Notable Discoveries
- Authorship
- Despite the traditional claims, there is surprisingly little evidence of Moses writing the 5 books of the Torah. The only pair sharing a distinctly common style was Exodus and Deuteronomy, which scored a 5/7*. The others scored 2s, 3s, or 4s/7, and Genesis and Leviticus scored only 1/7. To break this down further along one metric, Genesis had approximately 11 fewer words per sentence than Leviticus, and 13 fewer words per sentence than Numbers.
- In one of the highest scoring sections, Judges, Samuel 1, Samuel 2, Kings 1, and Kings 2 might have shared authors. This is particularly interesting because, unlike with the Torah, different authors supposedly wrote Judges and the two books of Samuel, and the two books of Kings. While you might expect that these two authors might overlap and style simply due to timing, this seems unlikely since there is supposed to be a 460 year gap in the writing of these texts. Therefore, this brings into question both whether the authors were the same and whether the timing was as accurate as is implied. Regardless, the data supports the idea that authorship was constant within each of the two sets of books.
- Although this might be erroneous due to the varying types of writing tested, it seems unlikely that Solomon wrote Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon, since comparisons between each of the books score only 1, 2, and 2/7.
- In another confusing set of observations, in the section around the writing of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Ezekiel, it appears that there was a common author for all of the writings except Lamentations. To the contrary, different authors wrote Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, while a common author wrote Jeremiah and Lamentations.
- Other
- It is surprising how much variance there is in how similar a given book is to all other books in the Bible. For example, in summing over all possible comparisons for each book, the overall average score is 1.63/7. However, the maximum average score was the Isaiah with 2.65/7, and the lowest was Haggai with 0.65.
- Overall, books closer to each other in biblical order score higher. This is logical.
- In a display that might point to the fallibility of the method, there are a number of exceptions to the previous observation. For example, the most similar books according to the chart are Genesis and Kings 2. Not only are there 10 books between these texts in order, but also supposedly a 933 year gap.
*Note: Throughout this description, score means the number of times that two texts were closer to one another than at least 3/4 of all other text comparisons for a given test. 7 tests were given, so the highest score two texts can earn is 7/7.