What Darash Is

This is a getting-started guide: the one place that takes you — or your AI — from nothing to using Darash well. It is a starting point, not an exhaustive reference, and it grows as Darash does — new features are added here as they ship.

Most Bible software hands you what other people have said about the text — study notes, a commentary, a scholar's summary. Darash hands you the text itself, and the data beneath it, so you can see for yourself.

The name is a Hebrew word, dāraš H1875 דָּרַשׁ — to seek, to inquire, to study, to search out. It is what the Bereans did, and why Luke calls them noble:

Acts 17:11, KJVThese were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.

They did not simply accept what they were told — they searched to see whether it was so. Darash is built for that posture: not "take my word for it," but "see whether these things are so."

A research engine, not a reading app

Darash is an engine. Under one roof it holds:

• the Bible in 56 translations, side by side
• Strong's numbers for every Hebrew and Greek word, with full lexical data
• 446,544 cross-references linking verse to verse
• 13 dictionaries, alongside the Hebrew and Greek lexicons
• word-by-word morphology — the grammar the original languages carry but English smooths away
• gematria and word-frequency tools
• a keyless ELS discovery engine for the Hebrew Torah (in the heavyweight Engine edition — see chapter 3)

Everything is verifiable

The point of Darash is not to impress you with answers — it is to let you check. Every verse it quotes, every Strong's number, every cross-reference traces back to a source you can inspect. When Darash tells you what a Hebrew word means, it shows you the word, its Strong's index, and where else it stands in the text. Nothing rests on its own say-so.

That is the whole idea: a tool for people who would rather search the Scriptures than be handed a conclusion.

What You Can Do With It

Each part of Darash answers a different question you might bring to the text.

Read it in many translations at once

No single translation is "the" Bible — each one is a set of choices. Darash carries 56 translations, so you can lay them side by side and see where they agree and where a translator had to decide. When two versions differ, that difference is usually the interesting part: it marks a word the original leaves open. King James from 1611 is only one of those. As well as the Strongs index.

Reach the original word

Every Hebrew and Greek word in the text carries a Strong's number, and Darash gives you the full lexical entry behind it — the lemma, how it is pronounced, its range of meaning, and the grammar it is carrying. You do not need to read Hebrew or Greek to use it: Darash transliterates the word, glosses it, and links it to every other place it appears.

Follow a thread through the whole Bible

Darash holds 446,544 cross-references. Pick a verse and it will show you the others Scripture itself ties to it — the quotations, the echoes, the fulfilments. A theme you notice in Genesis can be followed, link by link, to its answer in the Gospels. Is it perfect, no. It will work the best when you use an AI which has a solid context window and is able to think and reason-alike through the red threads. Such as the SOTA LLM models of today.

Go deeper with the lexicons

Thirteen dictionaries and lexicons stand behind the text — for a word, a name, a place, a topic. Where a single gloss is not enough, these give you the scholarship of the old.

See the grammar English hides

English flattens distinctions the original languages mark plainly — tense, voice, mood, who is acting on whom. Darash's morphology restores them word by word, so you can see, for instance, that a verb is passive where a translation made it active, or that a "you" is plural where English cannot say so.

Weigh and count

Darash also measures the text: word-frequency (how often, and where, a word is used), related words, and gematria (the numeric value Hebrew and Greek letters carry). These are tools for noticing emphasis and pattern.

Let the text speak first: keyless ELS

Finally, Darash carries a keyless ELS (equidistant letter sequence) discovery engine for the Hebrew Torah, yet this is usually a feature only if you can run the engine itself. Most "Bible code" tools make you supply a word and then go looking for it — which all but guarantees a find. Darash works the other way round: it scans a passage and reports the sequences that are actually there, before you have named anything. It is a research instrument, not a parlour trick — and Darash is careful to tell you what a result does and does not mean. Although this feature can be challenging to even the most solid LLMs so the person using this needs to push it in order to have it pull out the answers so to speak, unless it also will glee over the gold which is there hidden behind the text without it understanding it. Often placement of Bible Codes (ELS) is just as important if not more and not just the statistics behind it - which often can be of no use. Even so, this is built into Darash and isnt a small feature as such but uses quite a lot of processing resources and memory.

