BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Identifying Biblical Authors with Statistical Analysis

Scholars use data to untangle Bible’s origins

The Hebrew Bible is the product of centuries of oral and written transmission, combining numerous sources and multiple redactions. Although this has been a long-recognized feature of the biblical text, scholars still fiercely debate the precise details, including what parts of the text originated from the same authors or scribal schools. Publishing in the journal PLOS One, a team of computer scientists and biblical scholars has proposed a new method to untangle the web of authorial pieces that make up the Hebrew Bible.

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Analyzing the Biblical Text

Biblical scholars generally agree that individual books of the Hebrew Bible, as well as many chapters and verses, were the product of multiple authors and redactors. Yet, despite hundreds of years of biblical text criticism, scholars continue to argue about seemingly every facet of this theory, most notably, who wrote what. In hopes of providing a new tool to answer this question, an international team of computer scientists and biblical scholars developed a statistical analysis model for the biblical text. The model is designed to analyze language patterns across large sections of texts and identify patterns that can be used to differentiate one set of texts from another. Such a model was used over an artificial intelligence (AI) model because it allowed the team to track and analyze the model’s reasoning in making conclusions and predictions.

In applying this model to the Hebrew Bible, the team took 50 chapters from the first nine books that are widely accepted to belong to one of three different scribal collections: Deuteronomy, the Deuteronomistic History, and the Priestly material. The model then analyzed the chapters and identified patterns that set each collection apart from the others. The specific patterns investigated were individual Hebrew words and phrases, with the model identifying which words and phrases each collection used and at what frequency.

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The results of the model showed that the Priestly material was by far the most linguistically distinctive, while Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History collection overlapped on several linguistic features, such as their propensity for the word melek (“king”). This matched earlier proposals by many biblical scholars. However, in a few cases, the model suggested that a chapter, attributed to one collection, was a better fit in another. This most often happened with chapters identified as belonging to Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History collection. Although this may suggest that the authorial history of those chapters should be reconsidered, it could also be a result of the limited data size resulting from the study’s parameters.

Once the model had identified noticeable patterns in the three collections, the team applied it to an assortment of other chapters and verses in the Hebrew Bible, whose attribution to a particular scribal tradition has been more debated. Among the most notable results, the model suggested that the Book of Esther does not belong to any of the three scribal collections. Similarly, while the later part of the so-called ark narrative (2 Samuel 6) belonged to the Deuteronomistic History, the earlier part (1 Samuel 1–6) did not. According to the team, this can be interpreted as evidence that the earlier part of the narrative predates the Deuteronomistic History.

Although the team suggests that further work is needed to perfect their method, they hope that the research “paves the way for scholars to address additional questions in biblical studies in statistical methods, thus improving our understanding of the formation of the Hebrew Bible.”

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