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The Scripture Analysis Method

SAM answers scripture-based questions from primary sources only — the Hebrew Masoretic text, two Greek New Testament traditions, the Septuagint, and a plain English baseline — never from commentary, tradition, or an AI model's memory. Every quotation you see has been mechanically verified, word for word, against the source corpus before it reaches you.

The sources

• Hebrew Old Testament — Masoretic text, Westminster Leningrad Codex, with every word tagged to its dictionary entry.
• Greek New Testament, two traditions — the Byzantine Majority Text (Robinson-Pierpont) and Tischendorf's 8th Edition — so textual variants can be checked against each other.
• The Septuagint (Brenton's English translation) — the Greek Old Testament the New Testament writers often quote.
• World English Bible — the readable modern-English baseline.
• Strong's Greek and Hebrew lexicons — consulted whenever a question turns on what a word means; SAM never asserts a Greek or Hebrew word's meaning from memory.
• 1 Enoch (R. H. Charles, 1912) — consulted only because the New Testament quotes it; it carries no authority of its own.

The canon boundary

SAM operates on the 66-book Protestant canon, selected by convergent criteria: apostolic proximity, doctrinal consistency with the verified historical core, cross-community verification, and citation by canonical authors. 1 Enoch is consulted (not canonized) because Jude quotes it as prophecy. The Apocrypha is excluded because no New Testament author cites it as Scripture.

Phase 1 — Read the text honestly

1. Classify the question. Factual (what happened?), doctrinal (what is taught as binding?), practical (what is required?), predictive (what will happen?), or disputed (where do honest readers disagree?). Each type is answered differently — mixing them up is the most common source of bad interpretation.
2. Read the whole chapter, never a bare verse. Who is speaking, to whom, what occasioned it, what comes before and after. Every passage SAM cites was read inside its full chapter — enforced by the engine, not left to chance.
3. Identify the text type. Direct divine speech, law, narrative, poetry and wisdom (which use metaphor and hyperbole), prophecy (conditional or unconditional), or apocalyptic vision (heavy symbolism).
4. Check the command's own stated purpose. If a law says why it was given, that matters. But the purpose must be stated by the text itself — a purpose supplied by scholars or reconstruction is never enough to set a command aside.
5. Let scripture interpret scripture. Every other place the same word, concept, or theme appears is checked before anything external is brought in. For word questions, the original Hebrew or Greek is examined word-by-word with the lexicon.
6. Weigh authorial distance. A later text directly quoting an earlier one carries more weight than a later text applying it by analogy.

Phase 2 — Establish authority

When texts conflict, or a command's standing is questioned: whose word is each text, and does it have standing to change what was established earlier?

• Tier 1 — God's direct word. Explicit divine speech. Highest authority; cannot be overridden except by an explicit, stated revocation.
• Tier 2 — Jesus' own words and actions, read in full chapter context. Full divine authority; may clarify or fulfill Tier 1 — but clarifying and revoking are different moves needing different evidence.
• Tier 3 — The eleven apostles: eyewitnesses Jesus commissioned in person.
• Tier 4 — Everyone else: Paul, the narrators, and all other NT writers. Valuable testimony that can clarify and apply — but cannot revoke what Tier 1 established.

The core principle: silence is not revocation. A higher-tier command stands unless a text explicitly states it is revoked — never inferred from silence, omission, or absence of restatement. Two supporting rules: symbolic or poetic language never overrides a plain direct-speech command at the same or higher tier; and within the same tier, a later explicit statement on the same subject modifies an earlier one (Genesis 9:3 modifies Genesis 1:29 — later silence modifies nothing). Whenever a lower-tier text is used against a higher-tier command, SAM names that move out loud instead of letting it happen quietly.

Phase 3 — Deliver the answer

• Settled — the text speaks clearly; context confirms it; no honest reading of the full passage differs. Stated without hedging.
• Probable — the evidence favors one reading but a legitimate alternative exists. The alternative is presented, and the judgment is flagged as a judgment.
• Genuinely open — the text does not resolve it. The strongest version of each position is presented, and the specific scriptural gap is named — an open verdict is never a shrug.

A fourth outcome, couldn't ground an answer, means SAM found no source passages that address the question — it says so rather than guessing. SAM never fabricates a verdict.

When texts disagree

When the Hebrew and the Septuagint diverge on an Old Testament passage, both readings are shown — weighted toward whichever the New Testament quotes, if it does. When the two Greek New Testament traditions differ on a verse, the variant is flagged. Genuinely disputed questions get the strongest scriptural case for each side, then the tier system decides which — if either — the text favors.

What SAM never does

• Quotes a verse without having read its whole chapter.
• Lets a lower-tier text quietly override a higher-tier command without naming the move.
• Manufactures harmony between genuinely conflicting texts by softening one of them.
• Answers from memory when a source text can be checked directly — or invents when it can't.
• Treats silence, omission, or absence of restatement as revocation.
• Picks one source when sources conflict without telling you.
• Presents a denomination's tradition as the text's own position.
• Claims certainty the text does not supply.
• Treats what a story records as automatically being what is commanded.
• Collapses categories the text itself keeps distinct.

Follow-up questions

Ask follow-ups in the same session — “why that tier?”, “what about verse 12?” — and SAM continues from the same evidence it already examined.

Reproducibility

Every answer is stamped with the model version, corpus version, and framework version that produced it. Same question, same pins, same answer. If any of the three ever changes, a fixed test set of questions is re-run and reviewed before the change ships.

Sources & credits

Westminster Leningrad Codex + morphology (OpenScriptures, CC-BY 4.0) · Strong's Greek and Hebrew dictionaries (OpenScriptures; Hebrew CC-BY-SA) · Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Majority Text · Tischendorf 8th Edition (MorphGNT) · Brenton's Septuagint (ebible.org) · World English Bible (ebible.org) · 1 Enoch, R. H. Charles 1912 (sacred-texts.com) · Versification mappings: Copenhagen Alliance (CC-BY-SA 4.0).

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