Werner VorstmanInstruments for reading Scripture closely
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Sources

The instruments are built entirely from public texts and open datasets. Nothing here belongs to someone else in a way that forbids its use, and nothing was scraped off anybody's site. This page exists so that any result can be traced back to what produced it.

Biblical text

TextEditionUsed for
StatenvertalingExtended export, with the original marginal notes and Strong's numbers on every wordReading text; the quotation and thematic analyses
King James VersionPublic domainReading text; the thematic analysis, jointly with the Dutch
Berean Standard BiblePublic domainReading text
Reina-Valera1909, public domainReading text
Versión Biblia Libre2018, CC BY-SA 4.0 — Jonathan Gallagher and Shelly Barrios de Avila, with Gustavo Sanabria and Rebekah Põldaas; translated from the Hebrew and the GreekReading text
Hebrew BibleWestminster Leningrad Codex, with the Open Scriptures morphology (OSHB 2.0.2, CC BY 4.0); the codex itself is in the public domainLemmas, Strong's numbers, full morphology, the reading marks (maqaf, sof pasuq, paseq) and the paragraph marks (pe, samekh, reversed nun)
Greek New TestamentSBLGNT with the MorphGNT parsingLemmas, full morphology
SeptuagintSwete, 1909–1930The Septuagint bridge; the Greek form of Old Testament verses

Datasets

DatasetSourceLicence
Cross-referencesopenbible.info — about 700,000 directed verse pairs with vote scoresCC-BY
Proper names and placesTIPNR, Tyndale House — biblical proper names with the geo-positions from openbible.infoCC-BY
Map baseNatural Earth — coastlines, lakes and rivers, cropped to the biblical world and simplified to a few hundred kilobytesPublic domain
LexiconsStrong's Hebrew and Greek dictionaries, including the etymological links that tie Δαυίδ and דָּוִד into one entryPublic domain
The meaning under the wordThe short English glosses under the source text come from STEPBible (TBESH and TBESG, Tyndale House Cambridge); the Dutch and the Spanish are my translation of them, and the English original stays in the word panelCC BY 4.0
Moon photograph"Full Moon Moon Png Clipart" by Andrea Stöckel, via publicdomainpictures.net — cropped to the disc and reduced to 384 pixels; the shadow over it is computed, not suppliedCC0, public domain
Crucifixion weekThe shape of the strip and the argument follow the teaching Was the Last Supper a Passover Meal? by 119 Ministries. Every date, weekday, sunset and candidate year is computed here from this site's own calendarUsed for the layout and the argument only; the reckoning is our own
Torah portionsThe division of the Torah into 54 portions as Sefaria records it in the alt structure of its book indexes; converted here to the numbering of the translations on this site and checked against Moria's own chapter and verse countsCC-BY
Haftarothebcal's leyning tables (@hebcal/leyning), with the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi custom kept apart; likewise converted to the numbering of the translations shown hereGPL-2.0, used as data only
MenorahThe relief on the Arch of Titus in Rome, put up shortly after 81 CE, by way of Wikimedia Commons: Menora_Titus.png. Reduced here to one colour and set on a transparent ground; the flames are computed, not suppliedThe relief itself is in the public domain; for this rendering see the file page
The yearsThe regnal years follow the common scholarship: Josephus (Antiquities and The Jewish War) for the Herodians and the high priests, Roman sources for Augustus and Tiberius, the inscription found at Caesarea in 1961 for Pilate, and the coin series of Antipas and Philip for their length. Where the sources contradict each other it says so at the band itself, and the band is hatched; death years resting only on later tradition are not drawnAncient sources, public domain; the compilation is our own work

Algorithms

The calendar is Jean Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms, 2nd edition (Willmann-Bell, 1998) — chapter 7 for the Julian Day and the weekday, chapter 10 for Dynamical Time, chapter 12 for sidereal time, chapter 15 for sunset, chapter 22 for the obliquity of the ecliptic, chapter 25 for the position of the sun, chapter 27 for the equinoxes and solstices, chapter 47 for the position of the moon, chapter 48 for the illuminated fraction of its disc, and chapter 49 for the phases of the moon. ΔT follows the polynomial expressions of Espenak and Meeus in NASA’s Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses, which extend chapter 10 back to 500 BCE.

Those results were checked twice over: against the worked examples printed in the book, and against an independent ephemeris built on different theories altogether. Moon phases agree within seconds for recent centuries and within a minute at 501 BCE; equinoxes and solstices within about forty-five seconds across the whole span; sunset at Jerusalem within three seconds, in 2026 and in 501 BCE alike.

The analyses inside Moria use tf-idf weighting, truncated singular value decomposition for the 300-dimensional semantic space, log-likelihood (G²) for distinctive vocabulary, pointwise mutual information for collocations, and dynamic time warping for the Septuagint alignment.

On licences. The instruments are given freely, but the corpora and datasets keep their own terms — the CC-BY sets above require attribution wherever their data is reused. If you build on any of this, attribute the sources, not just the tools.