Actors and Books of the Bible (Solution)

Welcome back, Puzzlers. Spoilers ahead! It's time to solve the the Sunday Puzzle:

This week's challenge comes from listener Samuel Mace of Smyrna, Del. Name a famous actor whose first name is a book of the Bible and whose last name is an anagram of another book of the Bible. Who is it?

On Monday, I posted this breakdown:

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Note one possible pitfall before we jump in: actor. This sometimes refers to men only (as opposed to actresses), but these days it is often used to include men and women. Let's use the less restrictive definition here. We know what can happen when we make assumptions about the puzzle.

Okay, to solve this we need:

• Lists:
• A: a list of actors;
• open list; I'm using this list of 1000;
• B: a list of books of the Bible;
• closed list; I'm using this list from the standard King James Version; we could of course expand this by looking at other versions;
• N: a subset of B, where all items are personal names;
• Function:
• is_anagram(x, y)
• remove nonletters ("O'Neal" --> "ONeal")
• lowercase ("ONeal" --> "oneal")
• sort letters ("oneal" --> "aelno")
• compare x, y
• return True or False

The process from here is pretty straightforward. We iterate through A, checking each actor's first name to see if it appears in N. If we find a match, then we take the actor's last name and iterate through B, using the anagram function to look for a match.

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And that's exactly what I did. I've posted my solver script to the companion GitHub repository for this blog. The script is annotated with comments to explain what each step is doing.

I guess it's time for the big reveal. Did you get a solution? Here's what I came up with:

John Hurt <--> John, Ruth

I would not be surprised if there are multiple solutions, but only one actor on my list of 1000 fit the bill.

Thanks for reading! I'll catch you on the next puzzle.

--Levi