Machine learning is also being used for text mining – where a target text is compared with many other similar texts to find parallel uses of the same words or ideas – to explore variations between different texts. Others are modelling texts to explore historical themes across the Hebrew Bible. The Qumran caves, where the scrolls were found. I have seen increasing numbers of papers at conferences on the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament exploring various aspects of the process of transferring texts into digital artefacts (such as the Codex Sinaiticus project), the issues relating to how different projects can make use of each other’s data, and the success – or otherwise – of machine-learning processes.īiblical scholars, including a group of researchers in Switzerland, are using machine learning and stylometry – the study of linguistic style – to determine which new letters were authored by Paul the Apostle, for example. ![]() 21st-century Bible studyĬomputers are an increasingly important part of 21st-century text analysis. ![]() Still, the difference seems pretty clear, and a change of scribe is the most likely conclusion. The authors note that a change of pen, the sharpening of a nib, a change in writing conditions or in the health of the scribe could contribute to the difference they found. Dhali, University of GroningenĪ different scribe is not the only possible explanation, however. This result adds to the general assumption and some previous research suggesting there were perhaps teams of scribes who worked together on the Dead Sea Scrolls, with some working as apprentices to the more senior members.Įvery use of same character was analysed for small differences. A second sheet is stitched onto the first, and at this stage, the authors suggest, the scribe also changed. At the end the 27th column of text out of 54, the researchers found a break in the manuscript – both a gap of three lines and a change in material. ![]() To some extent, the new paper overturns the argument that the original text was the work of one scribe. This kind of algorithmic technology, shown in the image below, has started to be used in biblical studies, and the wider digital humanities, in just the last few years. Then, the algorithm studied every character, looking for small changes that might signal a different writer. The authors trained an algorithm to separate the ink from its background, the leather or the papyrus of the scroll. The 2,000-year-old scroll preserves the 66 chapters of the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Isaiah and predates other Hebrew manuscripts of Isaiah by over 1,000 years. The scroll in question, 1QIsaa, is a large manuscript and one of seven found near the Dead Sea at Qumran, the Palestinian territories, in 1947.
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