Digital text comparison of ancient Hebrew texts: A case study of the two accounts of the battle against the Canaanite Army Captain Sisera (Judges 4-5)

In the Bible there are two accounts of the battle against the Canaanite army captain Sisera, in Judges 4 and 5. Since the second half of the 19th century the majority of scholars assumed that the poetic version in Judges 5 is an archaic text (from ca. the 13th or 12th cent. BC), and that Judges 4 is a later prose report of the same battle, dependent on the poetic version. In the last decades of the 20th century, however, this view has been challenged and since then scholars have been divided into seemingly immovable scholarly positions. The aim of our pilot was to investigate how a systematic computational analysis could overcome this deadlock. First, we built various similarity matrices (matching each verse of Chapter 4 with each verse of Chapter 5) based upon both 'sighted' methods (e.g. shared lexemes) and 'blind' methods (e.g. Normalized Compression Distance). Second, we examined those segments that had a high similarity score to see what textual features account for the similarity. Third, we investigated these features and their distribution over the larger corpus of the book of Judges. In our conclusions we addressed the impact of our findings on the questions posed to these chapters by traditional biblical scholarship.