Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms. — Jesus Christ,
told by Luke the Evangelist (Luke 24:44)
The importance of the Psalms was quite hidden for me even several years after I became a Christian.
I can recall some brothers who gathered together and studied systematically the Psalms,
at the end of the 1990s. I admired these brothers, but I was somehow not enthusiastic enough to join,
once in a month, or so.
In this blog entry some mechanical experiments will be shown via the bibref tool.
We are interested if the getrefs command can find potential quotations in the New Testament,
where the quoted texts appear from the Psalms. To achieve this, we mechanically run the command
getrefs SBLGNT LXX n where the number n stands for the given Psalm.
We will collect the longest matches for each psalm. For Psalm 1, the required command will
be getrefs SBLGNT LXX Psalms 1. The computation
will take a couple of seconds, but for other psalms this may be either faster or slower.
(For example, for Psalm 18 I needed about 5 minutes on my 4-years-old laptop.) To save time for you,
I performed the commands on my computer for all psalms, it took about 40 minutes (in the
native version of bibref,
it is significantly faster than the version that runs in your browser), and I created
the following table that shows the outputs:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
0
19
131
12
24
19
20
14
120
18
19
1
13
21
10
318
25
282
12
33
74
17
2
13
63
18
20
14
13
16
21
16
15
3
18
97
27
82
18
13
23
22
15
64
4
14
20
19
53
124
13
20
16
17
15
5
38
17
14
17
18
17
19
18
20
15
6
25
14
21
19
18
19
16
18
74
12
7
15
19
18
13
18
14
18
28
15
15
8
14
15
14
23
21
34
13
13
22
21
9
53
14
12
35
134
14
18
15
26
17
10
13
133
20
57
21
25
23
13
23
81
11
20
59
11
17
30
19
22
114
17
11
12
9
20
17
11
14
13
13
16
11
13
13
9
17
14
27
18
13
13
13
15
12
14
15
17
23
14
26
20
14
17
13
15
The table shows the outputs consecutively in all 150 psalms. For example, the entry on line 4, column 5 stands for
the output for Psalm 45: the longest maximal extension of the minimal unique passages is 124 characters long.
The same output for Psalm 40 (on row 3, column 10) is 64 characters.
Surprisingly, all outputs are at least 9. Their average is about 29.47. Many of them are below the
average, but some of them are quite high – for Psalms 2, 8, 14, 16, 45, 95, 102 and 118 the
longest literal matches are above 100 characters.
We give two visualizations on this dataset. The first one is a 3D surface plot, provided
by the plotly library. The high peaks show those 8 remarkable psalms
with the longest matches, but some lower peaks are also nicely visualized.