About

I am Werner Vorstman. I build instruments for reading Scripture closely, and I put them here. They were made for one purpose: to let a reader look at what a claim about Scripture rests on, instead of taking it on the authority of whoever printed it.

Why the analysis is called Moria

Moriah is where Abraham was sent to look, and where he found that what he had been told and what he was shown were not the same thing until he went and saw. The name is a reminder that the work of study is the going and the seeing. It belongs to the analysis, not to this site.

Why it is built this way

One file, no server. Moria has no back end, no account, no analytics and no network calls. Everything is inside the file. That is partly a matter of privacy — nobody can see what you look up, because there is nowhere for that to go — and partly durability. A study tool that depends on a server is a study tool with an expiry date. Save the file and it will still open in ten years.

Evidence over authority. Any system can produce a list of related verses. The question that matters is what the list is made of. So each connection shows its own working, and the one method with nothing to show — the inherited cross-references — says so plainly rather than borrowing credibility from the four that do.

Its limits, in writing. Every method here has a blind spot, and each is stated on the method page next to the thing it does well. A tool that only advertises what it can do teaches you to trust it too much.

How to use it

Start with a verse you already know well. Look at what the five methods return for it and, more usefully, at where they disagree. Agreement between independent methods is the strongest signal in the whole system; a link found by one method alone is a question, not an answer.

When something is worth keeping, put it in the dossier with a note, and save that dossier as a file next to whatever you are writing. It exports to Word and Markdown when you are ready to use it.

Articles

Articles here are notes on what the instruments turn up and on how they work. Where a claim rests on a measurement, the measurement is named, so that it can be repeated or contradicted. Read them, or take the feed.

Contact and reuse

The instruments may be copied and shared freely. The underlying corpora and datasets keep their own licences, which are listed on the sources page — the CC-BY sets require attribution wherever their data is reused.