These are the slides for my contribution to the Global Education and Research Technology (GERT) Unit of the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting 2019

1. The Tiberias Stylistic Classifier
Experiences from the MA course Analytical Tools and the Study of the Bible,
part of the MA specialization Biblical Studies and Digital Humanities
Wido van Peursen
Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computer
Society of Biblical Literature, Annual Meeting, 23-26 November 2019
www.etcbc.nl /etcbc @etcbc_vu company/etcbc/

2. Experiences from an MA class
https://masters.vu.nl/en/programmes/theolog
y-religious-studies-research/biblical-studies-
digital-humanities.aspx

3. Two basic questions
1. How to use the tool?
2. How does this tool contribute to OT
scholarship?

4. User-friendliness
• More documentation needed (as always)
• Hard to get insight into results (e.g. what
does an accuracy of 75% say?)
• Separate chapters have to be selected, e.g.
Isaiah 1–39.
• Desiderata: unique identifiers for saved
experiments and comment function.

5. Contribution to OT scholarship
1. What does the tool measure?
2. What is style? (should words be included?)
3. How does Open Science relate to black box?
4. What type of research questions can be
answered?

6. Research questions
1. P and non-P
2. Deuteronomistic redaction
3. Holiness Code in relation to D and P
4. Classification of Psalms
5. Poetry in the Pentateuch
6. Linguistic dating
7. The composition of the Book of Isaiah

7. 1. P and non-P
See Idan Dershowitz et al., "Computerized
Source Criticism of Biblical Texts", Journal of
Biblical Literature 134/2 (2015), 253-271.
This works fine with the tools used for the JBL
article, but may be a more difficult to
perform with TSC. The beta-version of the
Stylistic separator may be more useful to this.

8. 2. Deuteronomistic redaction
• Deuteronomistic redaction of Jeremiah
• Deuteronomistic chapters in DtrH
This is typically the kind of research we want to be
with the TSC, but the question is: how to do it?
a. How do you compare two corpora?
b. How do you find an answer to the question: are there some
parts in Jeremiah that show
And the question is: what do the results say
(related to question above: what is style):
a. How do the results relate to say, the lists of typically
Deuteronomistic phrases and idioms that S.R. Drivers gives in
his Introduction to the OT?”

9. Holiness Code
• Holiness Code in relation to D and P
This is also typically the kind of research we
want to be with Tiberias, but the question is:
what do the agreements say? Some students
had difficulty with this.

10. Selection of Psalms
• Selection of Psalms e.g. kingship psalms or Shire
ha-ma`a lot
Questions (examples):
1. Are the shire ha-ma`aloth stylistically different from
other Psalms?
2. Is it justified to speak of royal psalms as a separate
group?
3. Is Psalm 8 a royal Psalm or a Creation Psalm?
The tool is there, the students have to learn to
pose the right questions and put them into
classification tasks.

11. Poetry in the Pentateuch
• Example: Is Exodus 15 recognized as poetry?
It is an instructive exercise to see whether,
e.g., Exodus 15 is recognized as poetry
(comparing the Pentateuch with a poetic
corpus), but how can we make this fruitful to
Biblical studies. It is more like an experiment
to see whether Tiberias works fine and does
what we expect it to do.

12. Linguistic dating
• Example: is Jonah early or late?
In my understanding, this is typically the kind
of research that the creators of Tiberias had
in mind. It works fine, but: depends on the
preconceived ideas and definitions as to what
is representative of early and of late texts.
How to go beyond diachronic framework?

13. Composition of Isaiah
• Does Tiberias support a tripartite division of the
Book of Isaiah?
Relevant, but interpretation depends on one’s
presuppositions, especially if there is more unity
in the book than the tripartite division suggests.
As far as the division is supported, does it relate
to date or genre?
The small size of trito-Isaiah hinders the analysis
(and hence what does “low accuracy mean?)

14. Concluding observations
This is an excellent tool, a valuable contribution
to Biblical studies, but there are some points of
concern:
1. Documentation and explanations.
2. Classification and clustering options.
3. Thoughtful interaction with research
questions from the field.