More stats from the Old Testament

My last post examined the use of blessings and curses in the Old Testament (with comparisons to the Book of Mormon).  There were lots of other statistics that I tracked, and I looked to find interesting things to pull from them. 

Here's a plot of commandments based on whether the commandment is to do something, or not to do something.  Interestingly the ratio is about even.  The Lord says "Thou shalt" about as often as he says "Thou shalt not". 

There's a little bit of a spike in the Mosaic law part for the "not" commandments, and a little spike before the captivity of "thou shalt" commands.  Here's the plots for what was commanded.

You should be happy, courageous, strong, but not fearful or frivilous.  A lot of emphasis on controlling emotions, which I used to think was impossible.

Here's a plot of the descriptions given about God from the Book of Mormon:

Book of Mormon

Here's the same plot from the Old Testament:

Old Testament

Kind of noticeable that ANGRY is like 25% of the descriptors from the Old Testament (counting the top 20 descriptors) but it's much less in the Book of Mormon.  This just adds to the feeling that the God of the Old Testament is an angry vengeful God.  Here's a plot of where the "angry" descriptions fit in the timeline:

Notice that there's phases where the anger is mentioned more often, and not-surprisingly it's right around the time of the captivity.  

Some other nuggets of interesting findings gleaned from the Old Testament:

I know there's two texts overlapping, but you can see a lot of things that bring hope to anyone struggling.  In fact there's a lot of scriptures specifically talking about how much the Lord seeks to bless us when we feel the weakest.

Want to know the things that aren't openly discussed?  Humbly seek and live righteously and the Lord will help you learn mysteries and secrets of the kingdom.

 

Obviously we have trials because we're wicked.  But not all trials are from wickedness.  This shows all the reasons (note the "other" that has lots of small pieces), but from Old Testament half the trials are NOT because of wickedness.

Tough times?  To me it sounds trite to say "pray!" but the scriptures strongly back that up.  Along with letting others help.

Ever felt depleted to the point of despair?  You might like to know you're in company with a lot of other prophets.  By far the most frequent difficulty prophets faced was their own feelings of worthlessness, inadequacy, or lack of hope.  Being depressed does not make you a bad person, it means you're going through a tough trial.

This graph is interesting because while there's a lot of stories involving dreams, clouds, angels, visions and visitations there's also an awful lot of small singular methods.  If you're not the type to be recieving angels physically maybe there's just another way the Lord likes to talk to you in a different way.

We know scary times are ahead.  As they come keep in mind that this was prophesied, and the good news is that the end of the story will be fantastic.  The millenium is coming.

A lot of promises for when the Millenium comes.  I like the "all tears wiped away" promise.  Basically a promise that the Lord will help balance the massive injustices that currently exist in this world.