fredguth/atlas-biblica

Atlas Biblica — open reference data

🌍 atlasbiblica.com · 💾 GitHub · 📖 CC BY 4.0

• Homepage: https://atlasbiblica.com
• Repository: https://github.com/Gutenback/atlas-biblica-data
• Point of contact: Fred Guth

Structured reference data about the people, places and names of the Bible. It is the open half of the data behind Atlas Biblica, a free reference to the people, places, events and books of the Bible.

Every record carries atlas_url, the canonical address of its page on atlasbiblica.com, so the dataset joins to the live reference without a lookup table — a row about Abana carries https://atlasbiblica.com/places/abana-2ki-5-12/ and the page is there.

Configurations

Config	Rows	What it holds
onomasticon	4,219	The Portuguese spelling of every named entity, and how each was decided.
onomasticon_rulings	577	Hand-authored spellings, one written reason each.
onomasticon_refusals	31	Names the ARC renders as common nouns and never spells.
places	1,013	The gazetteer join, carrying every competing modern identification.
names	683	Names more than one figure answers to, and the candidates they resolve among.
canon	66	The shape of the pinned edition: books, chapters, verse extents.
eponyms	28	The man, the tribe and the land told apart.
eponym_refusals	2	Senses looked for and deliberately not minted.

from datasets import load_dataset

ono    = load_dataset("fredguth/atlas-biblica", "onomasticon", split="train")
places = load_dataset("fredguth/atlas-biblica", "places",      split="train")

The one that exists nowhere else: onomasticon

A mapping from each entity in an English-language scholarly registry to the way the Almeida Revista e Corrigida — the Portuguese translation in widest traditional use — spells that name. Every entry records how it was decided:

• arc-vote (3,631) — resolved automatically by matching the entity's own verses in the ARC text.
• ruling (557) — decided by hand, each with a written reason, mostly non-cognate renderings no string similarity can find: John → João, James → Tiago.
• english (31) — a refusal. The ARC renders these as common nouns and never as names: Azazel is "bode emissário", Horesh is "um bosque". Nothing in that edition spells them, so the name stays English rather than being invented.

The refusals are the point as much as the rulings are. A gap recorded as a gap is a result; a gap filled by a plausible guess is a fabrication no downstream reader can detect.

places

Biblical places matched from the STEPBible registry to OpenBible.info, carrying every proposed modern identification rather than a single answer: coordinates, the scholarly works consulted, and community vote scores over time. Where the tradition disagrees about where a place was, the disagreement is in the data. identifications[].best marks the highest-scoring proposal.

votes is a list of {name, count} rather than an object, because the key set is open — 19 keys across 628 distinct combinations — and an open-key struct breaks Arrow's schema inference partway down the file.

names

Names that more than one figure answers to, each with the candidates it resolves among and how each is attested. scenario: no_primary_topic means no candidate is attested strongly enough to hold the bare name alone. This is the disambiguation problem stated as data — what stands between "Joseph" and the eleven different people the text calls Joseph.

canon

Per book: order, testament, chapter count, total verses, and extents, the verse ceiling of each chapter. Measured against one pinned edition, and a property of that edition — versification differs between traditions, so these are not universal.

eponyms

STEPBible types fifteen eponymous ancestors as persons and gives the tribe and the territory descended from them no record at all. Read literally, that places seven towns inside Jacob's fourth son. These records declare the missing senses, each with a written verdict.

eponym_refusals holds the senses looked for and deliberately not minted: Levi has no territory (Joshua 13:14), and Joseph's allotment is Ephraim's and Manasseh's.

What is not here

The claim store. Atlas Biblica is built on a graph of verse-anchored assertions extracted from the text; that graph is not published, and nothing in this dataset derives from it. Everything here comes from the entity registry, the gazetteer, the pinned edition or hand-authored decision tables.

Practically: these datasets describe who and what exists, what they are called, and where they are — not what anyone did.

Source, licence, citation

The browsable form of this data — one JSON file per record, in a tree — and the code that builds both live at https://github.com/Gutenback/atlas-biblica-data. This mirror is generated from that repository and pushed on every change.

Released under CC BY 4.0. It incorporates work by others under their own terms — STEPBible (CC BY 4.0), OpenBible.info (CC BY 4.0), the Berean Standard Bible, the Almeida Revista e Corrigida and Natural Earth (public domain). See ATTRIBUTION.md for the pinned versions and full notices.

Guth, F. Atlas Biblica — open reference data. https://github.com/Gutenback/atlas-biblica-data