A Statistical Exploration of Text Partition Into Constituents: The Case of the Priestly Source in the Books of Genesis and Exodus
This work addresses the need for statistical validation in textual analysis for biblical scholars, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific domain.
The authors tackled the problem of statistically validating a hypothesized partition of biblical texts by developing a pipeline that identifies stylistic features and quantifies the significance of overlaps between hypothesized and unsupervised partitions, applying it to the Books of Genesis and Exodus to confirm stylistic differences between Priestly and non-Priestly components with statistical significance.
We present a pipeline for a statistical textual exploration, offering a stylometry-based explanation and statistical validation of a hypothesized partition of a text. Given a parameterization of the text, our pipeline: (1) detects literary features yielding the optimal overlap between the hypothesized and unsupervised partitions, (2) performs a hypothesis-testing analysis to quantify the statistical significance of the optimal overlap, while conserving implicit correlations between units of text that are more likely to be grouped, and (3) extracts and quantifies the importance of features most responsible for the classification, estimates their statistical stability and cluster-wise abundance. We apply our pipeline to the first two books in the Bible, where one stylistic component stands out in the eyes of biblical scholars, namely, the Priestly component. We identify and explore statistically significant stylistic differences between the Priestly and non-Priestly components.