About This Project

The Moby-Dick Bible is an experiment in reverent absurdity — a way of treating Herman Melville’s epic like a sacred text, full of strange truths and slippery meanings.

A few years ago, I read Moby-Dick for the first time. It hit me harder than any classic ever had. Inside the novel was… everything.

As someone who doesn’t believe in anything supernatural or divine, I’ve always been searching for a book that could serve as a kind of “guide.” Nathaniel Philbrick — a fellow Moby-Dick nerd who’s much smarter than I am, and author of Why Read Moby-Dick — once said:

“For me Moby-Dick is really the American Bible. Embedded within it is the DNA of America’s culture.”

I took that literally. I broke it up into verses and started treating it like a sacred text.

The Pequod is a microcosm of the world itself, and now feels like the perfect time to look for meaning in its pages. Obsession, the search for meaning in an uncaring universe, a maniacal captain with a cult-like following that dooms the ship… it's wild that this was published in 1851. (Then again, once you read it, it becomes clear — because a lot of it is really old-timey.)

How it Works

First, I split the entire novel into bite-sized “verses." That was a huge task. I wanted each verse to stand on its own, feel meaningful, and flow from one to the next — not too long, not too short. I used SpaCy, a Python library for natural language processing, to segment the text, and then manually fine-tuned each one.

Each verse is tagged with themes, vibes, and literary motifs. But the real magic happens in the semantic search. You can type anything — a question, a feeling, a phrase — and the site will generate a Moby-Dick-style verse from scratch using OpenAI’s GPT. That new verse is then compared to the real ones using FAISS, a vector similarity engine, which finds the most semantically similar passages.

• Your input is used to generate a new verse in Melville’s style using an AI model.
• That verse is embedded and compared to all verses in Moby-Dick.
• The closest matches are returned — semantically, not literally.

Each verse in the Bible is embedded with 1538 dimensions for this comparison. The result is part scripture, part hallucination, and part literary concordance.

This thing is far from perfect. But I hope it gives you something — a bit of guidance, reflection, or even just a weirdly specific quote for your moment.

Moby-Dick or Moby Dick?

Moby-Dick (with the hyphen) is the book.
Moby Dick (no hyphen) is the whale. Usually.