Old Testament Books: Length vs LDS Conference Citations

As a follow up to my previous post, here's the same analysis done with books of the Old Testament:

And for the ratio of Citation % / Book Length %, the top books (ratio > 1) are:

Book	Citation/Length
Malachi	15.6
Obadiah	3.2
Isaiah	2.9
Amos	2.7
Genesis	2.1
Exodus	1.8
Daniel	1.7
Proverbs	1.5
Joel	1.4
Ecclesiastes	1.3
1 Samuel	1.3
Micah	1.2
Joshua	1.1

A few of these books, might be what you call One-Hit Wonders. They have one verse that gets quoted a lot and that drives up the citations for the whole book. For example in Obadiah, all the citations are for verse 21, and Amos 3:7 carries half the weight for Amos's citations. However, if you're looking for good books to study, Malachi, Isaiah, and Genesis are great places to start. After all, the Lord calls out Malachi and Isaiah specifically in the Book of Mormon (see 3 Nephi 24:1 and 3 Nephi 23:1.)

Speaking of Book Mormon...next blog post will be on Book of Mormon.

Notes on sources:

LDS Conference scripture citations are based on citations from 1971 to 2016 from the LDS Scripture Citation Index (http://scriptures.byu.edu/)

Old Testament verse statistics were from online at http://catholic-resources.org/Bible/OT-Statistics-NAB.htm; apocryphal books were excluded.

New Testament Books: Length vs LDS Conference Citations

What if you took your New Testament, stretched it out tall like a bar graph, and then color coded the sides of the pages so you could compare the relative length of each book in the New Testament? You'd get a sense for how much each author wrote in each book. And although every reader of the New Testament knows that "all scripture...is profitable" (see 2 Tim 3:16), yet there are some parts that spiritually "yield...thirty, and some sixty, and some an hundred" (see Mark 4:8).

How would you find which parts might yield the quotable, ponderable scriptures? One way is to look at which books are cited the most in LDS General Conference. The books cited the most could be considered the "hundred-yield" parts of the New Testament.

Below is a bar graph showing just such a comparison. On the left is the graph showing the relative length of each book in the New Testament based on the number of verses (click on picture to see larger version).

A few interesting points to notice are that Matthew and John show an increase in citations whereas Acts is noticeably diminished, relative to their lengths. 2 Timothy is noticeably larger and Revelation is about half the size in the Citations column vs the Book Length column.

In fact, if you wanted to see which books carry more than their own weight (or length) in citations, you could divide their value in the Citations graph by their value in the Book Length graph and get a ratio. Below is the list of all the books that have a ratio > 1, meaning they get cited more than what their # of verses would merit if every verse got cited equally.

So if you're looking for some good New Testament study, start with James and 2 Timothy--they're relatively short and packed with good stuff!

Book	Citation/Length
James	1.9
2 Timothy	1.9
Matthew	1.9
Ephesians	1.8
John	1.7
1 Peter	1.5
2 Peter	1.2
1 Corinthians	1.2

Coming soon...Old Testament Book Length vs Citations

Notes on information sources:

LDS Conference scripture citations are based on citations from 1971 to 2016 from the LDS Scripture Citation Index (http://scriptures.byu.edu/)

New Testament verse statistics were from online at http://catholic-resources.org/Bible/NT-Statistics-Greek.htm