Scripture Stylometry

Scripture stylometry measures the writing style of sacred texts quantitatively, chiefly through the frequencies of the most common words, in order to compare passages, detect authorial layers, and test traditional claims about who wrote what. Its workhorse is John Burrows's Delta, introduced in 2002, which represents each text as a profile of standardized function-word frequencies and measures the stylistic distance between texts as the average difference between those profiles. Because function words such as articles, prepositions, and particles are used unconsciously and at rates that vary little with subject matter, they form a stable stylistic fingerprint. Recent work, such as the 2025 word-frequency study of the Hebrew Bible by Faigenbaum-Golovin and colleagues, shows how these techniques distinguish scribal corpora and corroborate or challenge the layers identified by traditional source criticism.