Did God Author the Bible?
Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2011 2:02 am
Computer says no...
And on the seventh day, the Lord kicked back and got someone else to write the Bible
SOFTWARE developed by an Israeli team is giving intriguing new hints about what researchers believe to be the multiple hands that wrote the Bible.
The new software analyses 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 the Five 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. The rest is "non-priestly".
Scholars have meticulously gone over the text to ascertain which parts belong to which strand.
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 per cent - effectively recreating years of work by multiple scholars in minutes, said Moshe Koppel, the computer science professor who headed the research team at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv.
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 Prof 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," Prof Koppel said.
The team includes computer science doctoral student Navot Akiva and 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 program recognises 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.
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," Prof Hirst said.
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