Latest / Fulfilled with Rebecca Sheehan / Who Wrote the Bible—and When? How Archaeology, Math & AI Are Solving an Ancient Mystery | Ep. 23

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Who Wrote the Bible—and When? How Archaeology, Math & AI Are Solving an Ancient Mystery | Ep. 23 · Fulfilled with Rebecca Sheehan

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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody, welcome to Fulfilled.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Rebecca Sheehan.
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  SPEAKER_00: If you've ever tried talking with friends or relatives who don't believe in God,
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  SPEAKER_00: hoping they might reconsider, you've probably hit the same roadblock.
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  SPEAKER_00: That they just can't accept that the Bible is true.
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  SPEAKER_00: Either they think it was compiled too long after the events to be accurate,
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  SPEAKER_00: Or that the stories changed over time,
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  SPEAKER_00: that somewhere between oral tradition, translation, and editing, the truth got lost.
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  SPEAKER_00: But what if new evidence could actually address some of those age-old doubts?
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  SPEAKER_00: What if we could show that some of the oldest books in
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  SPEAKER_00: the Bible were written much closer to the events they described
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  SPEAKER_00: than many have assumed?
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  SPEAKER_00: Could that help more people take Scripture seriously and come to faith?
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  SPEAKER_00: That brings us to today's topic, which is pretty incredible.
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  SPEAKER_00: Archaeologists,
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  SPEAKER_00: physicists,
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  SPEAKER_00: biblical scholars,
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  SPEAKER_00: and mathematicians from three continents have joined forces using cutting-edge AI
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  SPEAKER_00: to tackle one of history's greatest mysteries,
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  SPEAKER_00: who actually wrote and compiled the books of the Bible and when.
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  SPEAKER_00: To help us unpack this fascinating work,
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm joined by Dr.
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  SPEAKER_00: Shira Feigenbaum-Golovan,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Philip Griffiths Assistant Research Professor of Mathematics at Duke University.
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  SPEAKER_00: Her trailblazing research is revealing surprising new insights
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  SPEAKER_00: into ancient writing styles
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  SPEAKER_00: and showing how today's technology can help us understand scripture's roots
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  SPEAKER_00: in ways we never could before.
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  SPEAKER_00: Dr. Shira, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
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  SPEAKER_00: So grateful to be here.
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  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so let me get this straight.
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  SPEAKER_00: You are a math professor by day, solving biblical mysteries by night.
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  SPEAKER_00: That sounds kind of more like a Clark Kent, Superman, James Bond type of thing.
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  SPEAKER_01: Something like Indiana Jones.
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  SPEAKER_01: I like to think about it.
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  SPEAKER_01: I'm putting my Indiana Jones hat and then I'm just diving into the libraries
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  SPEAKER_01: and just swiping the dust and opening the ancient Bibles to study something
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  SPEAKER_01: that we want to find out.
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  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
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  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Indiana Jones is probably a better comparison.
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  SPEAKER_00: So do you teach regular classes as well or do you primarily do research at Duke?
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  SPEAKER_01: I teach regular classes as well.
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  SPEAKER_01: And basically anything that you can think about that relates to math.
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  SPEAKER_01: One of the classes that I taught in the spring was Introduction to Math
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  SPEAKER_01: to Non-Mathematician,
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  SPEAKER_01: where we actually give some examples where you can see math in real life.
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  SPEAKER_01: And students are so thrilled to know that, oh,
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  SPEAKER_01: my credit card or my airplane tickets or something else
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  SPEAKER_01: that they are doing is actually involve math and seeing how you can really use math
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  SPEAKER_01: in real life.
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  SPEAKER_00: So your work is sort of the epitome of using math in real life.
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you were literally using math to uncover mysteries in the Bible.
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  SPEAKER_00: How did you get interested in that?
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean, your work is at such a unique intersection of math, AI, archaeology, scripture.
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  SPEAKER_01: I'm so lucky to do something that I like and even that has some historical interpretation in it.
