While multiple writers provided
source material, it is plausible that the translation of source material was
conducted by two writers. This was
likely a response to the emergence of a uniform script and the need to assemble
centuries of collected material. We
naturally under estimate the real antiquity of much of this material. When the bible appeared in final form the
Bronze Age was already over. Yet it drew
on two thousand years of tradition at least.
I particularly suspect that the
Noah Story is vastly older yet and describes the establishment of a human
colony in Mesopotamia around or about seven to
ten thousand years ago. Longetivity
allowed those colonies to remain intact for as much as two to three thousand
years, thus overlapping with the early Bronze Age.
We can see a possible line of
custody for these ‘sacred’ texts down through the present with only one
significant translation effort that gathered it all together. Our difficulty is that the sources are hardly
available.
This work clarifies much of who
did what to the text.
Tech tools tackle Biblical scholarship
Updated 6/30/2011 8:00 AM |
Software developed by Israeli scholars details what researchers believe
to be multiple writers behind the Bible, using an algorithm to examine texts
drawn from ancient manuscripts such as this parchment believed to be part of
the most authoritative manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, the Aleppo Codex.
Software developed by Israeli scholars details what researchers believe
to be multiple writers behind the Bible, using an algorithm to examine texts
drawn from ancient manuscripts such as this parchment believed to be part of
the most authoritative manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, the Aleppo Codex.
The new software analyzes style and word choices to distinguish parts
of a single text written by different authors, and when applied to the Bible
its algorithm teased out distinct writerly voices in the holy book.
The program, part of a sub-field of artificial intelligence studies
known as authorship attribution, has a range of potential applications — from
helping law enforcement to developing new computer programs for writers. But
the Bible provided a tempting test case for the algorithm's creators.
For millions of Jews and Christians, it's a tenet of their faith that
God is the author of the core text of the Hebrew Bible— the Torah, also
known as the Pentateuch or theFive Books of Moses.
But since the advent of modern biblical scholarship, academic researchers have
believed the text was written by a number of different authors whose work could
be identified by seemingly different ideological agendas and linguistic styles
and the different names they used for God.
Today, scholars generally split the text into two main strands. One is
believed to have been written by a figure or group known as the
"priestly" author, because of apparent connections to the temple
priests in Jerusalem
When the new software was run on the Pentateuch, it found the same
division, separating the "priestly" and "non-priestly." It
matched up with the traditional academic division at a rate of 90% —
effectively recreating years of work by multiple scholars in minutes, said
Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, the computer science
professor who headed the research team.
"We have thus been able to largely recapitulate several centuries
of painstaking manual labor with our automated method," the Israeli team
announced in a paper presented last week in Portland, Oregon, at the annual
conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics. The team includes
a computer science doctoral student, Navot Akiva, and a father-son duo: Nachum
Dershowitz, a Tel Aviv University computer
scientist, and his son, Idan Dershowitz, a Bible scholar at Hebrew University
in Jerusalem
The places in which the program disagreed with accepted scholarship
might prove interesting leads for scholars. The first chapter of Genesis, for
example, is usually thought to have been written by the "priestly"
author, but the software indicated it was not.
Similarly, the book of Isaiah is largely thought to have been written
by two distinct authors, with the second author taking over after Chapter 39.
The software's results agreed that the book might have two authors, but
suggested the second author's section actually began six chapters earlier, in
Chapter 33.
The differences "have the potential to generate fruitful
discussion among scholars," said Michael Segal of Hebrew University
Over the past decade, computer programs have increasingly been
assisting Bible scholars in searching and comparing texts, but the novelty of
the new software seems to be in its ability to take criteria developed by
scholars and apply them through a technological tool more powerful in many
respects than the human mind, Segal said.
Before applying the software to the Pentateuch and other books of the
Bible, the researchers first needed a more objective test to prove the
algorithm could correctly distinguish one author from another.
So they randomly jumbled the Hebrew Bible's books of Ezekiel and
Jeremiah into one text and ran the software. It sorted the mixed-up text into
its component parts "almost perfectly," the researchers announced.
The program recognizes repeated word selections, like uses of the
Hebrew equivalents of "if," "and" and "but," and
notices synonyms: In some places, for example, the Bible gives the word for
"staff" as "makel," while in others it uses
"mateh" for the same object. The program then separates the text into
strands it believes to be the work of different people.
Other researchers have looked at linguistic fingerprints in less sacred
texts as a way of identifying unknown writers. In the 1990s, the Vassar English
professor Donald Foster famously identified the journalist Joe Klein as the anonymous
author of the book "Primary Colors" by looking at minor details like
punctuation.
In 2003, Koppel was part of a research team that developed software
that could successfully tell, four times out of five, if the author of a text
was male or female. Women, the researchers found, are far more likely to use
personal pronouns like "she" and "he," while men prefer
determiners like "that" and "this" — women, in other words,
talk about people, while men prefer to talk about things. That success sparked
debate about how gender shapes the way we think and communicate.
Research of this kind has potential applications for law enforcement,
allowing authorities to catch imposters or to match anonymous texts with
possible authors by identifying linguistic tics. Because the analysis can also
help identify gender and age, it might also allow advertisers to better target
customers.
The new software might be used to investigate Shakespeare's plays and
settle lingering questions of authorship or co-authorship, mused Graeme Hirst,
a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Toronto.
Or it could be applied to modern texts: "It would be interesting to see if
in more cases we can tease apart who wrote what," Hirst said.
The algorithm might also lead to the creation of a style checker for
documents prepared by multiple authors or committees, helping iron out awkward
style variations and creating a uniform text, Hirst suggested.
What the algorithm won't answer, say the researchers who created it, is
the question of whether the Bible is human or divine. Three of the four
scholars, including Koppel, are religious Jews who subscribe in some form to
the belief that the Torah was dictated to Moses in its entirety by a single
author: God.
For academic scholars, the existence of different stylistic threads in
the Bible indicates human authorship.
But the research team says in their paper they aren't addressing
"how or why such distinct threads exist."
"Those for whom it is a matter of faith that the Pentateuch is not
a composition of multiple writers can view the distinction investigated here as
that of multiple styles," they said.
In other words, there's no reason why God could not write a book in
different voices.
"No amount of research is going to resolve that issue," said
Koppel.
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