This last one is reserved for the Darash Engine edition. It is both heavyweight — a thorough scan loads gigabytes of letter-index data — and separately licensed, so the everyday hosted key does not include it. The next chapter explains the editions.

The Three Editions

Darash comes in three editions. They share the same engine; they differ in how you run it, what it costs, and whether the heavy ELS discovery is included. (For current prices, see the store at darash.publifye.pro — they are set there, not in this book.)

Darash Access — the hosted key

Darash Access is the everyday edition: a personal API key to the Darash engine, already hosted and running — nothing to install. You point your own AI assistant at the MCP endpoint darash-api.publifye.pro/mcp (or use the darash command line — for instance, darash verse kjv "John 1:1" fetches a verse). It gives you the full research surface: the 56 translations, Strong's Hebrew and Greek, the 446,544 cross-references, the 13 dictionaries, morphology, search, word studies, and gematria. (It also includes authoring access to Junifye, Darash's publishing companion.) For almost everyone, this is Darash.

The one thing Access does not include is the keyless ELS discovery — for that, see the Engine below.

Darash Engine — run the whole thing yourself

The keyless ELS discovery belongs to the Darash Engine — for two reasons. It is heavyweight: a full ELS scan loads many gigabytes of letter-index data and wants real CPU and memory. And it is licensed separately: the everyday Access key does not carry ELS at all. The Engine is a license to run the complete engine on your own infrastructure (self-hosted or fully managed), built to scale to tens of thousands of concurrent users, with the Junifye publishing server bundled in — and it is the one edition where ELS is switched on. If your work is the Torah-code research Darash is known for, this is the edition you need. It is priced per deployment, by quote.

Darash Agent — a ready-made assistant

The Darash Agent is the no-setup option: a ready-made AI assistant that lives as a private bot on Telegram, locked to you. You simply message it — ask about a verse, a word, a cross-reference — and it does the research, and can even draft documents and books for you through Junifye. There is nothing to connect or configure; after you subscribe, a short guided chat sets up your bot. It is Darash for someone who wants the answers without touching the tools. Its the pricier of the two, Darash Access vs Agent, as its more extensive to set up and uses multiple times more resources - and we have limited seats available as of now. Price and availability may change in the future though.

The website

You will also see darash.publifye.pro — the home of Darash on the web. It has example lookups, hosts the ELS poster gallery for churches and study groups, and is where you subscribe to any of the three editions (there is also a free tier with a daily allowance). Think of it as the front door, not the workshop: the real research happens through your AI, the CLI, or the Agent.

The next chapter walks through a few examples in plain language. The final two chapters are the technical reference your assistant uses to connect to Darash and drive it.

Worked Examples

A few short walk-throughs, in plain language, to show the kind of thing Darash makes easy.

A word study: more than "peace"

Open almost any English Bible and šālôm H7965 שָׁלוֹם is simply "peace." Ask Darash for the word itself and a fuller picture appears: šālôm means completeness, soundness, welfare, wholeness — it is built from a root meaning to be whole, to make complete (H7999). So when Scripture pronounces shalom over someone, it is not only the absence of conflict; it is everything being made whole. Darash shows you the word, its range, and the more than two hundred places it stands — and a verse you thought you knew opens up.

Following a cross-reference

Read a verse and ask Darash what Scripture ties to it. From a single line it will surface the other passages — the quotation it draws on, the prophecy it answers, the later echo. You follow the thread the text itself laid down, rather than one a teacher chose for you. A study that used to need a shelf of reference books becomes a short conversation.

Seeing the grammar

Ask Darash for the morphology of a verse and it returns each word's grammar — part of speech, tense, voice, mood, person. Again and again this resolves a question English alone cannot settle: a verb is passive (something is being done to the subject) where the translation made it active, or a command is plural where English "you" is silent. The meaning was always there in the original; Darash simply makes it visible.