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  SPEAKER_01: Well, it all started when I was done with my bachelor degree.
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  SPEAKER_01: And then I was, you know, doing the routine stuff of programming.
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  SPEAKER_01: And then I encountered one of my colleagues from my bachelor degree and he said,
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  SPEAKER_01: oh, I'm doing something cool with math and archeology.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's just a project that is starting.
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  SPEAKER_01: Do you want to join?
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  SPEAKER_01: And I said, okay, let's try.
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  SPEAKER_01: That was in 2010, where 15 years later,
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  SPEAKER_01: And I'm still doing that because I think that the excitement
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  SPEAKER_01: in analyzing those ancient finds and ancient texts is something
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  SPEAKER_01: that you can't really replace.
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  SPEAKER_01: So that's how I started that as a master student of mathematics and evolved into
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  SPEAKER_01: where I am today.
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  SPEAKER_00: So you're from Israel.
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  SPEAKER_00: Do you think there's something about growing up
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  SPEAKER_00: with all this amazing history around you that made you more Passionate
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  SPEAKER_00: about exploring it and understanding everything behind it.
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  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think definitely it helps because there are so many different sites
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  SPEAKER_01: from different periods.
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  SPEAKER_01: And if I can help in any way to discover some hidden layers
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  SPEAKER_01: in those archeological sites, that's really something that is exciting to do.
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  SPEAKER_00: So you briefly mentioned your work in 2010.
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  SPEAKER_00: Could you explain in a little more detail your findings there,
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  SPEAKER_00: sort of more in layman's terms too, so people can understand?
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  SPEAKER_00: Because I know it's very complicated.
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  SPEAKER_01: So just a background in the desert of Judah,
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  SPEAKER_01: there was a big fort,
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  SPEAKER_01: a relatively big fort,
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  SPEAKER_01: back in the previous century, found one of the biggest corpora.
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  SPEAKER_01: They are talking about
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  SPEAKER_01: Please bring me wine and oil from here to there.
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  SPEAKER_01: They're talking about what happened.
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  SPEAKER_01: Bring some troops for the invasion by the Edomites to help them.
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  SPEAKER_01: Describing the numbers from where to bring them, what to do.
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  SPEAKER_01: There's another very exciting inscription about someone that is reporting to
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  SPEAKER_01: the fort,
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  SPEAKER_01: to the quartermaster of the fort,
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  SPEAKER_01: Eliashiv, I did what you asked me to do in the Temple of Jerusalem.
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  SPEAKER_01: Have a peak to those ancient lives of 600 BCE and we can know what they were doing back then.
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  SPEAKER_01: So now that we know what the inscriptions are talking about,
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  SPEAKER_01: we want to ask how many people wrote them.
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  SPEAKER_01: If there was one person that was sitting in the fort
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  SPEAKER_01: and he was writing all those letters, it's one situation.
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  SPEAKER_01: Because then this person probably got some education, but he was the only one.
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  SPEAKER_01: That tells us that other people didn't know how to read or write.
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  SPEAKER_01: On the other side,
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  SPEAKER_01: if we are able to find in those inscriptions different styles of
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  SPEAKER_01: the handwriting itself,
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  SPEAKER_01: then we can say that there was a high literacy rate in that period,
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  SPEAKER_01: 600 BCE, and the situation is already different.
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  SPEAKER_01: So that was the research question that we were trying to solve.
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  SPEAKER_00: Isn't it amazing that things you were talking about,
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  SPEAKER_00: they were saying like,
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  SPEAKER_00: get me wine or,
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  SPEAKER_00: you know, problems with personnel, like people are the same now as they were.
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  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's fascinating to see that nothing changed.
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  SPEAKER_01: We call those small inscriptions,
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  SPEAKER_01: they're really small,
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  SPEAKER_01: like the sticky notes that we have today,
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  SPEAKER_01: because it's just a note that someone wrote to and like sent with a messenger
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  SPEAKER_01: to bring the other person.
