New software developed by team from Israel is generating new understanding on the various authors and editors of the Bible.
Scholars and theologians have long known that the Bible was written by a number of different authors, and that some texts have been rewritten to fit into a larger editing process or particular theological emphasis.
Now software that uses an algorithm to examine texts from the Bible is being used to analyse style and word choices to distinguish parts of a single text written by different authors, and when applied to the Bible it is able to find different author’s voices in the larger work.
The program forms part of a sub-field of artificial intelligence studies known as authorship attribution, and is providing interesting food for thought. One of its more interesting findings is that the traditional scholarly division of the Bible between different authors is about 90% correct — effectively recreating years of work by multiple scholars in minutes.
"We have thus been able to largely recapitulate several centuries of painstaking manual labor with our automated method," said Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, the computer science professor who headed the research team.
One interesting point of difference is that scholars have always known that Isaiah was written by two different authors, with the second taking over from Chapter 39. However, the software results show that the second author actually takes over a little earlier, from Chapter 33.
The differences "have the potential to generate fruitful discussion among scholars," confirmed Michael Segal of Hebrew University's Bible Department, who was not involved in the project.