Artificial intelligence has revealed hidden linguistic patterns and the likely authorship of the Bible
Kyiv • UNN
AI analyzed the linguistic patterns of the Bible and identified three distinct writing traditions in the first nine books. He also established the likely authorship of other sections of Scripture.
Artificial intelligence capabilities have been used to study one of humanity's most revered texts - the Bible. And he revealed the hidden linguistic patterns of biblical texts and named their probable authorship. This is written by UNN with reference to Rys.
Details
An international team of scientists, including Shira Feigenbaum-Golovin, a researcher at the Department of Mathematics at Duke University (USA), combined artificial intelligence algorithms, statistical modeling and linguistic analysis to answer one of the oldest questions in biblical studies: who was the author of the biblical texts?
The results of the study are published in the scientific journal PLOS One.
By analyzing subtle differences in the use of words in the texts, the researchers were able to identify three separate scribal traditions that cover the first nine books of the Hebrew Bible, known as the "Eneateuch."
Using the same AI model, scientists were able to establish the likely authorship of other sections of the Holy Scripture. Moreover, artificial intelligence also explained how it came to its conclusions.
Back in 2010, Shira Feigenbaum-Golovin began collaborating with Israel Finkelstein, head of the School of Archeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa. They used mathematical and statistical methods to study inscriptions on ceramic fragments from the 6th century BC, analyzing the style and form of the letters. Their discoveries impressed the scientific community and made the front page of The New York Times.
We realized that these inscriptions can provide valuable clues for dating the texts of the Old Testament. That's when we started forming a team capable of analyzing biblical texts more deeply.
The interdisciplinary team included archaeologists, biblical scholars, physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists. They studied linguistic features in three main parts of the Bible: the book of Deuteronomy, the so-called "Deuteronomistic history" (from the book of Joshua to Kings), and the priestly texts of the Pentateuch.
The results confirmed that Deuteronomy and historical books have greater linguistic similarity to each other than to priestly texts - and this corresponds to the views held by most modern biblical scholars.
Artificial intelligence, as it turned out, is able not only to analyze the language, but also to shed light on millennial riddles.
We found that each group of authors has a different style - surprisingly, even for simple and common words like "no", "which" or "king". Our method accurately identifies these differences
Since the text of the Bible has been edited and re-edited many times, the team faced great difficulties in finding segments that would preserve their original wording and language.
After these biblical texts were found, they were often very short - sometimes only a few verses - which made most standard statistical methods and traditional machine learning unsuitable for their analysis. They had to develop their own approach that could handle such limited data.
The research team found that although the two chapters of the Ark narrative in the Books of Samuel deal with the same topic and are sometimes considered parts of the same narrative, the text in 1 Samuel does not match any of the three parts. Whereas the chapter in 2 Samuel shows affinity with Deuteronomic history (from Joshua to Kings).
Let us remind you
Scientists from the Austrian Academy of Sciences have discovered a new chapter of the Bible, which was hidden inside a 1750-year-old translation of the Gospel of Matthew. Scientists discovered a hidden text using ultraviolet photography while studying manuscripts in the Vatican Library.