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  SPEAKER_00: So was there one scribe that was sort of taking sticky notes for everybody
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  SPEAKER_00: or were they each writing their own notes?
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  SPEAKER_01: So that's the fascinating result that we received.
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  SPEAKER_01: We examined 18 inscriptions that they were long enough for our analysis.
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  SPEAKER_01: We have to have enough letters for the statistical analysis that we perform.
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  SPEAKER_01: Really, no one did this research and no one even asked the question,
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  SPEAKER_01: even didn't think about to do it manually.
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  SPEAKER_01: To our surprise,
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  SPEAKER_01: we found out that there were at least six writers in this small fort out
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  SPEAKER_01: of these 18 inscriptions that we checked out.
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  SPEAKER_01: So we have at least six people that wrote, and this opens a whole new world now.
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  SPEAKER_00: So before this, they thought that there was not much literacy during this time?
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  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_01: They thought that maybe all of those inscriptions were written by one
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  SPEAKER_01: or two people back then, but that's not the situation.
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  SPEAKER_00: So how did you determine that there were six different authors here?
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  SPEAKER_01: So it was an interesting mathematical question.
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  SPEAKER_01: We took those texts,
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  SPEAKER_01: we segmented the letters, we extracted some important feature of each letter.
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  SPEAKER_01: We chose seven features.
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  SPEAKER_01: Among them were what is the angle between one strong to another one?
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  SPEAKER_01: Can we measure the difference in shapes of those letters?
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  SPEAKER_01: And others, we combine those features into one representation of each letter.
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  SPEAKER_01: And later we use those features to compare between two different inscriptions.
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  SPEAKER_01: So the game goes the following, the mathematical game.
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  SPEAKER_01: We have two inscriptions.
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  SPEAKER_01: We ask, were they written by the same author or no?
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  SPEAKER_01: If yes, then they probably will have the same features of the letters.
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  SPEAKER_01: So by comparing the features,
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  SPEAKER_01: we were able to Tell what is the likelihood that those two inscriptions were written
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  SPEAKER_01: by the same offer or not.
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  SPEAKER_01: We performed it for each pair of inscriptions for all of the 18 inscriptions and got
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  SPEAKER_01: a big table that we were able to mind by other algorithms.
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  SPEAKER_01: What is the minimal number of writers that could have provided such separation
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  SPEAKER_01: that we see in the table?
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  SPEAKER_01: And the number was at least six writers.
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  SPEAKER_01: And that was fascinating.
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  SPEAKER_00: Can you talk about the context about what was happening historically at this time as well?
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  SPEAKER_01: So historically what was going on, it was,
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  SPEAKER_01: we still have the Northern and Southern Kingdom of Judah and Israel,
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  SPEAKER_01: and just before the exile of the Jewish people.
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  SPEAKER_01: And previously what was thought the Bible was probably written on the exile
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  SPEAKER_01: or maybe years later.
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  SPEAKER_01: But now that we have evidence of such High literacy rates already in
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  SPEAKER_01: the 7th century,
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  SPEAKER_01: we are able to think that part of the Bible was already written back then.
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  SPEAKER_01: And that's a big find that kind of shocked the world of archaeology
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  SPEAKER_01: and also biblical studies,
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  SPEAKER_01: because we have some kind of quantitative method to show something
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  SPEAKER_01: that they were struggling with so long.
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  SPEAKER_00: So what language was this in and was it written on parchment or what was the medium?
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  SPEAKER_01: It's the ancient Hebrew letters that actually when they revived the Hebrew,
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  SPEAKER_01: they took all the language as is, but the letters were Aramaic.
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  SPEAKER_01: But if you know how to read the ancient Hebrew,
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  SPEAKER_01: you can basically understand all the inscriptions that are written.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's written on pottery with ink.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's not parchment.
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  SPEAKER_01: The parchment that we have from that period, most of them didn't survive at all.
