Bible's authors decoded by computer

[rug]

Monday, 17 October 2011

Jesse Emspak
Discovery News

A group of Israeli researchers has built a computer algorithm to decode one of the most important books in Western culture: the Bible.

The Bar-Ilan University team used the program to examine what style parts of the Christian Old Testament, or Pentateuch, were written in.

That doesn't tell you how many authors wrote it, but since the two differing styles the team found, priestly and non-priestly, accord generally with the consensus of scholars, it shows that those differences aren't a coincidence.

The algorithm compares sets of synonyms (called synsets) in blocks of text, along with "function" words (such as prepositions). It then looks at the distribution of the most common words in the Bible. By finding sets that are similar in any two blocks it can group them according to the style they are written in.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/10/17/3341326.htm

[NYC_SKP]

1. I wonder if the same approach can be used to identify authors...

The unibomber comes to mind, and the way his brother said he could identify him by his manifesto.

K/R

[rug]

3. That would make sense,

[laconicsax]

2. Recommended.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. It's long been know that the first five books are compilations

of several sources. That's why there are two creation stories and two Noah's ark stories.

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. Not to mention two different 10 commandments.

Linguists - not computers - determined decades ago that the 5 "Books of Moses" had at least four different authors. Go on into the histories and the prophetc books and Psalms, and you come up with a good dozen authors.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

6. They were using computer textual analysis in the early 1970s.

This is when I was taking religion courses at a Presbyterian University.

all I remember is that First Isaiah and Second Isaiah were written by different people.

The translation they told us to read was The New English Bible, now called the Revised English Bible. The prof told us it was the first direct translation from the original languages, without going through Latin and Greek.

So that was the one we read for class assignments. This was a course in O.T.