A study using artificial intelligence has provided fresh insight into the authorship of some of the Bible’s oldest books, offering new perspectives for Christians on how Scripture was written.
However, it made no advance on confirming the authors of every book.
Researchers examined 50 chapters of the first nine books of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Enneateuch, revealing distinct writing styles that point to multiple authors or scribal groups.
The international research project was led by mathematician Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin of Duke University with her team made up of archaeologists, Biblical scholars, physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists.
STUDY COMBINED ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE, STATISTICAL MODELLING AND LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS
The team combined artificial intelligence, statistical modeling and linguistic analysis to address one of the most enduring questions about the Bible: The identification of its authors, without reaching any conclusions.
The AI model identified three clear writing styles: the Priestly Source, the Deuteronomistic History, and the Book of Deuteronomy itself.
This suggests that more than one person or group may have contributed to their writing.
EACH GROUP OF AUTHORS HAS A DISTINCT STYLE
“The model compared the chapters and proposed a quantitative formula for allocating each chapter to one of the three writing styles,” said Ms. Faigenbaum-Golovin.
“We concluded that the findings in those inscriptions could offer valuable clues for dating texts from the Old Testament”
Professor Thomas Römer, a Biblical scholar from the Collège de France in Paris highlighted the precision of the model:
“We found that each group of authors has a different style, surprisingly, even regarding simple and common words such as ‘no,’ ‘which,’ or ‘king.’
“Our method accurately identifies these differences.”
UNIQUE COLLABORATION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES
Ms. Faigenbaum-Golovin said: “It’s such a unique collaboration between science and the humanities.”
The team applied their model to chapters of the Bible whose authorship was more hotly debated.
By comparing these chapters to each of the three writing styles, the model was able to determine which group of authors was more likely to have written them.
“One of the main advantages of the method is its ability to explain the results of the analysis — that is, to specify the words or phrases that led to the allocation of a given chapter to a particular writing style,” observed team member and computer scientist Alon Kipnis of Israel’s Reichman University.
UNIQUE CHALLENGES FACING RESEARCHERS
Since the text in the Bible has been edited and re-edited many times, the team faced big challenges finding segments that retained their original wording and language.
Once found, these biblical texts were often very short — sometimes just a few verses — which made most standard statistical methods and traditional machine learning unsuitable for their analysis.
They had to develop a customised approach that could handle such limited data which often brings fears of inaccuracy.
“We spent a lot of time convincing ourselves that the results were getting weren’t just garbage,” said Ms. Faigenbaum-Golovin.
“We had to be absolutely sure of the statistical significance.”
A MYSTERY STYLE IN THE BOOK OF 1 SAMUEL
The team discovered that although the two sections of the Ark of the Covenant narrative in the Books of Samuel address the same theme and are sometimes regarded as parts of a single narrative, they’re written by different people.
The text in 1 Samuel does not align with any of the three identified styles, whereas the chapter in 2 Samuel shows affinity with the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua to Kings).
So another author or groups of authors wrote the first part.
LOOKING AHEAD FOR RESEARCH TEAM
Looking forward, Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin believes the same technique can be used for other historical documents.
“If you’re looking at document fragments to find out if they were written by Abraham Lincoln, for example, this method can help determine if they are real or just a forgery.”
“The study introduces a new paradigm for analysing ancient texts,” asserted another team member Israel Finkelstein, head of the School of Archaeology at Israel’s University of Haifa,
The team is now looking at using the same methodology to unearth new discoveries about other ancient texts, like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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