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  SPEAKER_01: We see the seals in the excavations,
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  SPEAKER_01: so we know that there were parchments, but they just perished.
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  SPEAKER_00: Just because it's interesting for those who are listening and don't know,
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  SPEAKER_00: can you talk about how and when Hebrew was revived for the modern generation
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  SPEAKER_00: and how it differs from biblical ancient Hebrew?
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  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so it was revived by Eleazar Ben Yehuda.
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  SPEAKER_01: He didn't take,
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  SPEAKER_01: as I mentioned,
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  SPEAKER_01: the ancient script,
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  SPEAKER_01: but he took the Aramaic one,
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  SPEAKER_01: which is probably more natural because it also appeared in the Bible and
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  SPEAKER_01: the books that people were reading.
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  SPEAKER_01: And basically that's the language that we use today.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's a little bit, so to speak, lighter than the one that we use in the Bible, less official.
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  SPEAKER_01: But it's the same.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's incredible that this is a language that is spoken and read today in Israel.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so you can read these ancient documents as your native tongue.
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  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's amazing.
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  SPEAKER_01: When we found the one inscription that I told you
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  SPEAKER_01: that we found using our special camera,
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  SPEAKER_01: we immediately sat down and read the entire thing.
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  SPEAKER_01: It was like, oh, my gosh, I can read it.
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  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about your more recent study.
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  SPEAKER_00: I know that's been all over the news within the past few months,
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  SPEAKER_00: what you were trying to find in the first nine books of the Bible
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  SPEAKER_00: and why those nine books.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's funny, when I heard nine, I was like, well, that's not a very round biblical number.
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  SPEAKER_00: Why not 10?
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  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_01: So when we started this research,
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  SPEAKER_01: and it's actually also a very poetic start,
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  SPEAKER_01: when we all met in Kiryati Arim near Jerusalem,
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  SPEAKER_01: and the sun was setting,
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  SPEAKER_01: and we started talking about those issues of who wrote the Bible.
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  SPEAKER_01: And then what I asked is,
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  SPEAKER_01: can we have some texts that we know who wrote them,
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  SPEAKER_01: and we also know that they are not...
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  SPEAKER_01: Re-edited over time and we started digging and we came with 50 chapters
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  SPEAKER_01: that we can split between three different schools of writing and that are
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  SPEAKER_01: in consensus and most of the biblical scholars agree that they were written
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  SPEAKER_01: by those people.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's a coincidence that they came from nine books but they were Around the number
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  SPEAKER_01: of 50 chapters, I was really persistent with not 49, you're right, but 50.
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  SPEAKER_00: A lot better.
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  SPEAKER_00: So which books were these and who wrote them, according to the consensus?
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  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so we are talking about three different groups of writers that wrote them.
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  SPEAKER_01: Deuteronomy 6, 12, and 13.
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  SPEAKER_01: And there are many more.
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  SPEAKER_01: There are nine chapters that we were able to distillate that were written by those D writers.
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  SPEAKER_01: The other corpus of texts and chapters are Deuteronomistic History,
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  SPEAKER_01: which is the books of Josiah, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.
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  SPEAKER_01: And we're talking about another later period of priestly material that are mainly
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  SPEAKER_01: the texts from Genesis,
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  SPEAKER_01: like Genesis 17, or Exodus 6, chapters 16, also chapters 25 to 31.
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  SPEAKER_01: And all in all, in priestly material, we have 22 chapters.
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  SPEAKER_00: So have scholars identified who exactly wrote these?
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  SPEAKER_00: I think it was Moses.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's hard to say exactly the person who wrote it, but they're able to date it to some periods.
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  SPEAKER_01: That is the early period, the kind of intermediate and the later period.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's hard to attribute it to a specific person because we don't know how Moses wrote.
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  SPEAKER_01: We don't have any writing that I can say,
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  SPEAKER_01: okay, this is how Moses wrote and that looks like his style.
