Games and the Acts of the Apostles

One of the standard textbooks in operational research a generation ago was "Fights, Games and Debates" by Anatol Rapoport. Rapoport distinguished between Fights, where you want to overpower your opponent, Games, where you want to outwit your opponent, and Debates, where you want to convince your opponent. Last week our home group Bible study was looking at chapter 25 and I commented that the story there illustrated those three situations.

The fight: in 25v7, When Paul came in, the men who had come down from Jerusalem stood around him. They brought many serious charges against him, but they could not prove them.

The game: in 25v3, They requested Festus, as a favour to them, to have Paul transferred to Jerusalem, for they were preparing an ambush to kill him along the way.

The debate: in 25v8, Then Paul made his defence: “I have done nothing wrong against the Jewish law or against the temple or against Caesar.”

As is clear from the whole chapter, the various parties present were not working to the same agenda, and hence they never communicated with one another.

Supply Chain management in Exodus

This year, Tina and I are reading the Bible together using a Chronological Bible, one which attempts to place the whole of the Old and New Testaments in their chronological order. Reading the whole Bible in one year is a challenge -- there are about four or five pages to read each day, and we read them aloud together after breakfast, before our family prayers.

Today we reached the account of the Children of Israel in Egypt, and Pharaoh's punishment that their slavery be made harder. They should continue making bricks for him, but they had to find their own straw (to bind the clay together). And, the word of God continues, this made their work much, much harder and their productivity fell.

It struck me that here is one of the earliest recorded instances of a supply chain and how bad management made it go wrong. Up till then, there was a supply chain of Egyptians providing straw for the Hebrews making bricks. Pharaoh's orders broke that. And it went wrong. The Bible tells the story from the production end. What happened, one wonders, about the upstream end? What happened to those whose livelihood had been based on supplying straw?

Amazingly, there are many hits when you Google with the keywords "supply chain" + exodus + straw, and one which comes up high is a Christian sermon about modern slavery ... not quite what I was thinking about, but fascinating that someone else has linked the ideas in a church. Here is that link.

Operational Research and the Bible

An interesting diagram has been posted in a forum for vsiualising information.
The picture has one entry along the x-axis for each chapter in the Bible and there are coloured arcs between chapters which cross-reference to one another. (This means that there is a word, phrase or idea that occurs in one chapter that also appears in another; "The Lord is my Shepherd" in Psalms links with "I am the Good Shepherd" in the gospels.) There are 63779 such arcs -- the picture is beautiful. Mathematicians and O.R. scientists will recognise that the structure is a graph, with each chapter a vertex, and that leads to assorted questions about the graph. How many components does it have? Are there isolated vertices? What are the properties of the components?

I'd like to hear answers.