Fri 14 Mar 2008
The idea for this chart came from The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte. On page 35, Mr. Tufte shows a chart of some of the royal genealogy England from 1660 to 1860. The chart shown is by E.J. Marey, La Methode Graphique, Paris, 1885. The wonderful time series enhanced with lineage and different shadings for the different reigning periods got me to thinking about whether the kings of Israel and Judah could be depicted this way.
This chart has some deficiencies in the graphics, and in the fact that there are too many kings listed to put them in top to bottom, left to right order and still keep it on a page. The up and down of the names seems like it means something, but it doesn’t. A future revision of the chart should remove this.
Click on the thumbnail to view the entire chart. It is in PNG format so you should be able to zoom in on it to see more detail.
One of the interesting things that the chart shows, is some light on Isaiah 6:1. – “In the year that King Uzziah died…”. Uzziah was the sixth king in a row to die an unnatural death. Due to the length of time that kings reigned (some of them anyway), this seems more significant than if six of our American presidents in a row died an unnatural death, terminating their time in office. That has never happened, and while I was alive when JFK was assassinated, I’m too young to remember anything about it. But the stories one hears make it seem as if a paplable fear gripped much of the populace. Six kings of Israel in a row died unnatural deaths. Not all violently, but still it would have been something that became part of the national psyche.
There are other interesting things in the chart (to me anyway), and improvements to make in due time.
How did you calculate the spiritual state value? Nice diagram.
The spiritual state grew out of an initial desire to reflect which kings had the major revivals. But in Judah, it comes from statements like this:
from 1 Kings 15:11, and the opposite for example 1 Kings 15:3.
In the lines of the kings of Israel we find things like this
from 1 Kings 16:30, or in other places that a certain one “walked in the way of Jeroboam”for example 1 Kings 16:19.
So there’s no mathematical formula behind it (yet!), but it falls out of the text pretty naturally. What should the units on the y-axisfor spiritual state be measured in?
I read your comment today and I have been pondering the question for a few hours. Here are some of thoughts:
Christ’s spiritual life is like the concept of a limit in calculus. We strive to be like Christ spiritually. The more we strive to become like Christ and become more like Christ, we then realize the we cannot fully be like Christ since he is perfect.
The units for the y-axis should be “walking closer to God” unit. At the origin, we completely disobeying God. This also made me think of something else. There is also context involved in the diagram. The contexts are: before the law, law and Christ. If there a pious Jew living next to us, but he doesn’t know Christ then his spiritual state score is zero; however a pious Jew before Christ would have a higher spiritual state score.