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  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so if one day we find something that, hello,
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  SPEAKER_01: I'm Moses writing to you,
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  SPEAKER_01: like an inscription,
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  SPEAKER_01: then maybe it will be interesting to, to see if we can find his style and match it.
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  SPEAKER_01: But we are limited to those like free groups of scholars that wrote those texts.
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  SPEAKER_00: So you created a model and you validated the model on these already agreed upon writing styles.
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  SPEAKER_00: Is that correct?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
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  SPEAKER_01: What it's called, leave one out.
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  SPEAKER_01: Method in statistics that basically we have the entire dataset,
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  SPEAKER_01: we extract a chapter,
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  SPEAKER_01: we build the model based on the 49 that are left,
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  SPEAKER_01: and we try to see to which of the three corpora can we attribute the chapter.
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  SPEAKER_01: And if we succeed, then we are happy.
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  SPEAKER_01: If not, then we count how many times we were wrong.
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  SPEAKER_01: And out of those 50 tests that we did,
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  SPEAKER_01: We were quite successful in 84% of the cases,
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  SPEAKER_01: which is quite impressive because the texts that we used,
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  SPEAKER_01: the chapters themselves were relatively small and I didn't speak about it,
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  SPEAKER_01: what is the measurement that we are comparing them by,
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  SPEAKER_01: but from each chapter we extracted the frequency of the words that are used
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  SPEAKER_01: and it's sort of a fingerprint of the style of writing of the writer that wrote it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Were there certain phrases that you latched onto?
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  SPEAKER_01: Yes,
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  SPEAKER_01: we were able to find specific words that certain writers loved using more as opposed
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  SPEAKER_01: to other ones, and also phrases that they used if we looked for phrases.
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  SPEAKER_01: It was a separate kind of examination.
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  SPEAKER_00: So in English and in the Christian version of the Bible,
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  SPEAKER_00: at least,
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  SPEAKER_00: with the Old Testament, there are Dozens and dozens of different translations.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the Hebrew Bible,
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  SPEAKER_00: is there one consistent translation or are there also different translations?
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  SPEAKER_00: Like do the Hasidic Jews have a different translation than the reformed Jews?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a good question.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: The Bible is one.
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  SPEAKER_01: We took the Hebrew Bible written in Hebrew.
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  SPEAKER_01: So I think that working on the Hebrew Bible itself, that has only one version.
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  SPEAKER_01: I think that was crucial to find what happened in reality.
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  SPEAKER_01: What are those texts that we have today that passed to us from generation to generations?
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  SPEAKER_01: What do they tell us?
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  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about your findings.
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  SPEAKER_00: I was reading about the arc narrative.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think that was a big part of it.
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  SPEAKER_00: If you could talk about that a little bit.
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  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_01: So the arc narrative tells about the story of the arc.
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  SPEAKER_01: How they started moving it from where it was to a different location,
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  SPEAKER_01: which we are still looking for today.
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  SPEAKER_01: And they tell what is the Ark,
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  SPEAKER_01: how it looks like, how glorious it is and with all the angels flying around it.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: We're getting back into Indiana Jones territory here, looking for the lost Ark of the Covenant.
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  SPEAKER_01: Definitely.
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  SPEAKER_01: So once we are done with convincing ourselves,
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  SPEAKER_01: that was the hardest part,
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  SPEAKER_01: that the matter is actually working, we threw in some disputed chapters.
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  SPEAKER_01: There is a debate among archaeologists and biblical experts on how to So one of
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  SPEAKER_01: the questions was whether the two stories of arc narrative in Samuel 1 and Samuel 2
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  SPEAKER_01: that are sometimes considered to be complementary to one another,
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  SPEAKER_01: whether they were written by the same author or no.
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  SPEAKER_01: And the findings of this test case were really fascinating.
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  SPEAKER_01: And we found out that the Samuel 1 version,
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  SPEAKER_01: which Cannot attribute it to any of the three corporates we have.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's not D, it's not the DTRH, and it's not likely to be priestly material.
