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 AHS  Vol.2 No.2 , June 2013
Communities Inferred from the Books of Samuel in the Old Testament of the Bible
Wei Hu*
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Abstract: The books of First and Second Samuel are part of historical books in the Old Testament of the Bible, which appear as a single book in Jewish scriptures. These two books record the critical transition of governing system in Israel from judges to kings and from 12 tribes to a centralized state. The three major characters in these books are Samuel priest, prophet and the last judge, Saul the first king of Israel, and David the second king, a man after God’s own heart. These books contain many fascinating stories that present the life of Samuel, the rise and fall of Saul, the long journal for David to become king, and the establishment of his kingdom. In this study, we constructed a sequence of social networks from these two books based on the interactions of many characters and their locations. Our aim was to apply a computational approach to identifying the communities in these networks, which summarized the interactions between the key figures and others, along with their locations. As a result, the rich information of this part ofIsraelhistory was encoded and visualized concisely through this sequence of networks of communities in time.
Keywords: Samuel; Bible; Community
Cite this paper: Hu, W. (2013). Communities Inferred from the Books of Samuel in the Old Testament of the Bible. Advances in Historical Studies, 2, 70-80. doi: 10.4236/ahs.2013.22011.
References

[1]   Gordon, R. P. (1999). 1 & 2 Samuel: A commentary. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

[2]   Magennis, F. T. (2011). First and second Samuel (New Collegeville bible commentary: Old Testament). Collegeville: Liturgical Press.

[3]   Newman, M. (2010). Networks: An introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

[4]   Payne, D. F. (1982). I and II Samuel (OT daily study Bible series). Westminster: John Knox Press.

[5]   Pons, P., & Latapy, M. (2006). Computing communities in large networks using random walks. Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications, 10, 191-218. doi:10.7155/jgaa.00124

[6]   Tsumura, D. T. (2007). The first book of Samuel (New international commentary on the Old Testament). Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

 
 
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