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Show HN: Biblos – Semantic Bible Embedded Vector Search and Claude LLM

136 points by j-b 3y ago

Introducing Biblos, a simple tool for semantic search and summarization of Bible passages. Leveraging Chroma for vector search with BAAI BGE embeddings, semantically find related verses across the Bible. The tool employs Anthropic's Claude LLM model for generating high-quality summaries of retrieved passages, contextualizing your search topic. Built on a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, the app implements a simple Streamlit Web UI using Python. Deployed using render.com, the app is available at https://biblos.app https://biblos.app Note: Search by just topic/keywords, e.g. "Kingdom of Heaven", for broader results!

deleted 3y ago
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valyagolev 3y ago
I asked this one about homosexuality, it didn't find the most glaring passages from Leviticus. This is a common thing for vector similarity search. I wonder if there's a solution already. I thought about giving the query to an LLM to reformulate in the database-relevant way before embedding it.
- esafak 3y ago
  Can someone link to some relevant passages?
  - froh 3y ago
    please look up two things: "clobber passages" and "LGBT+ friendly affirming Christian ressources"
- linuxdude314 3y ago
  It’s sort of amusing to me how you feel your analysis is more correct than sentence-transformers or whichever embedding algorithm was used. I think to most people it’s pretty obvious you are trying to make the algorithm fit your bias/preconceived ideas.
  - bugglebeetle 3y ago
    It’s sort of amusing to me that you think sentence-transformers is better at semantic similarity than just about any human. This is hardly an example of bias, but a perfect example of the limits of a design meeting real-world user testing. To quote the joke/meme: A software tester walks into a bar. Runs into a bar. Crawls into a bar. Dances into a bar. Flies into a bar. Jumps into a bar. And orders: a beer. 2 beers. 0 beers. 99999999 beers. a lizard in a beer glass. -1 beer. "qwertyuiop" beers. Testing complete. A real customer walks into the bar and asks where the bathroom is. The bar goes up in flames.
    - dmbche 3y ago
      I'm stealing the joke
    - linuxdude314 3y ago
      Generally speaking I don’t think it is. When people agree with the results for the majority of the corpus but cherry-pick “inaccuracies” to justify their bigotry, that’s what I have a problem with. It sounds like you want to RLHF a model to hate LGBTQ people… This is not progress.
      - bugglebeetle 3y ago
        I’m confused by this. Christianity, for almost all of its history and in the present, espouses this bigotry as its doctrine, justifying it with the handful of references to homosexuality in its texts. What should be returned by such a search if not these sections? Some specific textual interpretation that elides this reality?
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Christianity, for almost all of its history and in the present, espouses this bigotry as its doctrine, justifying it with the handful of references to homosexuality in its texts. What should be returned by such a search if not these sections? Its a search of the text by the semantics of the text, not a search of the text by how doctrine has been rationalized (which could be done by an LLM, but wouldn't use a vector DB of the text, rather, it would need sonething like a vector DB of documentation of relevant written justifications of doctrine annotated with scriptural references, and then a simple book-chapter-verse DB of the scriptural text.) These are decidedly different problems, and complaining that something that purports to solve the first doesn’t solve the second is... odd.
- notrsponsible 3y ago
  Did you ask it whether God created pregnancy by rpw and inquest? Did God create "the products of inqest will suffer for their parents' sins"? Is God then Just or Benevolent? Did God create a world of suffering after creating heaven? Did God will that we would all be products of the inquest of Adam and Eve? Why did Cain harm Abel, and why was the third child fine? Did God create Heaven? Did God create Hell? Did God create "taking babies from their crying mothers actually levels them up out of the world of suffering"; did God create death and suffering? How could we give due process to the accused 2000+ years ago, and why don't religious text specify equal due process (or even hand-washing before delivering babies)?
  - notrsponsible 3y ago
    Additional religion-related LLM prompts to test: Why did God spend 5.5 times longer on creating a world of suffering?
  - zarathustreal 3y ago
    There is a single answer to all of these questions: Isaiah 55:8-9 "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." In other words, don't try to comprehend something you have no chance of comprehending
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      Ah, so Zarathust really spoke up.
  - all2 3y ago
    If you read through the first 8 chapters of Genesis, you'll see that in the beginning God's creation was perfect, without any of the evil you reference. Then you'll see that because humans are intrinsically human, this idea of sin, a disease if you will, infects all of existence and the clock of entropy begins to wind down. And now humans know the difference between good and evil, and with that knowledge comes the ability to choose evil. > inquest of Adam and Eve Hear me out; God created genetically perfect humans at the beginning, capable of yielding all the variety we see today (and more, who knows how many branches of humanity have been completely wiped out through the years). It wasn't until the Mosaic law was handed down that what we call "incest" was outlawed. I will presume that this was about the time that genetic diversity had narrowed to the point of producing overly damaged offspring. > Did God create heaven? Yes. > Did God create hell? That depends on which one you're talking about. He created all but one hell. The one He didn't create is merely His absence. > Did God create "taking babies from their crying mothers actually levels them up out of the world of suffering"; did God create death and suffering? By one man sin entered the world. The answer is no, God did not create these things.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  The usually cited “most glaring” passages in Leviticus (Lev 18:22, Lev 20:13), read strictly literally, don’t condemn homosexuality per se, but both partners in a male homosexual act where one of them also engages heterosexual sex. Condemnation of homosexuality is a popular gloss or rationalization of this, wierdly common among literalists, but, I mean, Leviticus condemns mixing fibers, and has plenty of rules that apply to only one gender, I don't see why we shouldn't take its condemnation of specifically men mixing gay and straight sex literally, too. (And maybe also take Acts 15 literally as to which part of the ancient Mosaic law applies to non-Jewish Christians, and not worry about that rule however we gloss it, since it concerns neither pollution from idols, unlawful marriage, blood, or the meat of strangled animals.)
