How this catalog was built.

The statute

The Tennessee Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022, codified at Tennessee Code Annotated § 49-6-3801 through 49-6-3803 and substantially amended by Public Chapter 782 in 2024 (effective July 1, 2024), restricts materials in public school library collections that contain nudity; descriptions or depictions of sexual excitement, sexual conduct, or sadomasochistic abuse; or excessive violence. The 2024 amendment targets materials containing such content “in whole or in part,” declares any nudity or excess violence per se inappropriate for K–12, and allows the State Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission to review materials when local boards do not act within sixty days. Materials covered may still be used in classroom instruction but cannot remain available in school library collections.

The source text

The King James Version of the Christian Bible, the 1611 Authorized Version, is in the public domain. The machine-readable plain-text edition used for this analysis was retrieved from Project Gutenberg eBook #10, the standard reference version of the KJV in plain text and the same edition used across academic biblical computing for decades.

The text was parsed into 31,102 individually-addressable verses across 66 books. Book and verse counts were verified against the canonical KJV totals (Genesis through Revelation), and the parsed result matched the canonical totals with zero discrepancies. This verification matters because it forecloses the most basic challenge to the work — that the source text might be incomplete, mistakenly aggregated, or non-canonical. The text used here is the same KJV any Tennessee resident would find on a public bookshelf.

Operational definitions

The four statutory categories required operational definitions in order to be applied evenhandedly across 31,102 verses. The definitions used in this catalog are intentionally strict — that is, they err on the side of not flagging content, in order to produce a defensible undercount rather than an inflated one.

Nudity

Explicit references to a person being naked, exposed, having their nakedness uncovered, or being stripped. Excludes metaphorical uses (e.g., “nakedness of the land” meaning military vulnerability).

Sexual content

Explicit descriptions of sexual acts. Excludes euphemistic mentions of marital relations (“knew his wife,” “lay with his wife”) unless the surrounding narrative provides graphic detail. Includes the Song of Solomon’s erotic blazons, Ezekiel’s extended sexual metaphors, and the Levitical catalogs of forbidden sexual practices.

Sexual abuse

Rape, forced sexual acts, sexual violence, abduction for sexual purposes, coerced sexual servitude, and laws sanctioning these acts.

Excessive violence

Extended graphic violence spanning three or more consecutive verses. Excludes isolated single-verse mentions of killing, ritual sacrificial blood, and metaphorical or covenantal uses of violence-related language.

Detection process

Pass one: automated scan

A keyword and phrase scan of all 31,102 verses against curated pattern libraries for each of the four categories. Each pattern library was developed to capture the language signatures of the relevant content type in the KJV’s distinctive early-modern English, including terms like uncover thy nakedness, lay with, defiled, smote with the edge of the sword, ripped up, and many others. The first pass produced a candidate set of approximately 1,400 verses.

Pass two: curated reference list and cross-check

The candidate set was then cross-checked against a manually-assembled curated reference list drawing on biblical reference works, academic surveys of biblical violence and sexuality, and the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible’s tagged-verse index. Curated references were used to confirm true positives and surface false negatives that the automated scan had missed.

False-positive exclusions

Several categories of candidate verses were systematically excluded because they did not meet the spirit of the operational definitions. These exclusions were documented at the time of detection and applied uniformly:

• Ritual sacrificial blood. The Levitical and Mosaic sacrificial codes refer extensively to blood and slaughter as part of religious ritual. These references are not depictions of violence against persons and are excluded.
• The death-formula “slept with his fathers.” This standard biblical euphemism for the death of a king or patriarch is not a depiction of violence and is excluded.
• Idiomatic “smote upon their breasts.” The biblical idiom for striking one’s breast in grief is excluded.
• Metaphorical “nakedness of the land.” Geopolitical or covenantal uses of nakedness language are excluded.
• Single-verse mentions of killing. The category requires three or more consecutive verses to count as excessive; isolated mentions are excluded.
• Generic narrative summaries of warfare. Phrases like “and he smote the Philistines” without further graphic detail are excluded.

Unit of analysis

The catalog operates at the level of passages, not individual verses. A passage is defined as a range of consecutive verses sharing the same triggering content. This is not an arbitrary choice. It mirrors how the Knox County Schools review committee actually evaluated Roots: the district’s own statement specified that the book was elevated to district review committee “for consideration of a passage in chapter 84.” Throughout the catalog, the unit of analysis matches the unit the law and the school district have been using in practice.

Cross-category overlap

Some passages trigger more than one category. For example, Numbers 31:7–18 (the slaughter of Midianites) is tagged for both excessive violence and sexual abuse, since the narrative includes both the killing of non-combatants and instructions concerning captive virgins. The category counts reported in the summary statistics overlap; the total number of catalogued passages (147) and total flagged verses (754) deduplicate across categories.

Limitations

Several limitations of the dataset are explicitly disclosed:

Not exhaustive. The catalog uses a strict reading of each operational definition. Borderline cases were resolved toward inclusion only when content clearly met the strict definition. Many narrative summaries of warfare were excluded as not sufficiently graphic, even though a more permissive reading of “excessive violence” would include them. A less strict threshold on any of the four categories would expand the catalog substantially.

Poetic and prophetic books. The Bible’s poetic and prophetic books contain additional violent and sexual imagery, often in metaphorical form, that could be added at a less strict threshold. The catalog captures the most explicit such passages (Song of Solomon’s blazons, Ezekiel 23, Hosea 2) but does not capture the full range of figurative content.

Translation specificity. The catalog applies only to the King James Version. Other translations (NIV, NRSV, ESV, NASB) render some passages with different vocabulary that might affect keyword-based detection. The underlying content is the same in all major Christian translations, and the catalog’s findings are translation-neutral in substance even if translation-specific in exact phrasing.

Not legal or theological advice. The catalog is an analytical artifact. It is not a legal opinion about the AAMA, not a theological argument about the Bible, not a recommendation that any text be removed from any library, and not guidance on what any school district should do.

Reproducibility

Every catalogued passage is identifiable by book, chapter, and verse, and can be independently verified by anyone with access to a public-domain KJV text. The categorization rationale is documented for every passage. Researchers, journalists, and members of the public who wish to verify, dispute, or expand the catalog are invited to do so — the source text is free, the statute is public record, and the methodology described here is fully replicable.

Tools and sources consulted

Source text: King James Version, 1611 Authorized Version (public domain), via Project Gutenberg eBook #10. Statutory criteria: Tennessee Code Annotated § 49-6-3803, as amended by 2024 Public Chapter 782. Reference works consulted for the curated list include the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible (skepticsannotatedbible.com) tagged-verse index and standard biblical reference works. Detection scripts: Python 3 with standard text-processing libraries.