השוואת שיטות

	Source Criticism (Documentary Hypothesis)	Scripture Stylometry
תחום	Religious Studies	Religious Studies
משפחה	Process / pipeline	Machine learning
שנת המקור	1885	2002
הוגה השיטה	Julius Wellhausen (classic synthesis); popularized by Richard Elliott Friedman	John Burrows (Delta); applied to scripture by Faigenbaum-Golovin et al. and others
סוג	Document-separation pipeline reconstructing the written sources of a text	Distance-based stylometric model over function-word frequencies
מקור מכונן	Wellhausen, J. (1885). Prolegomena to the History of Israel (trans. J. S. Black & A. Menzies). Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black. [Cambridge Library Collection reprint]. ISBN: 9781108053822	Burrows, J. (2002). 'Delta': a Measure of Stylistic Difference and a Guide to Likely Authorship. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 17(3), 267-287.
כינויים	Literarkritik, Documentary Hypothesis, JEDP Analysis, Pentateuchal Source Criticism	Stylometric Analysis of Sacred Texts, Computational Stylistics of Scripture, Burrows's Delta for Scripture, Quantitative Stylistics of Religious Texts
קשורות	4	4
תקציר	Source criticism (Literarkritik) seeks the written documents that lie behind a composite biblical text. Its most famous result is the Documentary Hypothesis, the claim that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) was woven together from four originally independent sources, conventionally labeled J, E, D, and P. The hypothesis grew over the nineteenth century and received its classic synthesis from Julius Wellhausen, whose 1878 Prolegomena to the History of Israel argued that the sources reflect successive stages in the development of Israelite religion. Richard Elliott Friedman's 1987 Who Wrote the Bible? presented the theory to a wide audience with vivid arguments for who wrote each source and when. Source criticism separates the strands by criteria such as the divine name used, doublets, vocabulary, style, and theology, then reconstructs how a redactor combined them.	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.