Every dossier on this site ends with one of five words. The scale exists because the alternative — a paragraph of qualified prose — lets a reader take away whichever half they arrived wanting.
A verdict here is a claim about the documentary situation, not about whether something is true in some larger sense. It answers one question: when the biblical text is set beside the surviving external record, what can be said about the fit? That question has five possible answers, and a dossier that will not commit to one of them is not finished.
1 — Documented
An independent record, produced outside the biblical tradition, names the same event and agrees on the substance. The clearest cases are the ones where a foreign administration had its own reasons to write the episode down: a Babylonian chronicle tablet dating a siege, an Assyrian annal naming a king who also appears in Kings.
What documented does not mean: that every detail matches, that the numbers agree, or that the theological framing of the biblical account is thereby confirmed. It means the event is attested. The two accounts of it can still differ sharply, and usually do.
2 — Probable
The external record supports the account without settling it. A person of the right name and rank appears in the right period; a destruction layer sits at the right site in roughly the right decade; a practice the text describes is documented in neighbouring archives. The inference is reasonable and a serious specialist would make it, but a second reading of the same evidence remains open.
This is the largest category in the field and it should be the largest here. Most of ancient history is probable rather than documented, and a site whose verdicts cluster at grade 1 is not reading the evidence, it is grading its own team.
3 — Disputed
Competent specialists, reading the same evidence, reach incompatible conclusions — and the disagreement is about the evidence, not about religious commitment. The dating of a text, the identification of a site, the reading of a damaged line: these produce real disputes that no amount of good faith resolves.
A dossier at grade 3 has an obligation the others do not: it must set out both readings at their strongest, and say which specialists hold which position. “Scholars disagree” without naming the disagreement is not a verdict, it is an evasion wearing one.
4 — Unconfirmed
Nothing outside the biblical tradition speaks to the event either way. No inscription, no chronicle, no excavated layer, no foreign archive. The record is silent.
This grade exists to stop a silence being rounded off in either direction. The overwhelming majority of everything that happened in the ancient world left no recoverable trace, so silence is the expected condition, not a finding. A page that lands here is reporting the state of the archive, and that is a fact worth publishing rather than an absence worth hiding.
5 — Contradicted
The external record, or the biblical text itself, states something incompatible with the claim under examination. The most instructive version is internal: a later passage conceding that an earlier oracle did not turn out as stated.
Pages at grade 5 are the ones this site exists to be able to publish. A project that can only produce grades 1 and 2 is an apologetics operation with a bibliography, and its grade 1s are worth nothing, because the scale was never in a position to return anything else.
What the verdict is attached to
A verdict is always attached to a stated claim, never to a book, a prophet, or a tradition. “Ezekiel” does not receive a grade; the oracle at Ezekiel 26 against Tyre does, and it is graded against what Ezekiel 29 goes on to say. Keeping the unit that small is what makes the scale usable, and it is also what keeps a single hard case from being read as a verdict on anything larger than itself.
Every verdict on this site carries a rationale in the author’s own words explaining why this grade and not the one beside it, and every one is revisable. When a verdict changes, the change is dated and recorded on the corrections page, with the old grade still legible. A verdict that could never move would not be a reading of evidence.