Precisely who wrote the Bible has been debated for centuries – but now scientists have devised a computer program that sheds much more light on the sources of the various religious texts within it. Israeli computer scientists and Bible scholars have written an algorithm that analyses the writing styles found within various sections. While it can’t pinpoint an individual author, the program has been able to determine when a passage has been written by more than one person and can detect the point at which a new author has taken over. For instance, many believe that the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, was written by one person – Moses. However, many experts insist there were multiple sources. The computer program will be able to help with these kinds of debates by processing how functional words and synonyms are used within various passages, which can reveal whether different people were involved in producing the material. The researchers tested their software by feeding it mixed up passages from two Hebrew books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel – and asking the computer to re-sort them. It did so with 99 per cent accuracy, by looking at how various words were distributed.
