Every figure on a name page traces to a named source, and every rule we apply
to reach it is written down here. Where a rule involves judgment rather than
derivation, we say so.
Where the data comes from
- STEPBible TIPNR and the open BibleData
project — the people of scripture and the verses they appear in, reconciled into
one graph. CC BY. - US Social Security Administration — birth records from 1880.
Public domain. - IBGE (Brazil), INE (Spain),
datos.gob.ar (Argentina) — census and registration counts. - IRN (Portugal) — the published list of names approved for
civil registration.
What we count
The graph holds person–verse connections across every entity scripture
names. Not all of those are people: scripture names God, peoples, places and
titles alongside individuals, and we type each one. When we describe how deep a
name runs in scripture we count only the connections belonging to
individual people, and we show the total beside it.
A name’s verse count is always the distinct union across its
bearers, never the sum. Two men named Zechariah appearing in the same verse are
counted once.
Names that are also peoples and places
A few names carry more than one sense. Israel is a man renamed at
Peniel and afterwards a nation. Judah is a son of Jacob, a tribe, a
kingdom, and the root of the word Jew. Ephraim is Joseph’s
second son and, in the prophets, the northern kingdom itself.
We separate those senses verse by verse, and this is an editorial
judgment rather than a derivation. The rule, applied in order with the
first match winning:
- The people — collective phrasing: children of,
house of, men of, tribe of, all Israel; or two
national names conjoined, as in “all Israel and Judah”. - The place — a geographic or political referent:
land of, kingdom of, cities of, king of. - The man — named as a son, or listed in a genealogy.
- Otherwise the man if the verse is in Genesis and carries no
collective marker, and the people if it is not, because usage
after Genesis is overwhelmingly collective.
A name page covers the person. The other senses are counted and named on the
page so you can see how much of the name’s scriptural weight sits elsewhere. The
rule will be wrong in individual verses; we would rather publish it and be
corrected than quietly pick one sense.
The Concordance Depth Index
A single figure for how deeply a name runs in scripture:
CDI = log1p(verses) × 10
+ log1p(cross-references) × 4
+ books × 2
+ 15 if the person speaks or acts
+ 5 if attested in both testaments
Where a name is borne by several people we publish the deepest single
bearer’s score, not the sum. Adding twenty-nine Zechariahs together
would rank the name above David, which would be false.
When a name has no usage figure
The Social Security Administration does not publish counts below five. A name
given to four children in a year is therefore indistinguishable in the data from
one given to none. We say such a name is below the reporting
threshold. We never say a name was never used, because we cannot know
that.
Birth counts and resident counts answer different questions and are never
added together. Each figure shows which of the two it is.