How we write

Ask the Books is a comparative-religion answer engine. Every answer on this site is generated by a large language model (Claude) constrained to cite primary sources we have ingested into a structured corpus. The model is forbidden from making claims it cannot cite. Where it cannot cite, it refuses.

Sources we use

Christianity: KJV and World English Bible (public domain). Islam: Quran in Arabic and the Sahih International / Pickthall English translations (public domain), plus Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. Judaism: JPS Tanakh (1917), Talmud Bavli, and the Mishnah, via Sefaria's open license. The full source list is at /sources.

How a page is generated

1. The question is embedded with a 1024-dimension vector (Bedrock Titan v2).
2. The 12 most-relevant passages are retrieved from the corpus, restricted to the religion(s) being answered.
3. A second model (Haiku 4.5) re-ranks down to the top 6.
4. Claude Sonnet 4.6 generates an answer with inline [[cite:N]] citations.
5. A validator rejects answers that have unresolved citations, banned phrases, or fewer than 3 citations.
6. For sensitive topics, a named scholar reviews the answer before publish.

Tradition-aware

We never merge traditions into a single voice. A Catholic answer reads like Catholic scholarship; a Sunni answer reads like Sunni scholarship. When traditions diverge, we name the divergence rather than smooth it over.

How readers can correct us

Every tradition section has a vote bar — does our answer match what your tradition actually teaches? Comments that suggest a correction with a source citation route to our reviewer queue with the highest priority. We will rewrite the answer if a reader's citation is better than ours.

What this site is not

We are not a fatwa service, not a bishop's office, not a beit din. We report what the traditions say. We do not rule on personal cases. Treat us as a research tool, not as a replacement for your own clergy.