Method
Nothing here asks to be believed. This page sets out how each analysis works, so that a result can be examined rather than accepted — and so that the places where a method is blind are as visible as the places where it speaks.
The shape of the thing
Moria is one file. All five analyses were computed in advance over the whole canon and packed into it, along with the texts themselves, so that nothing is fetched and nothing is logged. The build runs in eight steps, from reading the source documents through to assembling the finished page, and the whole of it can be repeated from public data.
The unit throughout is the verse — 31,102 of them, in the versification the King James Version uses. Getting everything onto that one grid is most of the work, and two of the eight steps do nothing else.
Getting the texts onto one grid
The Dutch text comes from the extended Statenvertaling export, which carries the marginal notes and a Strong’s number on every word, and which already follows the KJV versification. The simpler export does not: in some sixty psalms it follows the Masoretic count, where the superscription is verse 1, and so runs one or two verses out of step with everything else.
Those are not shifted by hand; they are checked in two stages. The Old Testament project’s own VerseMap says which chapters are counted differently and how, which gives the places where something may need doing. Each of those places is then measured, by setting the Dutch beside the English and looking at shared proper names, numbers and the length of the verse — three things that stay recognisable through a translation. Only where the Masoretic reading scores clearly better is it applied. The step now reports rather than corrects, so that if the text source is ever changed the problem shows up immediately instead of quietly.
The Septuagint bridge
The New Testament almost always quotes the Old in the Greek of the Septuagint. Hebrew and Greek cannot be compared word by word; Hebrew and the Septuagint cannot either — but the Septuagint and the New Testament can, because they are in the same language. So every Old Testament verse that has Septuagint text is compared directly against every New Testament verse.
Two things are looked at together. First, rare runs of three words that occur in both verses: that is the signature of a quotation, because it means not only the same words but the same order. Second, how much the two verses resemble each other in their vocabulary as a whole, with rare words counting for more than common ones. The second catches the looser allusions.
The Septuagint has its own verse divisions. The psalms shift; Jeremiah is ordered differently. Which Greek verse belongs to which ordinary verse number is not tabulated by hand but worked out from the text itself. Proper names stay recognisable through a translation, so the vowels are dropped from every Greek and Hebrew name and the remaining consonants are set side by side. For each book the run is then sought that gets the most names to match and the verse lengths to fit, under one condition: the run may never go backwards. It is that condition which takes care of the places where the Septuagint makes two psalms into one, or one into two, as at Psalm 9. Jeremiah, the one rearranged book, had two chapter mappings tested against each other, one computed and one the classical table from textual criticism, and the better-scoring one was kept. Against 34 known checkpoints — Psalm 110:1 as Septuagint 109:1, Jeremiah 31:31 as 38:31, and so on — the alignment is right in 33.
Why the evidence is recomputed, not stored
Each link is shown with the words that produced it, and those words are worked out again in the browser when you look at them, using exactly the same segmentation and stop-word lists as the original analysis. Storing the highlighting would have been smaller and faster, and would have risked marking something other than what actually caused the score.
That is useful in itself. If the score is high and nothing comes back highlighted, the link is running along a different track — through the Greek, say, while the translations diverge. That is information, and it is only visible because the evidence is derived rather than remembered.
Where the methods go quiet
Every one of the five has a blind spot, and knowing them is most of what it takes to read the results honestly.
The cross-references show no textual evidence at all, because they are not derived from the text. They record where readers, over centuries, judged two passages to belong together.
The original-language method cannot cross between Hebrew and Greek. It will never connect a Hebrew psalm to its Greek quotation directly.
The Septuagint bridge finds only quotations that follow the Septuagint’s wording. Where the New Testament follows a different Greek text, or translates the Hebrew itself, the bridge is silent — and its silence is not evidence of absence.
The quotation method through the translation runs through a translation, which means the translators’ vocabulary partly determines what is found. The quotation and thematic analyses are computed on the Dutch and English texts; changing the reading translation in the interface changes what is displayed, not what was scored.
The thematic method is statistics. It knows that two texts use language the same way. It does not know what either of them means.