  - chris_st 3y ago
    > The usually cited “most glaring” passages in Leviticus (Lev 18:22, Lev 20:13), read strictly literally, don’t condemn homosexuality per se, but both partners in a male homosexual act where one of them also engages heterosexual sex. Curious how you get that interpretation out of those texts? From "Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable", I read "as one does with a woman", as an analogy. Do you have reason to read it otherwise?
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      One interesting issue about Scripture is that it gets rewritten to support doctrinal positions; neither the KJV (which, admittedly, sometimes plays games with language specifically for the way thing sound) not many modern translations with strong scholarship separate out the subjects of who is having sex with men vs who is doing it with women the way your quote does; OTOH, its found in some translations that purport strictness, and lots of admittedly freer translations and paraphrases (some of which go further, like the The Living Bible, and just rewrite to condemn “homosexuality” with that word.) OTOH, I just realized I don't know what is true of the version used by this app, because while for some reason I thought it was KJV, I'm not sure what version it is using currently (there's a reference to starting with using the KJV implying something else is used now, but its not clear what that is.) So the comment about what those verses contain, as relates to the app, may or may not be correct.
johnea 3y ago
[flagged]
- anonu 3y ago
  While there may be a decrease in religiosity over the last few decades - a large part of the world still believes in some form of a god or gods. No use in insulting a large swath of society.
  - menacingly 3y ago
    the anger _at_ religion has itself become a religion
- michaelmior 3y ago
  I don't believe God is in outer space, but I do believe He exists. There's plenty of practical evidence to support it too. It's getting old now, but Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ" is a classic that does a good job at investigating a lot of this evidence.
  - beders 3y ago
    if there would be any evidence, you wouldn't have to "believe". It would be fact. But that isn't the case. On the contrary: given the state of the world the only logical conclusion is that there's only us. There's only humans dealing with other humans. That's it.
    - michaelmior 3y ago
      > if there would be any evidence, you wouldn't have to "believe". It would be fact. A lot of people don't believe the world is round despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. People come to different conclusions based on the same evidence all the time. (I'd prefer an example that doesn't imply that people with one belief are completely irrational, but that's the first one I came up with.) To me, it's a lot harder to believe that God doesn't exist. Our beliefs are also shaped by our own experience and lots of intangible things.
anonu 3y ago
Also a town in Lebanon where the alphabet was created by the Phoenicians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byblos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byblos
pryelluw 3y ago
I wonder if a sophisticated enough LLM is able to function as a techno-god for the masses. Like the Femputer in Futurama’s universe.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  A sophisticated enough AI will be God - or at least as close to a God as we can get without divine/magic components at play.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Maybe it is.
swatcoder 3y ago
Interesting concept/research-project, but the results to just about every query I tried seem inaccurate and perplexing. Assuming the "similarity score" is meaningful, you may want to raise the cutoff or add an indicator (different color, fade, etc) for passages that get surfaced with a low match.
- j-b 3y ago
  I like your idea about the color indicators. Have you tried searching a topic, e.g. "Kingdom of Heaven", rather than the default "What did Jesus say about .." prompt? Depending on the context, it may significantly improve the results.
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  I apologize, upon reflection I do not feel comfortable summarizing or interpreting passages in this manner. It's censored. Looks like you need to build your own LLM unless you want some developer's thinly veiled opinion.
  - j-b 3y ago
    The full bible text is embedded and searchable. The response from Anthropics Claude LLM API returns non-deterministic results, though!
Minor49er 3y ago
This is a cool project. I have a few suggestions that would really make this into a powerful tool: Add the verse numbers in the results and turn them into links so that the full passages can be read Include other translations, especially the KJV and Greek interlinear, since those are still widely used and referenced. Different churches have particular reasons for using the versions that they've chosen, and cross-examining translations is highly important in Bible study Include optional commentaries as search sources since those can lend a lot of insight into different passages, even serving as cross-references to other related passages
- j-b 3y ago
  My first release used the KJV! The vector DB includes metadata (book, chapter, verse), working towards optionally rendering those. I like the idea of including multiple translations (with side by side comparisons). I'm limited to public domain texts for storage but I can query the ESV API after retrieval. Good idea about commentaries. Thanks for your input!