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  SPEAKER_00: So before your research,
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  SPEAKER_00: scholars thought that the Ark narrative was an independent story
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  SPEAKER_00: that was maybe dropped in by a different author.
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  SPEAKER_00: But so what does it mean?
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  SPEAKER_00: What do your findings mean that it was written in separate parts?
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  SPEAKER_01: When we showed it to the biblical expert,
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  SPEAKER_01: they were also surprised,
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  SPEAKER_01: but they could explain that there are some phrases that were coming from
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: a later period that probably it was heavily rewritten in later stages.
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  SPEAKER_01: While for the Samuel 2 text,
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: which basically tells the same story,
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: it uses more or less the same ideas,
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: but the style of how the writer tells the story is different.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: And if we compare the style to the three styles that we have,
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: it is more likely,
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: with 84% of attribution accuracy,
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: that we can attribute it to DTRH material,
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: the autonomistic history text that we were talking about.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: And also our algorithm,
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: as I mentioned before,
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's giving the words that are indicative for a certain writer.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: And if we know that those are the words that are indicative
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: for this arc narrative number one,
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: then it's interesting to see where did it came from?
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: What are not only the ideas, but the language and the linguistic properties that they use there?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that there's a lot of research that needs to be done in that direction.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: What is it like to...
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think that it's fascinating to see how you change a certain field of people
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: that are doing it for ages.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: And there are so many biblical experts and archaeologists,
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: and I have a huge respect for what they're doing.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that sometimes not everything is seen on the surface and not all
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: the analysis can be done by hand.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: And with the age of digital humanities,
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think we have a big power in our hands to actually incorporate
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: the automatic tools.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that when I'm working on that,
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm always excited to see what will come out of the research because it's an enigma,
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: really.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: The questions themselves that I try to decipher,
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: the answers that I get and try to see with reflection,
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: how does it reflect on the bigger picture?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that seeing this dialogue,
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: seeing how it changes things that people were thinking about for ages,
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: or maybe reassures those things, it's definitely interesting.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: What are your plans for the future with these models?
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: I read that you are wanting to apply it to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: Is that correct?
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it's a bigger picture project that we are thinking about.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: So if we have those models and we have the inscriptions from 600 BCE,
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: can we understand what are the linguistic properties when
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: the Dead Sea Scrolls were composed and later
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: and see how can we find those exact same properties in the Bible?
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: So basically our goal is to not only To decipher
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: whether we can identify those three groups,
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: but can we identify exactly the texts that were written in those periods?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: So taking what you've already found with the military correspondence and relating it
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: And tracing the evolution of the language from the pottery shards to the scrolls
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: and seeing how it evolves also in the Bible.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: So the Dead Sea Scrolls were written about 400 years,
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: is that correct, after these military inscriptions?
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, something like that.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe even later, you have to double check it.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's 1st century BCE to 1st century CE.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're able to delineate more writing styles there,
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: what would the implications of that be?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we can...
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: Continue doing the mining basically of the Bible,
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: if we are able to find the chapters that were written in those earlier periods
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: and also with a more kind of wise way of quantifying the likelihood
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: of how they look like, I think there is a big prospect to that.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: Because we only study the texts that we have,
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: but if we have additional information from ex-biblical materials,
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: it can give additional information on how and when they were written.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: It will help us to understand what texts can we find there.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: Does that help people see the Bible as more trustworthy?
