One space for three scriptures

I embedded all 472 verses with BAAI/bge-m3, a multilingual model small enough to run on my own machine, which puts the King James English and the Qur'an translations in one space of 1024 dimensions, and then I had UMAP squash that space down to the two on this plate. UMAP keeps local neighbourhoods and distorts nearly everything else, so two dots sitting together really were close in the full space, the gap between two distant clusters means almost nothing and the axes mean nothing at all.

The ruling underneath is a regular grid of 24 threads by 18, and I let the data pull it out of true: every intersection is dragged toward the verses that bunch near it, so the grid puckers where the verses are dense and hangs slack where they thin out. On the other plates the ruled lines stay straight and only the hand-drawn marks wobble, and this is the one place I let the grid itself bend, because the bending shows where the verses cluster.

Each dot is one verse, tied by a chalk thread to the two verses the model puts nearest it. Rest the pointer on a dot, or tap it, and a card shows the verse, its mode and its five nearest neighbours, each with its cosine similarity: 1 would be identical wording, and a verse's nearest neighbour typically sits around 0.71. The straight yellow lines that appear under your pointer run from that verse to its neighbours, and they are the only straight lines on the plate.

The same stories twice

The pairs I trust most are the ones that cross from one scripture to the other, because nothing on the surface of the text forces them together. Of all 471 other verses, the one the model sets closest to Exodus 17:6, where Moses is told to smite the rock in Horeb and water comes out of it, is Qur'an 2:60, where Moses is told to smite the rock with his staff and twelve springs gush from it, so the same story turns up in two canons at a cosine of 0.68.

Isaiah 49:10 and Qur'an 15:48 are each other's nearest neighbour, one promising the returning exiles that neither heat nor sun shall smite them and the other promising the people in paradise that no fatigue shall smite them there. The killing of the firstborn gathers into a single knot on the cloth, where Exodus 12:29 tells it at midnight and Psalm 78:51 recites it centuries later at a cosine of 0.70, with Psalm 105:36 and Psalm 135:8 pressed in beside them.

Nobody told the model these are the same story, so it puts them together from the words alone, and I can't fully separate how much of that comes from the embedding and how much from the translators. Each Qur'an verse here is embedded in the English of one translator who smote in it, Arberry's for 37 of the 58 and Pickthall's for 10, Qur'an 2:60 among them, and both wrote in the archaic English of the King James Version (Pickthall's Moses smites the rock with thy staffand the springs gush out therefrom), so some of the nearness is inherited style. A cosine only measures how alike two sentences look to this one model.

Carried forward · 472 verses · 148 incidents