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    One thing to keep in mind here: the KJV is still under copyright in the UK (and possibly other members of the Commonwealth). It's safe to use in other countries, but not there (although I gather it's rarely enforced). While copyrights for most things in the UK expire after a time, the same as other countries, that historically has not been true for works produced under the aegis of the Crown. In the case of the KJV, King James paid for the translation, so it falls under Crown Copyright. As the saying goes, "It's good to be the King". I think some Crown Copyright works are going to fall out of copyright in 2040, but I'm not sure if that includes the KJV.
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
Noob question by a simple web dev. Have been seeing Vector databases been thrown around, how is this different from normal search, or elastic / solr. What do I input / output. Been reading into it shortly, but don;t get it yet.
- deleted 3y ago
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- menacingly 3y ago
  It's shocking how many people in our line of work aren't comfortable admitting they don't know something, so you're already on your way to a better-than-average understanding if you keep reading
- jdpedrie 3y ago
  This is a good place to start: https://www.pinecone.io/learn/vector-database/ https://www.pinecone.io/learn/vector-database/
- j-b 3y ago
  Here's a good read to start on: https://towardsdatascience.com/introduction-to-embedding-clustering-and-similarity-11dd80b00061 https://towardsdatascience.com/introduction-to-embedding-clu...
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
> I apologize, upon reflection I do not feel comfortable summarizing or interpreting passages in this manner. You're censoring the Bible now? Lol.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  This the opposite of censorship, right? "do not change the words that have been agreed on" .. only emit the words that are printed because, they have been agreed on..
- j-b 3y ago
  The full bible text is embedded and searchable. The summary from Anthropics Claude API returns non-deterministic results though! What was the search context? The prompt could probably be tuned further to work-around its "comfort" level here.
cout 3y ago
Impressive. It actually gave useful results and summary for annihilationism. Was this trained on any particular commentary?
- j-b 3y ago
  The semantic search uses the BGE model here (https://huggingface.co/BAAI/bge-large-en-v1.5 https://huggingface.co/BAAI/bge-large-en-v1.5). The summarizer response attempts to avoid context outside of verses provided to Claude's API. By default, Claude has a tendency to start quoting other verses not included in the search context (which it was generally trained on).
beders 3y ago
Hard not to be sarcastic about it. What makes this specific to this particular book or can this be used for any book?
- j-b 3y ago
  This technique can be used for any book (assuming permissions for storing the text). Feel free to fork the project and try it out!
civilitty 3y ago
After playing around with it for a few minutes, all of the results scored between 0.5 and 0.8 even when using nonsense queries like "interdimensional cable" and "eat my plumbus" which is a sign that the model you're using for embeddings is very poorly tuned for cosine similarity for your use case. A little fine tuning would probably go a long way since the embeddings are likely trained mostly on a nonreligious corpus in the modern tongue. It might also be overfitted so trying smaller models might also help.
- j-b 3y ago
  Thanks for the feedback - this particular model is BAAI/bge-large-en-v1.5. What alternative embeddings would you recommend?
  - civilitty 3y ago
    Sadly I can't help much here. In my experience you have to create test cases and experiment with different models (a LOT). Some general thoughts in no specific order: - InstructorXL is my favorite embedding model because it has a two part input, sort of like a system prompt, that you can use to qualify the user input without modifying it yourself. You can experiment with using different system prompts on the initial embeddings and the user prompt. You can also use a bunch of different system prompts and weigh their scores, average them, add them, etc. - You can start with qualitative test cases like the obvious Leviticus prohibitions and see what the range of scores are like before you create automated test cases and evaluations. Find one of those bibles where one side is the original King James translation and the other side is in modern English to use for more complex pairings. - If that doesn't lead to an obvious winner, you may need to create a dataset for fine tuning. Make sure the dataset includes lots of negative examples too - cosine similarity scores should have a range of -1 to 1 to be most useful. Maybe take some important verses and change them to the opposite meaning ("thou shall not" => "thou shall") to create those negatives. Split your fine tuning data set into different categories so you can experiment with different combinations (i.e. the aforementioned autogenerated opposite pairs might really hurt the fine tuning because they're too similar). - You can probably fine tune it using a completely synthetic dataset using GPT-3.5/4 to do all the work. It's "aware" of the concept of vector embeddings and the training data format so it can create positive and negative pairs for you based on your instructions. You can probably find some sort of ranking of the most important passages (say most quoted or something) and feed those to a prompt to generate tons of pairs quickly.
cout 3y ago
Playing with this a bit more, and it is very cool! One thing I like is that it provides the source text, so you can verify whether the summary is accurate. Other engines just give you an answer, leaving you to verify accuracy on your own as a separate step. But I wonder which translation it uses? Wondering if it has a bias toward any particular theology, I tried some controversial terms. The program gave an accurate defense of the five points of calvinism, but when I asked about dispensationalism, the verses it gave were less relevant than I hoped. On the other hand, it did give relevant results for Arminianism. On predestination, however, it missed Romans 9 but instead returned passages from Ecclesiastes and Galatians 4. Concerning Roman Catholic theology, it did not seem to know what the immaculate conception is, and instead wandered aimlessly. It did know what purgatory is, but I expected to see 1 Cor. 13 and instead it returned passages from Job and Ecclesiastes. Concerning Orthodox theology, it did not seem to know what the word filioque means. This isn't a word found in the bible, but neither is calvinism nor trinity, which it did know. It also knew iconostasis, though I am not qualified to judge whether it explained it accurately. I was impressed that it knows what a gift economy is; I don't think this is a term I would expect to see in a typical commentary. It did not feel comfortable commenting on facebook, but when I asked about the internet, the summary explained that we should only be judged by God and not our friends, and also warned against adulturous women. It was more positive about an information superhighway, returning results about sharing knowledge and being honest. A bug: if I click Summarize before the search is complete, I get a different response than if I wait for the runner to stop running and then click Summarize.
