Methodology

How every entry in this tool is built, and why — so you can check our work instead of taking our word for it.

The goal

This tool tries to answer one question per passage: what would a first-century talmid of Yeshua — someone shaped by Second Temple Judaism, not by later Rabbinic Judaism or later Christianity — have understood immediately? That is a historical question before it is a theological one, and it sets the rule for everything below: we are reconstructing what was plausibly known and assumed by the original audience, not reporting what any modern tradition currently teaches.

Source tiers

Every claim in this tool is traceable to a tier. When tiers conflict, a higher tier always wins. Lower tiers illuminate background and plausibility — they never establish doctrine on their own.

• Tier 1Scripture itself — the Tanakh and the Apostolic Writings (Brit Chadashah). This is the controlling authority. Any reading that contradicts the plain grammar and context of the text itself is wrong, no matter how well-attested it is elsewhere.
• Tier 2Second Temple primary sources, pre-70 CE — Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, the Pseudepigrapha (1 Enoch, Jubilees, etc.), Wisdom literature. These are contemporaneous with or prior to Yeshua and His talmidim. This is the tier that most directly answers "what did the original audience already know" — it carries the most weight after Scripture itself.
• Tier 3Early Tannaitic material, c. 70-200 CE — Mishnah, earliest halakhic midrashim, Targum Onkelos in its earliest form. Postdates Yeshua, but often preserves older oral tradition. Used cautiously, and always dated explicitly.
• Tier 4Later Amoraic / Aggadic material, c. 200-600+ CE — the Bavli, the Yerushalmi, aggadic midrash collections. Useful for showing how a text's interpretive trajectory developed, and often preserves genuinely old traditions — but it is centuries removed and shaped by post-Temple, post-Yavneh concerns. Always flagged with its date; never used as if it were first-century.
• Tier 5Later Rabbinic Judaism and Church tradition, post-70 CE normative developments — Rabbinic Judaism as it re-formed after the Temple's destruction, and Christian creeds/councils from Nicaea onward. Both are historically important, and both postdate the first-century context this tool is trying to reconstruct. They appear here only for contrast and awareness — as the two traditions whose later, separate developments this tool is explicitly trying to see past, back to the shared first-century starting point.

Working rules

• 1Scripture interprets Scripture first. Before reaching for extra-biblical material, check what the rest of the Tanakh and Apostolic Writings already say.
• 2No claim without a citable, checkable source. If we can't point to a specific text (with a reference you can look up yourself, ideally linked), it doesn't go in.
• 3Distinguish exegesis from background from synthesis, explicitly. That's what the Pshat / Remez / Drash / "how a talmid heard it" structure is for — you should always be able to tell whether a given sentence is describing what the text says, what context illuminates, or what we're concluding from putting the two together.
• 4Show contested readings, don't hide them. When Second Temple or rabbinic sources disagree on a passage (as they do on Psalm 82), the tool presents the live disagreement rather than picking one reading and pretending it was the only one.
• 5Flag uncertainty honestly. Fragmentary Dead Sea Scrolls texts, disputed datings, and reconstructed readings are marked as such, not smoothed over.
• 6Primary sources over secondhand summaries. Wherever possible, the tool links straight to the source text (via Sefaria or other public archives) so you can read it in full context yourself, not just our excerpt of it.

A note on Sod

Sod (the fourth PaRDeS level — hidden meaning) is the riskiest layer to include honestly, because "hidden meaning" is exactly where speculation dressed as depth tends to sneak in: numerology, gematria, Kabbalistic systems (the sefirot, letter-mysticism), or free-associative symbolism with no textual control. None of that appears in this tool's Sod sections. Instead, Sod here is restricted to what the Apostolic Writings themselves already call a mystery — a meaning genuinely hidden in the earlier text but explicitly unveiled in Messiah, using the New Testament's own vocabulary for this (Ephesians 3:4-6, Colossians 1:26-27, 1 Peter 1:10-12 — the prophets themselves searching what their own words pointed to). In practice that means every Sod claim in this tool must tie to an explicit, citable typological or canonical connection — a pattern Scripture itself draws or the New Testament itself names as fulfilled — not an interpretation invented from outside the text. It is marked with its own confidence rating, usually more cautious than the other layers, since typological synthesis is inherently more interpretive than Pshat, Remez, or Drash.

A note on the Traditional Reading

Where present, an entry opens with "The Traditional Reading" — the passage's common or traditional misreading, stated plainly and fairly, before anything else on the page. It has to be stated specifically enough to be a real position someone actually holds, not a strawman built to be knocked down; if it can't be stated fairly, the entry isn't ready to publish. This is deliberately the first thing a reader sees, ahead of the synthesis, so the honesty check comes before the payoff: the reader can judge for themselves whether what follows is a fair correction or an overcorrection. It's an optional field — only added where an entry actually has a well-known misreading worth naming, and not backfilled onto older entries mechanically.

A note on names

New entries use Hebrew names for people, not their later Anglicized/Greek forms — Yeshua rather than Jesus, Miriam rather than Mary, Yosef rather than Joseph, Moshe rather than Moses, Sha'ul rather than Paul, and so on, including inside translated Scripture text itself. The point isn't novelty for its own sake; it's a standing reminder that everyone in these texts was a first-century Jew, not a character in a later Western retelling. Every name used this way is added to the glossary (data/glossary.json) with its meaning and a short note on who the person was, and — per the linking rule below — every occurrence anywhere on a page is linked, not just the first. Where two different figures in the sources carry the same name — Ya'akov the brother of Yeshua and a later rabbinic figure whose patronymic is "bar Ya'akov"; Yochanan ben Zavdai and a later Rabbi Yochanan; and so on — the entry names who is meant in brackets at the first mention on the page, and the glossary entry for that name spells out which figure it refers to in this tool and which it does not. This applies to newly written entries going forward; older entries are updated to match as they're revisited, not all at once.

What this tool is not trying to do

It is not trying to referee the modern Jewish/Christian/Messianic debate, score points against any tradition, or substitute for reading the text yourself. It is trying to put the same historical and textual evidence a first-century talmid had access to back in front of a modern reader, clearly sourced, so the reader can weigh it directly against the text of Scripture.