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Software deciphers Bible authorship

An Israeli software program is helping to distiguish the possible different authorships found in the Bible.
Software deciphers Bible authorship
Published: June 30, 2011 10:49 AM GMT
Updated: June 30, 2011 10:49 AM GMT

An Israeli software program is helping to distiguish the possible different authorships found in 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, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. The program is part of a sub-field of artificial intelligence studies known as authorship attribution, and the Bible provided a tempting test case for the algorithm's creators. Academic researchers have believed the Bible 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 percent, recreating years of work by multiple scholars in minutes, said Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, the computer science professor who headed the research team. FULL STORY An Israeli algorithm sheds light on the Bible (Sydney Morning Herald/AP) PHOTO Moshe Koppel (Matanya /Wikipedia/CC 3.0)

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