Adam and Eve in the scriptures, part 1

Stisa and I have both written about how central the creation account is understanding the scriptures.  I read somewhere that aside from the first five chapters of Genesis, the Old Testament contains no meaningful references to Adam and Eve. Of course I never take a claim like this at face value without doing my own investigation. :) In studying this question in more depth, I put together the following information, which I'll share in two parts.

Number of references to Adam and Eve in each book of scripture

My first step was to identify and count up every reference to Adam and Eve in the scriptures.  (Note, I decided to exclude "Ancient of days" which shows up in Daniel and the Doctrine and Covenants, since bible scholars do not associate this term with Adam, and since these references generally refer to post-mortal Adam.) I also determined word counts for each book of scripture to allow for a word frequency analysis. I decided to split up the Old Testament into two sections to compare the creation account to the remainder.

Here are the raw counts:

		Total mentions
	Word Count	Adam	Eve	"First Parents"	Combined
Bible	789613	27	4	0	31
Genesis 1-5	3260	16	2	0	18
Rest of OT	605973	3	0	0	3
NT	180380	8	2	0	10
Book of Mormon	267170	26	3	11	40
Book of Moses	12531	52	7	0	59
Book of Abraham	5502	9	0	0	9
D&C	111912	30	1	0	31

Here are the results in graph form:

I see a few things that surprise me:

1. There are more references to Adam and Eve in revealed scripture than I would have initially guessed.
2. There are more references in the Book of Mormon than in the entire Bible, despite the Bible being about three times as long.
3. "First parents" is a term that is unique to the Book of Mormon.

Word Frequency

Next I wanted to find a way to compare the relative frequency of references to Adam and Eve in each book of scripture, so I used the word counts to generate the number of references to Adam and Eve per 10,000 words:

	Frequency per 10,000 words
	Adam	Eve	"First Parents"	Combined
Bible	0.34	0.05	0.00	0.39
Genesis 1-5	49.08	6.13	0.00	55.21
Rest of OT	0.05	0.00	0.00	0.05
NT	0.44	0.11	0.00	0.55
Book of Mormon	0.97	0.11	0.41	1.50
Book of Moses	41.50	5.59	0.00	47.08
Book of Abraham	16.36	0.00	0.00	16.36
D&C	2.68	0.09	0.00	2.77

Here are the same data in graph form:

Unsurprisingly, the books of scripture that are short and contain a creation account come out in the lead on this graph.  Notice the rest of the Old Testament is indistinguishable from zero.  The difference between the first five chapters of Genesis and the rest of the OT is three orders of magnitude (1000x).  That's pretty striking.

Now that we have some numbers to get a frame of reference, the next step in my study was to take a look at the qualitative differences between the books of scripture.  It is one thing to count total mentions, but another thing entirely to see how often doctrine connects to mentions of Adam and Eve.

I'll discuss those findings in the next part.