Werner Vorstman
I build instruments for reading Scripture closely, and I put them here for anyone to use. They are made with one purpose: to show what a claim about Scripture rests on, rather than have you take it on the authority of whoever printed it.
From the age of ten I wanted to be a biologist. Before going up to university I spent a few months on a kibbutz in Israel, and there a realisation pressed itself upon me that there must be a Creator. I became a theist. Only then came Wageningen and microbiology, and after that fourteen years of trying to understand how enterprises work.
Most people do believe that there is something, but they do not take the step of finding out what that something is. I took that step, and what is here is the tooling I needed for it and could not find. An invitation to conversation, not to debate.
Each instrument comes with its data and its method, including where they are weak. What an instrument cannot show is stated as plainly as what it can — otherwise you learn to trust it too far. 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.
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.