Neat.
Perhaps it would be even nicer if the "advent" theme was more prominently present, e.g. using the Bible as the target data file to be used.
Here's three examples tasks from me:
(1) Write an sh script (using only POSIX standard commands) to create a Keywords in Context (KWIC) concordance of the new testament.
(2) Write a bash script that uses grep with regular expressions to extracts all literal quotes of what Jesus said in the New Testament. [Incidentally, doing this task manually marked the beginnings of philology and later automating it marked the beginning of what was later called literary and linguistic computing, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, and digital humanities.]
(3) How many times is Jesus mentioned by each of the four accounts of his life (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John)?
(You may begin by extracting the New Testament from the end of the Bible with a grep command.)
Respectfully, many would find that off-putting. "Advent of X" in tech is entirely decoupled from religion. Keeping it neutral seems to me the "nicest" approach. That said, something like what you described might be a cool exercise for your bible study group. Finally, I appreciated your "incidentally" aside about the origins of philology.