both used it. Matthew and Luke also share material that is not in Mark, which scholars attribute to a lost source called "Q".
Matthew repeatedly says an event happened to fulfil a prophecy. Here is each of those passages next to the Old Testament verse it draws on, using the highest-voted cross-reference. Some fit cleanly; for others the source or the reading is debated, and the note says how.
Average emotional tone per word, scored with the VADER sentiment word list. Bars above the line are more positive, bars below more negative. Click a bar to see that book chapter by chapter.
VADER was built for modern English and misses archaic words, so treat this as a rough sketch. Short books swing furthest because they have fewer words to average.
Lifespans as the text states them, parsed from the number words in each verse. They fall from the patriarchs before the flood to the “threescore years and ten” of Psalm 90.
Matthew 1 traces Jesus from Abraham; Luke 3 traces him back to Adam. They agree from Abraham to David, then follow different sons of David and disagree on Joseph's father. Since ancient times readers have proposed explanations, such as one list following Mary's line.
Every person in the Bible with their family ties, from the Theographic Bible database. Dates are Theographic's estimates.
The same verse in six public-domain English Bibles. Words that differ from the King James are highlighted.
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The KJV New Testament was translated from Greek printed editions based on late manuscripts. Older manuscripts found later, such as Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, lack these verses, so the American Standard Version (1901) leaves them out, as most modern Bibles do or move them to footnotes.
How often each number word appears in the KJV. Seven, ten and twelve stand far above their neighbors. That patterning is real and deliberate: the authors used those numbers symbolically, as in the seven days of creation, the Ten Commandments and the twelve tribes. Forty, often called the Bible's number of testing, turns out no more common than thirty or fifty.
Gematria gives every letter a number and adds up words. Pick a number and see how many KJV phrases of one to four words add up to it. With hundreds of matches for almost any number, a single match proves nothing.
The Bible does contain deliberate wordplay. These two kinds are documented and accepted by scholars.
Every place the text names, with its most likely modern location. Pick a book to see where it happens, or a disputed site to see every location scholars have proposed for it.
Many ancient texts about the same figures never made it into most Bibles. Some are quoted inside the Bible itself. Some are genuine ancient writings that attract modern myths, and one famous papyrus is a modern forgery.
Passages where 1 Enoch and the Bible tell the same story or use the same image, side by side.
Full public-domain translations. Under any passage, "Closest Bible verses" finds the verses that share the most distinctive words with it. That shows shared vocabulary, not proof of borrowing, and the modern translations of Thomas and Mary share fewer words with the 1769 KJV than Charles's older English does.
Every entry in the official list of popes, from Peter to Leo XIV, one row per century. Each bar is one reign; click one for details. Red bars under a row are antipopes, rival claimants the Church does not recognize; the cluster in the 1300s and 1400s is the Western Schism, when up to three men claimed the title at once. White gaps are vacancies between popes. Dates come from Wikidata, and those before about AD 200 are traditional rather than recorded.
The stories that grew up around the Church, sorted into what the evidence supports and what it does not.
"Bible codes" are equidistant letter sequences (ELS). Strip out spaces and punctuation, then read every nth letter, forward or backward. Search a word below. The same search also runs on Moby Dick and on the Bible's own letters shuffled at random, and each count sits next to the number expected by pure chance from letter frequencies.