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Thomas comments on Algorithm detects multiple authors in of the Old Testament [link] - Less Wrong
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Comments (6)
Was it ever a dispute? I remember that 33 authors - from ship herders to kings - was an "argument for the authenticity of the Good Book".
It's important to distinguish the Five Books of Moses -- aka "the Pentateuch" aka "the Torah" from "the Jewish Bible" or "the Old Testament" from "the [Christian] Bible". The [Jewish] Bible as a whole is openly and unambiguously the work of multiple authors over multiple eras.
The first five books are a separate coherent unit; the inter-book divisions do not correspond to authorship in any theory I've ever heard of. This article was about teasing out authorship in those first five books.
Orthodox Jews believe a single author - god, with Moses doing the writing (some allow the possibility of Joshua writing the very last verses). 33 authors would be blasphemy-level deviation for them.
Not so for a billion or more Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants and so on.
But it doesn't really matter. The real question is, how good id the mentioned algorithm, not the Bible.
Eh. Wouldn't it also be blasphemous to compare the mind of God to the mind of men?
I don't know how Maimonides is viewed among Orthodox Jews, but his whole ineffability of God seems to cast serious doubt on the efficacy of any analysis built out of experience of human writers. Afterall, does anything in Orthodox Jewish belief preclude God from writing in multiple voices, styles, ideological agenda?
I imagine the blasphemy comes in when the authors suggest that the variation was due to variation in the "conduits" or "transmitters" of God's chosen words.