Machine learning has increasingly been applied to biblical studies, including debates surrounding the Documentary Hypothesis, the theory that the Pentateuch is composed of multiple independent source documents—traditionally labeled J, E, D, and P—stitched together by later editors. Proponents of the classic Documentary Hypothesis argue that these sources can be distinguished by differences in divine names, vocabulary, theology, and literary style, assuming internally consistent authorial fingerprints and relatively clean boundaries between documents. In recent decades, however, machine learning techniques—particularly stylometry—have been used to test whether such distinctions emerge naturally from the…
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