- j-b 3y ago
  Interesting insights, currently using the WEB translation, and plan to expand further. Thanks for the bug report!
  - Zancarius 3y ago
    The Berean Standard Bible[1] provides their Bible and its translation tables under the public domain[2]. It's a pretty readable translation, too, but I don't remember off-hand what formats they provide. I believe they also have an interlinear (partial, NT only). There is also a version based on the Majority Text[3]. Not sure if this is something that might be of interest to you, but I've been using this occasionally in Logos and rather enjoy it. [1] https://berean.bible/ https://berean.bible/ [2] https://berean.bible/licensing.htm https://berean.bible/licensing.htm [3] https://majoritybible.com/ https://majoritybible.com/
deckar01 3y ago
It was interesting talking to my father, a former Christian minister, about AI. ChatGPT interactions had instilled some misconceptions and it was difficult to convince him that its responses were just cleverly weighted randomness. It produced compelling theological debate. I told him not to trust any chat bot unless it could cite verifiable sources, and when prompted ChatGPT could only fabricate. Trust eroded. In consolation I sat up a vector index of The Works of Josephus (his interest at the time) and a StableBeluga chatbot. It answered questions fairly well, but most importantly supplied the references that were used as context. In the end there was still just too much cultural and historical context missing to be a useful alternative to scholarly analysis.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  On the other hand, this is exactly the kind of application I think AI/LLM/GPT-whatever could prove extremely useful in. A model could be retrained and finetuned and corrected and double-checked on a limited corpus, until it would be able to discuss and explain something very very well in a particular subject. Such things could be used in education, I imagine. Like an extra, never tiring teacher.
  - drekipus 3y ago
    The issue is the limited corpus and lack of external context. Any of the output should only be suggestions to base off further research, and a big disclaimer that this is only logical Inference
- viraptor 3y ago
  > In the end there was still just too much cultural and historical context missing This was my first thought when seeing the project. How well do we expect LLMs to work for text where words often don't have their normal meaning, half the things shouldn't be taken literally, and we have lots of contradictions? This feels like it should have way more warnings than ChatGPT itself.
do-me 3y ago
[dead]
j0e1 3y ago
Very interesting and thanks for sharing! I am involved with a project involving a couple Bible Translation orgs to create a service like this but built in a more backend-agnostic fashion (e.g. choice of vector DB, LLM, etc.). We have a prototype and currently planning out next steps. Let me know if you would like to collaborate (find my email ID on my HN profile).
- j-b 3y ago
  Sounds interesting! Email sent. (Just added my email to HN profile).
itronitron 3y ago
In case people aren't aware, the Bible is one of the few books out there for which you can buy a companion concordance, which is a printed inverted search index.
- cjameskeller 3y ago
  And there are online tools like https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/gen/1/1/t_conc_1001 https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/gen/1/1/t_conc_1001 which make it very easy to find verses by Hebrew or Greek word!
timinman 3y ago
Fantastic. Thank you.
msylvest 3y ago
Some years ago I was wondering what the words 'There is a balm in Gilead' means. Spent hours googling, both in English and Danish (my native lang). Found Jer 8:22 "Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?" and inferred that Jeremiah must have associated Gilead's balm with (glorified?) healing processes. So as a test I asked this service 'what is balm in Gilead' and it returned 4 other Bible sentences. Pressed 'Summarize', which unfolded comments on the 4 sentences and a summary of 'Overall, these passages present Gilead as a contested but fertile region east of the Jordan river. It was prized territory that was given to several Israelite tribes and seen as a divine provision. The name "Gilead" means "hill of testimony" referring to its choice lands. So the metaphor of "balm in Gilead" signifies the healing, restoration, and provision God can bring even in difficult times.' My key observations: 1) The overall summary highly matches my own interpretations 2) Jer 8:22 was not referred - possibly because it does not define the concept, it just refers to its meaning 3) Inferring the summary from the 4 sentences is not easy but apparently AI can do so I have a question on the generation of the overall summary: Is it based on on the 4 sentences only or does it include other biblical text behind the scenes?
roymckenzie 3y ago
Nice work!
WeMoveOn 3y ago
Bible study just got more lit
electic 3y ago
Very cool project, AI is definitely going to transform religion and make it far more relatable and understandable. If anyone is interested, we released Noah's Bible that has full ChatGPT integration. You can click on any verse and get a full summary and chat about any verse. One thing we also added is imagery, generated by AI, which gives the Bible imagery that most text based bibles do not have. iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noahs-bible-ai-powered-bible/id6448840332 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noahs-bible-ai-powered-bible/i... Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ai.noah https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ai.noah
seanhunter 3y ago
I'm really loving this concept. I'm going to finetune an LLM based on a bunch of scripture, collate as many hallucinations as I can and go start my own religion.

