Computational Linguistic Analysis of the Biblical Text

This chapter discusses the various ways in which computational linguistics has been applied to biblical languages. It describes the development that started in the 1970s and 1980s with the first attempts in text representation and that continued with the creation of morphological and syntactic databases. Until the early twenty-first century, most computational linguistic approaches concerned rule-based linguistic analysis, which allowed for a systematic and distributional analysis of biblical corpora. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, statistical approaches and machine learning have entered the field of biblical studies, although most of their applications to the Bible still have an experimental character. Because of the various computational approaches that have emerged in the last decades, computational linguistics is not one single theory, but rather an amalgam of approaches in a rapidly changing field. The relation with other linguistic theories is complex, because the databases that are used in the computational analysis of the Bible are each rooted in different linguistic theories. However, the various computational approaches have developed further in ways that are typical of computational corpus linguistics and that go beyond the linguistic theories underlying the annotations in the respective databases. Because of the large amount of data it can handle, computational linguistics provides valuable contributions to wellestablished fields in the study of the biblical languages, such as orthography or syntax. In addition, more advanced computational techniques, such as author clustering and text-classification, provide new ways to approach long-standing problems such as source-critical questions and genre distinctions. The application of computational linguistics to the biblical languages also touches upon fundamental questions about the interpretation of the Bible, because it blurs the traditional distinction between the sciences, conceived of as a mode of scholarship involving calculation and pattern recognition, and the humanities, understood as a hermeneutic and critical mode of scholarship.