Eric Fredrickson

The story of Joseph in Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, has been pored over by scholars for centuries and told and re-told in books, ballets, movies, and even musicals. Yet the tale still contains mysteries—such as its exact date of authorship. “When I tell people that reputable scholars differ by 700 years regarding the date the story was written, they find that very surprising,” says Eric Fredrickson, a PhD candidate in Near Eastern languages and civilizations.

According to Fredrickson, dates are important because they affect how scholars interpret texts. “A lot happened in that 700-year period, so the date of composition can really change how you read the story of Joseph,” explains Fredrickson. In fact, similar controversies exist about the date of origin for most of the stories and texts in the Hebrew Bible. His recent work has focused on developing a statistical method for determining the dates of composition for these ancient texts.

The technique developed by Fredrickson and his colleagues models changes in ancient Hebrew over time. “We used all the ancient Hebrew currently available in the appropriate digital format, both biblical texts and non-biblical texts, including Hebrew uncovered by archaeologists and written, for example, on shards of pottery,” says Fredrickson. A morphologically tagged representation of these texts, which contains information regarding things like word choice, syntax, and grammar, is the input. The output is the ranges of the composition dates most likely to be correct for each text. 

His work is part of the nascent field of digital humanities, in which quantitative and computational methods are applied to questions in the humanities. “I found that this field brought together my fascination with ancient texts and my interest in quantitative methods,” he explains. “I hope this will be a first step toward a type of scholarship that views the Hebrew Bible as data.” 

Fredrickson believes that the future of digital humanities looks very promising. “If we can take the Hebrew Bible, which has been combed over for centuries, and still make progress with these quantitative methods,” he says, “then it is certainly possible to do the same for many other open questions in the humanities.”