What you’re looking at
One arc per link
The bar along the bottom is the whole Bible laid end to end — 1,189 chapters,
left to right, Genesis to Revelation. Each bar’s height is the number of verses in that chapter,
so the tall spike near the middle is Psalm 119. The pale line marks where the Old Testament ends.
Above it, every arc is a cross-reference between two chapters: a shared quotation,
a repeated phrase, a person, a place, an image. Colour encodes reach — how far apart the two
chapters sit. There are 328,531 such references between 141,763 distinct pairs of chapters, and
43,491 of those pairs span the two Testaments.
The books were written by roughly forty people over about fifteen hundred years,
and none of them had the finished collection in front of them.