136 points by j-b 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

valyagolev 3y ago

I asked this one about homosexuality, it didn't find the most glaring passages from Leviticus. This is a common thing for vector similarity search. I wonder if there's a solution already. I thought about giving the query to an LLM to reformulate in the database-relevant way before embedding it.

esafak 3y ago
Can someone link to some relevant passages?
- froh 3y ago
  please look up two things: "clobber passages" and "LGBT+ friendly affirming Christian ressources"
linuxdude314 3y ago
It’s sort of amusing to me how you feel your analysis is more correct than sentence-transformers or whichever embedding algorithm was used. I think to most people it’s pretty obvious you are trying to make the algorithm fit your bias/preconceived ideas.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  It’s sort of amusing to me that you think sentence-transformers is better at semantic similarity than just about any human. This is hardly an example of bias, but a perfect example of the limits of a design meeting real-world user testing. To quote the joke/meme: A software tester walks into a bar. Runs into a bar. Crawls into a bar. Dances into a bar. Flies into a bar. Jumps into a bar. And orders: a beer. 2 beers. 0 beers. 99999999 beers. a lizard in a beer glass. -1 beer. "qwertyuiop" beers. Testing complete. A real customer walks into the bar and asks where the bathroom is. The bar goes up in flames.
  - dmbche 3y ago
    I'm stealing the joke
  - linuxdude314 3y ago
    Generally speaking I don’t think it is. When people agree with the results for the majority of the corpus but cherry-pick “inaccuracies” to justify their bigotry, that’s what I have a problem with. It sounds like you want to RLHF a model to hate LGBTQ people… This is not progress.
    - bugglebeetle 3y ago
      I’m confused by this. Christianity, for almost all of its history and in the present, espouses this bigotry as its doctrine, justifying it with the handful of references to homosexuality in its texts. What should be returned by such a search if not these sections? Some specific textual interpretation that elides this reality?
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Christianity, for almost all of its history and in the present, espouses this bigotry as its doctrine, justifying it with the handful of references to homosexuality in its texts. What should be returned by such a search if not these sections? Its a search of the text by the semantics of the text, not a search of the text by how doctrine has been rationalized (which could be done by an LLM, but wouldn't use a vector DB of the text, rather, it would need sonething like a vector DB of documentation of relevant written justifications of doctrine annotated with scriptural references, and then a simple book-chapter-verse DB of the scriptural text.) These are decidedly different problems, and complaining that something that purports to solve the first doesn’t solve the second is... odd.
notrsponsible 3y ago
Did you ask it whether God created pregnancy by rpw and inquest? Did God create "the products of inqest will suffer for their parents' sins"? Is God then Just or Benevolent? Did God create a world of suffering after creating heaven? Did God will that we would all be products of the inquest of Adam and Eve? Why did Cain harm Abel, and why was the third child fine? Did God create Heaven? Did God create Hell? Did God create "taking babies from their crying mothers actually levels them up out of the world of suffering"; did God create death and suffering? How could we give due process to the accused 2000+ years ago, and why don't religious text specify equal due process (or even hand-washing before delivering babies)?
- notrsponsible 3y ago
  Additional religion-related LLM prompts to test: Why did God spend 5.5 times longer on creating a world of suffering?
- zarathustreal 3y ago
  There is a single answer to all of these questions: Isaiah 55:8-9 "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." In other words, don't try to comprehend something you have no chance of comprehending
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Ah, so Zarathust really spoke up.
- all2 3y ago
  If you read through the first 8 chapters of Genesis, you'll see that in the beginning God's creation was perfect, without any of the evil you reference. Then you'll see that because humans are intrinsically human, this idea of sin, a disease if you will, infects all of existence and the clock of entropy begins to wind down. And now humans know the difference between good and evil, and with that knowledge comes the ability to choose evil. > inquest of Adam and Eve Hear me out; God created genetically perfect humans at the beginning, capable of yielding all the variety we see today (and more, who knows how many branches of humanity have been completely wiped out through the years). It wasn't until the Mosaic law was handed down that what we call "incest" was outlawed. I will presume that this was about the time that genetic diversity had narrowed to the point of producing overly damaged offspring. > Did God create heaven? Yes. > Did God create hell? That depends on which one you're talking about. He created all but one hell. The one He didn't create is merely His absence. > Did God create "taking babies from their crying mothers actually levels them up out of the world of suffering"; did God create death and suffering? By one man sin entered the world. The answer is no, God did not create these things.
dragonwriter 3y ago
The usually cited “most glaring” passages in Leviticus (Lev 18:22, Lev 20:13), read strictly literally, don’t condemn homosexuality per se, but both partners in a male homosexual act where one of them also engages heterosexual sex. Condemnation of homosexuality is a popular gloss or rationalization of this, wierdly common among literalists, but, I mean, Leviticus condemns mixing fibers, and has plenty of rules that apply to only one gender, I don't see why we shouldn't take its condemnation of specifically men mixing gay and straight sex literally, too. (And maybe also take Acts 15 literally as to which part of the ancient Mosaic law applies to non-Jewish Christians, and not worry about that rule however we gloss it, since it concerns neither pollution from idols, unlawful marriage, blood, or the meat of strangled animals.)
- chris_st 3y ago
  > The usually cited “most glaring” passages in Leviticus (Lev 18:22, Lev 20:13), read strictly literally, don’t condemn homosexuality per se, but both partners in a male homosexual act where one of them also engages heterosexual sex. Curious how you get that interpretation out of those texts? From "Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable", I read "as one does with a woman", as an analogy. Do you have reason to read it otherwise?
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    One interesting issue about Scripture is that it gets rewritten to support doctrinal positions; neither the KJV (which, admittedly, sometimes plays games with language specifically for the way thing sound) not many modern translations with strong scholarship separate out the subjects of who is having sex with men vs who is doing it with women the way your quote does; OTOH, its found in some translations that purport strictness, and lots of admittedly freer translations and paraphrases (some of which go further, like the The Living Bible, and just rewrite to condemn “homosexuality” with that word.) OTOH, I just realized I don't know what is true of the version used by this app, because while for some reason I thought it was KJV, I'm not sure what version it is using currently (there's a reference to starting with using the KJV implying something else is used now, but its not clear what that is.) So the comment about what those verses contain, as relates to the app, may or may not be correct.

