Algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judah’s military correspondence sheds light on composition of biblical texts

Abstract

The relationship between the expansion of literacy in Judah and composition of biblical texts has attracted scholarly attention for over a century. Information on this issue can be deduced from Hebrew inscriptions from the final phase of the first Temple period. We report our investigation of 16 inscriptions from the Judahite desert fortress of Arad, dated ca. 600 BCE-the eve of Nebuchadnezzar's destruction of Jerusalem. The inquiry is based on new methods for image processing and document analysis, as well as machine learning algorithms. These techniques enable identification of the minimal number of authors in a given group of inscriptions. Our algorithmic analysis, complemented by the textual information, reveals a minimum of six authors within the examined inscriptions. The results indicate that in this remote fort literacy had spread throughout the military hierarchy, down to the quartermaster and probably even below that rank. This implies that an educational infrastructure that could support the composition of literary texts in Judah already existed before the destruction of the first Temple. A similar level of literacy in this area is attested again only 400 y later, ca. 200 BCE. B ased on biblical exegesis and historical considerations scholars debate whether the first major phase of compilation of biblical texts in Jerusalem took place before or after the destruction of the city by the Babylonians in 586 BCE (e.g., ref. 1). A related-and also disputed-issue is the level of literacy, that is, the basic ability to communicate in writing, especially in the Hebrew kingdoms of Israel and Judah (2). The best way to answer this question is to look at the material evidence: the corpus of inscriptions that originated from archaeological excavations (e.g., ref.3). Inscriptions citing biblical texts, or related to them, are rarely found (for two Jerusalem amulets possibly dating to this period, echoing the priestly blessing in Numbers 6:23-26, see refs. 4 and 5), probably because papyrus and parchment are not well preserved in the climate of the region. However, ostraca (inscriptions in ink on ceramic sherds) that deal with more mundane issues can also shed light on the volume and quality of writing and on the recognition of the power of the written word in the society.To explore the degree of literacy and stage setting for compilation of literary texts in monarchic Judah, we turned to Hebrew ostraca from the final days of the kingdom, before its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE and the deportation of its elite to Babylonia. Several corpora of inscriptions exist for this period. We focused on the corpus of over 100 Hebrew ostraca found at the fortress of Arad, located in arid southern Judah, on the border of the kingdom with Edom (see ref. 6 and Fig.

Computer aided restoration of handwritten character strokes

“…The restorations from Tel Arad were used in a computerized paleographic investigation regarding the literacy rates in the Kingdom of Judah ca. 600 BCE [41]. In addition, the Ophel ostracon restorations were used to present a new reading of the inscription [40], while the rest are intended for a future investigations of the dissemination of writing in the Kingdom of Israel in the 8 th century BCE.…”

Algorithmic handwriting analysis of the Samaria inscriptions illuminates bureaucratic apparatus in biblical Israel

“…In other words, the estimation of the number of writers in a given corpus has received little attention. In our previous publication [1], an algorithm yielding a lower bound for the number of authors in a group of inscriptions was introduced. Here we aim to provide the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) for the number of hands in a corpus.…”

“…The question of literacy in ancient (biblical) Israel is crucial for biblical exegesis and related fields. In a recent article [1] we dealt with the corpus of ostraca (ink inscriptions on clay sherds) unearthed at the desert fortress of Arad in Judah (the southern of the two Hebrew kingdoms), dated to ca. 600 BCE.…”

“…In a previous article ( [1], strengthened by results in [15,16]), which dealt with the corpus of ostraca from the fortress of Arad in the desert fringe of southern Judah, we introduced an algorithmic framework capable of detecting statistically significant "separations" of authors within pairs of inscriptions in the assemblage. Our former techniques allowed us to estimate the minimal number of writers within the investigated corpus.…”

Finding Answers from the Word of God: Domain Adaptation for Neural Networks in Biblical Question Answering

“…Tschuggnall and Specht explored grammar-based text analysis for authorship attribution in the Bible [25]. Faigenbaum et al used novel image processing and machine learning algorithms for authorship detection [9]. While NLP has undoubtedly given the Biblical scholars a new method for biblical analysis, the Bible in and of itself is also an invaluable corpus for computational linguistics research.…”