Algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judah's military correspondence sheds light on composition of biblical texts.
Abstract
The relationship between the expansion of literacy in Judah and composition of biblical
texts has attracted scholarly attention for over a century. Information on this issue
can be deduced from Hebrew inscriptions from the final phase of the first Temple period.
We report our investigation of 16 inscriptions from the Judahite desert fortress of
Arad, dated ca 600 BCE-the eve of Nebuchadnezzar's destruction of Jerusalem. The inquiry
is based on new methods for image processing and document analysis, as well as machine
learning algorithms. These techniques enable identification of the minimal number
of authors in a given group of inscriptions. Our algorithmic analysis, complemented
by the textual information, reveals a minimum of six authors within the examined inscriptions.
The results indicate that in this remote fort literacy had spread throughout the military
hierarchy, down to the quartermaster and probably even below that rank. This implies
that an educational infrastructure that could support the composition of literary
texts in Judah already existed before the destruction of the first Temple. A similar
level of literacy in this area is attested again only 400 y later, ca 200 BCE.
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/26247Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1073/pnas.1522200113Publication Info
Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira; Shaus, Arie; Sober, Barak; Levin, David; Na'aman, Nadav;
Sass, Benjamin; ... Finkelstein, Israel (2016). Algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judah's military correspondence sheds light on
composition of biblical texts. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113(17). pp. 4664-4669. 10.1073/pnas.1522200113. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/26247.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin
Assistant Research Professor of Mathematics
I am a Phillip Griffiths Assistant Research Professor at Duke University's math department
as well as at the Rhodes Interdisciplinary Initiative, working with Prof. Ingrid Daubechies.
In 2021 I completed my Ph.D. at the Department of Applied Mathematics, School of Mathematical
Sciences, Tel Aviv University, under the supervision of Prof. David Levin and Prof.
Yoel Shkolnisky.My research interests sp
Barak Sober
Phillip Griffiths Assistant Research Professor
I am currently privilaged to be working with Prof. Ingrid Daubechies. Before that,
I have completed my PhD in applied mathematics at Tel-Aviv University under the mentoring
of Prof. David Levin. My MSc was co-mentored by Prof. Levin and Prof. Israel Finkelstein
from the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations. My research
ranges between analysis of high dimensional data from a geometrical perspective and
the applicatio
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