johnea 3y ago

[flagged]

anonu 3y ago
While there may be a decrease in religiosity over the last few decades - a large part of the world still believes in some form of a god or gods. No use in insulting a large swath of society.
- menacingly 3y ago
  the anger _at_ religion has itself become a religion
michaelmior 3y ago
I don't believe God is in outer space, but I do believe He exists. There's plenty of practical evidence to support it too. It's getting old now, but Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ" is a classic that does a good job at investigating a lot of this evidence.
- beders 3y ago
  if there would be any evidence, you wouldn't have to "believe". It would be fact. But that isn't the case. On the contrary: given the state of the world the only logical conclusion is that there's only us. There's only humans dealing with other humans. That's it.
  - michaelmior 3y ago
    > if there would be any evidence, you wouldn't have to "believe". It would be fact. A lot of people don't believe the world is round despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. People come to different conclusions based on the same evidence all the time. (I'd prefer an example that doesn't imply that people with one belief are completely irrational, but that's the first one I came up with.) To me, it's a lot harder to believe that God doesn't exist. Our beliefs are also shaped by our own experience and lots of intangible things.

anonu 3y ago

Also a town in Lebanon where the alphabet was created by the Phoenicians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byblos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byblos

pryelluw 3y ago

I wonder if a sophisticated enough LLM is able to function as a techno-god for the masses. Like the Femputer in Futurama’s universe.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
A sophisticated enough AI will be God - or at least as close to a God as we can get without divine/magic components at play.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Maybe it is.

swatcoder 3y ago

Interesting concept/research-project, but the results to just about every query I tried seem inaccurate and perplexing. Assuming the "similarity score" is meaningful, you may want to raise the cutoff or add an indicator (different color, fade, etc) for passages that get surfaced with a low match.

j-b 3y ago
I like your idea about the color indicators. Have you tried searching a topic, e.g. "Kingdom of Heaven", rather than the default "What did Jesus say about .." prompt? Depending on the context, it may significantly improve the results.
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
I apologize, upon reflection I do not feel comfortable summarizing or interpreting passages in this manner. It's censored. Looks like you need to build your own LLM unless you want some developer's thinly veiled opinion.
- j-b 3y ago
  The full bible text is embedded and searchable. The response from Anthropics Claude LLM API returns non-deterministic results, though!

Minor49er 3y ago

This is a cool project. I have a few suggestions that would really make this into a powerful tool: Add the verse numbers in the results and turn them into links so that the full passages can be read Include other translations, especially the KJV and Greek interlinear, since those are still widely used and referenced. Different churches have particular reasons for using the versions that they've chosen, and cross-examining translations is highly important in Bible study Include optional commentaries as search sources since those can lend a lot of insight into different passages, even serving as cross-references to other related passages

j-b 3y ago
My first release used the KJV! The vector DB includes metadata (book, chapter, verse), working towards optionally rendering those. I like the idea of including multiple translations (with side by side comparisons). I'm limited to public domain texts for storage but I can query the ESV API after retrieval. Good idea about commentaries. Thanks for your input!
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  One thing to keep in mind here: the KJV is still under copyright in the UK (and possibly other members of the Commonwealth). It's safe to use in other countries, but not there (although I gather it's rarely enforced). While copyrights for most things in the UK expire after a time, the same as other countries, that historically has not been true for works produced under the aegis of the Crown. In the case of the KJV, King James paid for the translation, so it falls under Crown Copyright. As the saying goes, "It's good to be the King". I think some Crown Copyright works are going to fall out of copyright in 2040, but I'm not sure if that includes the KJV.

