How to Filter for Kings and Prophets only in Advanced Timeline

Richard Lyall · 2025-03-20T03:17:47+00:00

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Is this possible? Seems like a perfect use for the timeline, to see how the reigns and ministries align, but there seems no way I can find to filter for types of people e.g. “Monarchs” and “Prophets”.

The “People” filter contains a list of people in order of no. of occurrences which doesn’t help. I guess I could search this massive non-alphabetical list for the names of all the kings and prophets individually but this seems awfully convoluted.

I’m quite new to this tool so any help appreciated!

I’m using the iOS app btw.

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DMB

I think everyone's new to the tool and it's only been 15 years or so. During dreary nights, I wonder, in 2008, what exactly they were thinking, as they gave up 'Timelines' in favor of disorganized data dumps. What was the vision? But, Libby's not been forgotten:

Richard Lyall

In case anyone else is looking to explore this, here's a refinement of the above.

Search Query in the Find box is (reign AND (Israel OR Judah)) OR prophet NOT muhammad with the further Filtering of 1130-350BC and Event Type > Individual

Please post below if you can refine further! Thanks to previous posters for suggestions.

This is crying out for a way to colour things differently, as with regular search results, but it's a lot better than nothing.

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DMB

Donovan R. Palmer

As it currently stands, I find it challenging to tame!

Advanced Timeline has so much potential. With the developments around Smart Search entering into how we interact with data, the user-friendliness of this tool could take a quantum leap with support from AI.

I hope the new subscription model will provide resources to improve the text comparison tool, the timeline, and the atlas.

Mattillo

I agree. I've been asking for years that Logos make more user friendly graphics for display. Timeline is bloated. It has its uses but sometimes all we want is a simple colorful chart.

Richard Lyall

Thanks folks - useful to know. At least the data I'm interested in are available in another form.

I would hope that any future Timeline developments might be available to non-subscribers too, but I'm not holding my breath on that! 😁

Mattillo

I played around with timeline a bit and the best I could get is to filter by Individual. You can search just for prophet and it will give you some results and you can filter by Reign to get kings but I'm not so sure how to combine them… A good study bible would probably be better.

Richard Lyall

Yes that does move towards something useful thanks!

Realised that it's possible to combine terms in the Find bar e.g. "prophet OR reign" and that shows both regencies and prophetic ministries.

Also finding that Filtering the data using selected Bible books or Common Divisions such as "Latter Prophets" also seems to focus things a bit.

Combining this with a Places filter for "Judah (kingdom)" and "Israel" further narrows things, although this filters out most of the prophets, so not sure what terms to include in the left hand FIlter bar to include them - I thought that most of the prophets were either associated with Judah or Israel and that filtering for Judah/Israel would therefore include them. Removing these place filters restores the missing prophets but includes all foreign kings too so I'm not quite understanding the underlying data here, or there's an error in the dataset?

So this is better, but there are some bizarre blips in the data, with the blocks for Jehoram and Ahaz appearing in the wrong place it seems, but overall this feels like a bit of progress.

Richard Lyall

In case anyone else is looking to explore this, here's a refinement of the above.

Search Query in the Find box is (reign AND (Israel OR Judah)) OR prophet NOT muhammad with the further Filtering of 1130-350BC and Event Type > Individual

Please post below if you can refine further! Thanks to previous posters for suggestions.

This is crying out for a way to colour things differently, as with regular search results, but it's a lot better than nothing.