A keyless ELS scan (Engine edition)

On the Darash Engine, point Darash at a Torah passage and ask it to scan — without naming a target. It reports the equidistant letter sequences that are present, with their skip distance and position. This is the honest form of the method: because you did not tell it what to look for, a result is not something you went fishing for. Darash is deliberately sober about what this means — it reports what is measurable and leaves the weighing to you. Yet, you yourself also need be pushing the LLM in order for it to recognize the visual ELS and not just the statistical ones, as placement is as important if not more important compared to statistics, which an LLM will have a tendency to compare against - and so this is a weakness in any LLM. This is important to be aware of.

Connecting Darash to Your AI

This chapter and the next are written for the AI assistant — though a technical reader will follow them easily.

What MCP is

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard for giving an AI access to external tools. A service exposes a set of tools; an MCP-capable assistant can list them and call them during a conversation. Darash is such a service.

The endpoint

Darash's engine speaks MCP at darash-api.publifye.pro/mcp — a JSON-RPC 2.0 endpoint. There are two ways to authenticate:

• Sign in with your browser (preferred). On the first call your MCP client opens a Publifye login; you approve access once, and the session refreshes itself afterwards — there is no key to copy or store.
• API key. Send your key as the `X-API-Key` header on the same endpoint.

You get access by subscribing to Darash Access (or the Agent or Engine) at darash.publifye.pro; a free tier with a daily allowance lets you try it first. All access is metered with daily quotas — generous for everyday study and shown in your account — so heavy automated use should plan around limits.

Adding it to your assistant

Most MCP clients take a small piece of configuration naming the server and its URL — typically a single command that adds the endpoint above as an HTTP MCP server. Once Darash is registered, the assistant calls `tools/list` to discover every tool, and `tools/call` to run one. From then on it can research Scripture mid-conversation — no further setup. (Connected to a hosted key you get the full research surface; the ELS tools appear only when the assistant is pointed at a Darash Engine.)

The shape of a call

Every tool follows the same JSON-RPC form:

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"get_verse","arguments":{"bible":"kjv","ref":"John 1:1"}}}

and returns a JSON result carrying the source data. The next chapter lists the tools worth knowing, grouped by what they do.

The Tool Reference

The engine's tools, grouped by purpose. Names and arguments are stable; an assistant can always call `tools/list` for the authoritative, current set.

Reading the text

• get_verse — one verse or a small range in a chosen translation. `{"bible":"kjv","ref":"John 3:16"}`
• get_chapter — a whole chapter at once.
• list_bibles / get_bible — list, or fetch a passage from, the 56 translations.
• compare_verses — the same reference across several translations together.

The original languages

• get_strongs — the full lexical entry for a Strong's number. `{"number":"H7965"}`
• search_strongs / reverse_strongs — find a Strong's number from a word or gloss.
• get_morphology — word-by-word grammar of a verse.
• strongs_in_verse — every Strong's-tagged word in a verse.

Lexicons and word study

• lookup_dictionary / multi_dict_lookup — look a term up in one or many of the 13 dictionaries.
• word_study / verse_study — an assembled study around a word or a verse.
• get_synonyms / get_related_strongs — neighbouring words in the same semantic field.
• word_frequency — where and how often a word occurs.

Cross-references and search

• get_cross_refs — the references Scripture ties to a verse.
• search — keyword search across the text.
• semantic_search — meaning-based search: find passages by idea, not only wording.

Gematria

• search_gematria — words and verses sharing a numeric value.
• get_strongs — also returns each word's gematria value.

ELS — keyless discovery (Darash Engine only)

These tools belong to the Darash Engine — a separately-licensed capability the everyday Access key does not carry, so they appear in `tools/list` only when the assistant is connected to an Engine:

• els_discover — scan a passage and report the sequences actually present, no target supplied.
• els_search — search for a specific term's equidistant sequences.
• els_grid / els_grid_image — render the letter grid for a find.
• els_pvalue — a permutation-based measure of how surprising a result is.
• plus a deep suite (blind-probe, proximity, thematic and mirror scans, and more) — dozens of tools in all.

So the surface an assistant sees has two sizes: roughly the four dozen research tools above on a hosted key, and a much larger set once an Engine adds the ELS suite. Either way, each tool returns structured JSON with its source data, so whatever the assistant reports, you can trace it back to the verse, the lemma, or the grid it came from. That is the whole point of Darash: not answers to be trusted, but sources to be checked.