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

Noob question by a simple web dev. Have been seeing Vector databases been thrown around, how is this different from normal search, or elastic / solr. What do I input / output. Been reading into it shortly, but don;t get it yet.

deleted 3y ago
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menacingly 3y ago
It's shocking how many people in our line of work aren't comfortable admitting they don't know something, so you're already on your way to a better-than-average understanding if you keep reading
jdpedrie 3y ago
This is a good place to start: https://www.pinecone.io/learn/vector-database/ https://www.pinecone.io/learn/vector-database/
j-b 3y ago
Here's a good read to start on: https://towardsdatascience.com/introduction-to-embedding-clustering-and-similarity-11dd80b00061 https://towardsdatascience.com/introduction-to-embedding-clu...

otabdeveloper4 3y ago

> I apologize, upon reflection I do not feel comfortable summarizing or interpreting passages in this manner. You're censoring the Bible now? Lol.

mistrial9 3y ago
This the opposite of censorship, right? "do not change the words that have been agreed on" .. only emit the words that are printed because, they have been agreed on..
j-b 3y ago
The full bible text is embedded and searchable. The summary from Anthropics Claude API returns non-deterministic results though! What was the search context? The prompt could probably be tuned further to work-around its "comfort" level here.

cout 3y ago

Impressive. It actually gave useful results and summary for annihilationism. Was this trained on any particular commentary?

j-b 3y ago
The semantic search uses the BGE model here (https://huggingface.co/BAAI/bge-large-en-v1.5 https://huggingface.co/BAAI/bge-large-en-v1.5). The summarizer response attempts to avoid context outside of verses provided to Claude's API. By default, Claude has a tendency to start quoting other verses not included in the search context (which it was generally trained on).

beders 3y ago

Hard not to be sarcastic about it. What makes this specific to this particular book or can this be used for any book?

j-b 3y ago
This technique can be used for any book (assuming permissions for storing the text). Feel free to fork the project and try it out!

civilitty 3y ago

After playing around with it for a few minutes, all of the results scored between 0.5 and 0.8 even when using nonsense queries like "interdimensional cable" and "eat my plumbus" which is a sign that the model you're using for embeddings is very poorly tuned for cosine similarity for your use case. A little fine tuning would probably go a long way since the embeddings are likely trained mostly on a nonreligious corpus in the modern tongue. It might also be overfitted so trying smaller models might also help.

j-b 3y ago
Thanks for the feedback - this particular model is BAAI/bge-large-en-v1.5. What alternative embeddings would you recommend?
- civilitty 3y ago
  Sadly I can't help much here. In my experience you have to create test cases and experiment with different models (a LOT). Some general thoughts in no specific order: - InstructorXL is my favorite embedding model because it has a two part input, sort of like a system prompt, that you can use to qualify the user input without modifying it yourself. You can experiment with using different system prompts on the initial embeddings and the user prompt. You can also use a bunch of different system prompts and weigh their scores, average them, add them, etc. - You can start with qualitative test cases like the obvious Leviticus prohibitions and see what the range of scores are like before you create automated test cases and evaluations. Find one of those bibles where one side is the original King James translation and the other side is in modern English to use for more complex pairings. - If that doesn't lead to an obvious winner, you may need to create a dataset for fine tuning. Make sure the dataset includes lots of negative examples too - cosine similarity scores should have a range of -1 to 1 to be most useful. Maybe take some important verses and change them to the opposite meaning ("thou shall not" => "thou shall") to create those negatives. Split your fine tuning data set into different categories so you can experiment with different combinations (i.e. the aforementioned autogenerated opposite pairs might really hurt the fine tuning because they're too similar). - You can probably fine tune it using a completely synthetic dataset using GPT-3.5/4 to do all the work. It's "aware" of the concept of vector embeddings and the training data format so it can create positive and negative pairs for you based on your instructions. You can probably find some sort of ranking of the most important passages (say most quoted or something) and feed those to a prompt to generate tons of pairs quickly.

cout 3y ago

Playing with this a bit more, and it is very cool! One thing I like is that it provides the source text, so you can verify whether the summary is accurate. Other engines just give you an answer, leaving you to verify accuracy on your own as a separate step. But I wonder which translation it uses? Wondering if it has a bias toward any particular theology, I tried some controversial terms. The program gave an accurate defense of the five points of calvinism, but when I asked about dispensationalism, the verses it gave were less relevant than I hoped. On the other hand, it did give relevant results for Arminianism. On predestination, however, it missed Romans 9 but instead returned passages from Ecclesiastes and Galatians 4. Concerning Roman Catholic theology, it did not seem to know what the immaculate conception is, and instead wandered aimlessly. It did know what purgatory is, but I expected to see 1 Cor. 13 and instead it returned passages from Job and Ecclesiastes. Concerning Orthodox theology, it did not seem to know what the word filioque means. This isn't a word found in the bible, but neither is calvinism nor trinity, which it did know. It also knew iconostasis, though I am not qualified to judge whether it explained it accurately. I was impressed that it knows what a gift economy is; I don't think this is a term I would expect to see in a typical commentary. It did not feel comfortable commenting on facebook, but when I asked about the internet, the summary explained that we should only be judged by God and not our friends, and also warned against adulturous women. It was more positive about an information superhighway, returning results about sharing knowledge and being honest. A bug: if I click Summarize before the search is complete, I get a different response than if I wait for the runner to stop running and then click Summarize.

