148 researched incidents
238 entries
58 occupied crossings
9 smiter ranks × 14 smitten ranks
An incident that strikes a people and razes their city makes two entries, so the entries outnumber the incidents.
Who smites whom
Sorted by who struck and what was struck, the incidents come out lopsided in a way I did not expect, because God is not the biggest smiter in scripture. Kings are, with 54 entries against God's 38, and armies come close behind with 47. Divine hands account for 49 entries and human hands for 189, so most of the smiting is done by soldiers, and I think it feels otherwise because the divine smitings are the ones with the largest body counts.
Rows are the rank that strikes and columns the rank that is struck, with a mark wherever the two meet. Blue is used for a blow delivered by divine will and red for one delivered by human will. A filled daub means the striker's own hand, and an open ring means the blow came through something else, an angel or a plague or an army under orders. The size of a mark is the number of incidents at that crossing. Rest the pointer on a crossing and a yellow straightedge is laid across its row and column, and the strip under the plates shows the pair as a sentence.
Two columns come out empty and I have left them standing: nothing in the three books smites God or an angel, which is a real feature of the material, since the top of the hierarchy is never available as a target. Prophets are another matter. The prophet column holds 4 entries, among them Zedekiah striking Micaiah on the cheek in 2 Chronicles 18:23 and Pashur putting Jeremiah in the stocks in Jeremiah 20:2.
How to read the marks
- divine will, by God's own hand
- divine will through an instrument: an angel, a plague or an army under orders
- human will
- a natural force, or a blow with no striker named
- the bigger the mark, the more incidents at that crossing; the number is the count
- a thin outer ring: more than one kind of will at that crossing, coloured by the most common
- on a narrow plate, a shaded square or a small bar chart stands for a group of ranks against a group (rows divine, human and collective; columns person, collective, place and nonhuman), coloured by will
- grey pencil on the Qur'an plate: each entry exists only in some of the eight translations
- bars along the right and bottom edges of the Old Testament plate: each rank's total, split by will
Drawing the plates…
Old Testament
New Testament
Qur'an
I set the three plates side by side because they share one taxonomy, which lets you compare 223 entries in the Old Testament with 9 in the New and 6 in the Qur'an. The two small plates get a fraction of the room, so their drawing is simplified to fit: the weave goes first, then the rank labels, and on a narrow enough plate each group of ranks is shown against each group instead of one cell per rank, shaded by how many entries fall inside. Nothing is shrunk past reading, and you can watch the plates switch between these levels by resizing the window. The Qur'anic plate is drawn in pencil because its entries exist only if you accept a translator's word for them, and in Abdel Haleem's or Khattab's English the sheet would be blank.
Carried forward · 238 entries · 58 occupied crossings