Problem

I was going through a word study on holy in the Bible. And sometimes knowing the first occurrence of that word helps.

Why not create an app for that?

Solution

And so I did.

first-mention.marcuschiu.com

How it was Built

First, I needed to download the Bible. There are many versions out there, so I’ll start with ESV. But I can’t just download any ESV, I needed one that delimits the book, chapter, and verses.

Finding a good source was harder than expected. But I’ve ended up stumbling upon this goldmine of JSON files.

The JSON format looks something like this:

{
    "Genesis": {
        "1": {
          "1": "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.",
          "2": "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.",
        },
        "2": {
          "1": "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.",
        }
    },
    "Exodus": {
      "1": {
        "1": "These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his household:",
      }
    }
}

Looks perfect!

Next, I needed to write a program to extract the first occurrence of each word and map it to its location. Something like this:

holy Genesis 2:3
homage 1 Samuel 24:8
home Gensis 30:25

I chose Python to implement this. Implementing this was quite easy, first we need a key-value map data structure i.e. a dictionary in Python to store a word as its key and the first mention location as its value.

word_first_occurrence = {}  # word -> "BOOK CHAPTER:VERSE"

Next, we will loop through each of the verses from the beginning of the Bible to the end. And for each verse, we will tokenize it into individual words. Then for each word, check if it exists in the dictionary. If the word exists, do nothing. Otherwise, add it to the dictionary as a key with the location as its value.

That’s pretty much it.

Next, we need to build a simple website. I’ve opted to use ChatGPT 5 to help me prettify this website.

chatgpt-prompt

Did some minor touch-ups and made it public!

Here’s the GitHub link: https://github.com/TheRealMarcusChiu/the-law-of-first-mention