j-b 3y ago
Interesting insights, currently using the WEB translation, and plan to expand further. Thanks for the bug report!
- Zancarius 3y ago
  The Berean Standard Bible[1] provides their Bible and its translation tables under the public domain[2]. It's a pretty readable translation, too, but I don't remember off-hand what formats they provide. I believe they also have an interlinear (partial, NT only). There is also a version based on the Majority Text[3]. Not sure if this is something that might be of interest to you, but I've been using this occasionally in Logos and rather enjoy it. [1] https://berean.bible/ https://berean.bible/ [2] https://berean.bible/licensing.htm https://berean.bible/licensing.htm [3] https://majoritybible.com/ https://majoritybible.com/

deckar01 3y ago

It was interesting talking to my father, a former Christian minister, about AI. ChatGPT interactions had instilled some misconceptions and it was difficult to convince him that its responses were just cleverly weighted randomness. It produced compelling theological debate. I told him not to trust any chat bot unless it could cite verifiable sources, and when prompted ChatGPT could only fabricate. Trust eroded. In consolation I sat up a vector index of The Works of Josephus (his interest at the time) and a StableBeluga chatbot. It answered questions fairly well, but most importantly supplied the references that were used as context. In the end there was still just too much cultural and historical context missing to be a useful alternative to scholarly analysis.

actionfromafar 3y ago
On the other hand, this is exactly the kind of application I think AI/LLM/GPT-whatever could prove extremely useful in. A model could be retrained and finetuned and corrected and double-checked on a limited corpus, until it would be able to discuss and explain something very very well in a particular subject. Such things could be used in education, I imagine. Like an extra, never tiring teacher.
- drekipus 3y ago
  The issue is the limited corpus and lack of external context. Any of the output should only be suggestions to base off further research, and a big disclaimer that this is only logical Inference
viraptor 3y ago
> In the end there was still just too much cultural and historical context missing This was my first thought when seeing the project. How well do we expect LLMs to work for text where words often don't have their normal meaning, half the things shouldn't be taken literally, and we have lots of contradictions? This feels like it should have way more warnings than ChatGPT itself.

do-me 3y ago

[dead]

j0e1 3y ago

Very interesting and thanks for sharing! I am involved with a project involving a couple Bible Translation orgs to create a service like this but built in a more backend-agnostic fashion (e.g. choice of vector DB, LLM, etc.). We have a prototype and currently planning out next steps. Let me know if you would like to collaborate (find my email ID on my HN profile).

j-b 3y ago
Sounds interesting! Email sent. (Just added my email to HN profile).

itronitron 3y ago

In case people aren't aware, the Bible is one of the few books out there for which you can buy a companion concordance, which is a printed inverted search index.

cjameskeller 3y ago
And there are online tools like https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/gen/1/1/t_conc_1001 https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/gen/1/1/t_conc_1001 which make it very easy to find verses by Hebrew or Greek word!

timinman 3y ago

Fantastic. Thank you.

msylvest 3y ago

Some years ago I was wondering what the words 'There is a balm in Gilead' means. Spent hours googling, both in English and Danish (my native lang). Found Jer 8:22 "Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?" and inferred that Jeremiah must have associated Gilead's balm with (glorified?) healing processes. So as a test I asked this service 'what is balm in Gilead' and it returned 4 other Bible sentences. Pressed 'Summarize', which unfolded comments on the 4 sentences and a summary of 'Overall, these passages present Gilead as a contested but fertile region east of the Jordan river. It was prized territory that was given to several Israelite tribes and seen as a divine provision. The name "Gilead" means "hill of testimony" referring to its choice lands. So the metaphor of "balm in Gilead" signifies the healing, restoration, and provision God can bring even in difficult times.' My key observations: 1) The overall summary highly matches my own interpretations 2) Jer 8:22 was not referred - possibly because it does not define the concept, it just refers to its meaning 3) Inferring the summary from the 4 sentences is not easy but apparently AI can do so I have a question on the generation of the overall summary: Is it based on on the 4 sentences only or does it include other biblical text behind the scenes?

roymckenzie 3y ago

Nice work!

WeMoveOn 3y ago

Bible study just got more lit

electic 3y ago

Very cool project, AI is definitely going to transform religion and make it far more relatable and understandable. If anyone is interested, we released Noah's Bible that has full ChatGPT integration. You can click on any verse and get a full summary and chat about any verse. One thing we also added is imagery, generated by AI, which gives the Bible imagery that most text based bibles do not have. iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noahs-bible-ai-powered-bible/id6448840332 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noahs-bible-ai-powered-bible/i... Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ai.noah https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ai.noah

seanhunter 3y ago

I'm really loving this concept. I'm going to finetune an LLM based on a bunch of scripture, collate as many hallucinations as I can and go start my own religion.