A group of Israeli scholars have designed a computer algorithm to decode the Bible.
The Bar-Ilan University team have already used the program to examine what style parts of the Pentateuch, were written in.
The program picks up different styles of writing in minutes - work that can take scholars painstaking hours of effort.
The algorithm compares sets of synonyms (called synsets) in blocks of text, along with "function" words (such as prepositions). It then assesses the distribution of the most common words in the Bible, and links different blocks together according to the style they are written in.
To test their algorithm, the scholars cut up Jeremiah and Ezekiel and then mixed them together. The algorithm managed to separate the two books with 99% accuracy.
The hope is that the algorithm method will great speed up scholarly research and increase understanding.
University of Pennsylvania professor of linguistics Dr Mark Liberman, was not involved in the research but was impressed with the methods and results.
"The key to making such methods work is to hit on features (words or constructions or word-senses or whatever) that genuinely differentiate the authors," he said. "In their experiment on un-munging Jeremiah and Ezekiel, they found that word distributions did not work well; but synonym choice (as estimated in a clever way) did work."