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of back to my introduction,
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: how people are skeptical of the Bible because maybe it was Written and rewritten
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: and passed down and oral tradition, written tradition.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, so many different ways that came together.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: It can sort of help to identify what happened to the Bible.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the interesting part is also seeing the changes that evolved in
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: the Bible during the time,
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: like why they happened and what they were trying to tell us with all of that.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: About the transformative of the ideas, it's a great question.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a handful of research that was done to identify those.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: We still struggle with the historical events that are mentioned there.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I think any light that you can shed on all those questions,
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: everyone will just be happy to hear about it.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever thought of applying So, yeah.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Could your model help determine whether that section came from the original Isaiah
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: as originally thought, or whether that's after the exile?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's an interesting question.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: We never thought about it.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: The main thing that we have to have some reference data that we can compare to.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: And for Isaiah, we have to have at least like some understanding about the text at that time.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: And can we attribute part of the text from Isaiah to one of those groups?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: And since I'm not sure that it's so easy to find such texts,
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: we can maybe think about different algorithms that we can develop
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: that are not referring some ground truth texts in the background,
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: but comparing the linguistic properties themselves.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: But definitely it's an idea for future research.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you should pass that one along.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: It would have huge implications, though.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: It really would.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that sounds interesting.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Seems like the possibilities are endless with your research.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's very cool.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I know you see things very much from a black and white mathematical point
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: of view,
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: but on a personal level,
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: has this work shaped your own faith or perspective on the Bible?
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's a dialogue with my faith and the research that I am doing and
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: Before entering this research,
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: I had, I think, a different understanding of the Bible itself.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: But seeing the amazing results that the biblical scholars have and what we have
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: as well now,
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: in addition to that, I think that kind of adds to what I feel towards God.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: Can you expand on that a little bit?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like how it sort of changed?
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: I think that seeing those texts and feeling them and dealing with them daily,
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: it touches you in so many levels and asking those questions.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not something that I have been dealing with before.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that there are so many things that influenced me while I was doing this research.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard to say on something concrete,
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: but just working on that and with the biblical experts,
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think that this is something that will be reflected in my soul for a lot of time.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's interesting.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think that some people are afraid to ask questions when it comes to the Bible
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: and its authorship because they don't want to be Yeah, I agree.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: I agree that when I started with this research and a lot
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: of questions were asked like, what are you doing?
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's brave questions to be asked,
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: but I think that with brave questions,
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: we can find a lot of things that we didn't know before.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: And even if those questions are kind of controversial in some sense,
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: but I think that asking them and answering them,
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: it's giving additional layer of our understanding of what's happening in the Bible
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: and additional layer to the fate of people.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that can help deepen our faith as well with all these answers.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: So speaking of our faith,
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: are there any particular verses from any of these chapters that have inspired you
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: during your research or that you find particularly interesting that you would like
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: to share?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was thinking about verses like that, I was...
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: Thinking what verses will reflect the power that we have with the knowledge
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: that came with AI and how careful we should be with using it.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the verses that came to my mind was from King 1 chapter 5 about Solomon,
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: the wise Solomon,
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: and how we all should be very wise and very careful of how we use the knowledge
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: that we have today.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll just read the verses.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's God endowed Solomon with wisdom and vast understanding and breath of heart
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: as boundless as the sand on the shore.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that it's mentioned that we have the wisdom that was given to Solomon,
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: but not only the wisdom,
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: but also kind of the understanding how to use this wisdom,
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: not just like Oh, let's use it and be happy.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: But he had to be very careful and also his heart should be invested in this wisdom.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I think with great power comes great responsibility.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: That is so thoughtful to compare the wisdom of Solomon to AI and our responsibility with that.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Dr.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: Shira Feigenbaum-Golovin,
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: thank you so much for taking the time to come on Fulfilled today.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: Very grateful for all the work you're doing and wish you all the best in the future.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: Can't wait to see what you uncover with the Dead Sea Scrolls and beyond.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Rebecca.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: It was a pleasure to put my Indiana Jones hat and just dive into those ancient texts.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: Every time I talk about it, it's just like exciting.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a big pleasure to be here and thank you for the opportunity.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: And thanks to all of you, our awesome listeners, for tuning in.
• 31:20
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• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: so if you enjoyed today's conversation,
• 31:24
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• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: Stay inspired, keep trusting in God's plan for your life, and we'll see you next time.