Exploring the Stylistic Uniqueness of the Priestly Source in Genesis and Exodus Through a Statistical/Computational Lens
Axel Bühler, Gideon Yoffe, Thomas ̈Römer, Barak Sober, Israel Finkelstein, Eli Piasetzky, Nachum Dershowitz · 2023
Recently, we introduced a computational framework that, given a partition of a text into two literary constituents, finds the best parameter settings for successfully distinguishing linguistic features to support that partition and evaluates the statistical significance thereof. We applied our algorithm to assess the literary uniqueness of the Priestly source in the books of Genesis and Exodus, focusing on the mathematical and statistical underpinning of our approach. Here we take a close philological look at the linguistic features found to characterize the two distinct categories.