Werner Vorstman
I design instruments for the close reading of Scripture and make them freely available here. Their purpose is singular: to make explicit the basis on which a claim about Scripture rests, rather than requiring that it be accepted on the authority of its publisher.
From age ten I intended to become a biologist. Before beginning university studies, I spent several months on a kibbutz in Israel, where I arrived at the conviction that a Creator exists, and became a theist. I subsequently studied environmental science and microbiology at Wageningen University, followed by fourteen years examining the functioning of business organizations.
This site documents that inquiry and provides the tools it required — tools I could not find elsewhere. It is offered as an invitation to dialogue, not to debate.
Each instrument is presented together with its underlying data and method, including their limitations. What an instrument cannot demonstrate is stated with the same clarity as what it can, so as to avoid overreliance on its conclusions. More about me, and about how this site is built
It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.
Moria
Five independent methods, run over the whole canon in advance, that find texts related to any verse — and show what each link is made of.
The Calendar
New moons, full moons, equinoxes, solstices and the appointed days, from 1001 BCE to 3000 CE, computed from first principles rather than looked up.
The Timeline
Adam to the fall of the second temple on one axis, in two reckonings at once — the dating scholarship works with, and the years the text itself counts.
The Lifespans
Twenty-eight ages at death from Adam to Joshua — flat before the flood, and after it falling on one curve that flattens near the 120 of Genesis 6:3.
The Alphabet
Twenty-two letters with the shapes they had before the square script, the vowel points, the cantillation marks, and verses to read aloud.
The Moon
Today's moon, drawn as it appears from where you are, with its rising and setting, its distance, and the biblical month and day.
The Torah Reading
The reading of the week — the Torah portion, the haftarah in both customs, and a passage from the new covenant worked out from Moria itself.
The Crucifixion Week
The days around the crucifixion, the biblical and the civil calendar one above the other — and why the lamb dies on the fourteenth, the afternoon before the Feast of Unleavened Bread.
The Years
The life of Yeshua (Jesus) hemmed in by other men's dated lives — Herod, Tiberius, Pilate — and the question of which season he was born in, with both reconstructions side by side.
The Bible Scale
Well-known Bible translations of each language on one arc, from word for word to sense for sense — each with what its makers set out to do, and where that is stated.
These pages can also sit on your home screen as an app — with the calendar, the moon and the Torah reading working offline. How to do that →
Recent articles
How God takes back a people he sent away
A common argument makes Calvary the legal mechanism that removes the prohibition of Deuteronomy 24. Tested against the original text it fails at four points — and Jeremiah raises the question himself, centuries earlier, and answers it.
What a cross-reference actually claims
The column of references in the margin of a study Bible is not a measurement of the text. It is a record of what readers have judged, and it is worth more once you know that.
Sitting at the right hand — how Hebrews quotes Psalm 110
A Hebrew psalm and a Greek letter cannot be compared word by word. Put the Septuagint between them and the quotation becomes visible at the level of the original.