Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Bill:
Another article, accessed from the Wikipedia article:
http://rjohara.net/darwin/files/bmcr concerning textual criticism. From this
article it appears that cladistic analysis can help with textual criticism
where one has a body of data in the form of surviving manuscripts, but it
would not be useful in trying to reconstruct hypothetical stemma in a
hypothesized compilation of separate sources into a unified document.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Jan 2, 2008 1:20 PM, Bill Rea <bsr15 AT cantsl.it.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

> Moshe Shulman wrote:-
>
> >Verifiability is shown not of the text whose composition is unknown,
> >but on known texts. One would need to have a program that worked in
> >three cases: Genesis, text A of single authorship, text B with
> >multiple authorships. I have never heard of anyone even considering
> >doing  this type of test.
>
> I've been away for a while hence my delay in replying. I'm sorry I can't
> give clear references as this is outside my area of expertise. While not
> directly dealing with authorship, for many years some scholars who studied
> text families, variant readings and the like claimed that what they were
> doing could never be done by computer. However, someone once took up the
> challenge and applied cladistic analysis to, if I recall correctly, a
> group of Scandanavian texts. Coding the data for input took a long time
> but the running of the clade software only took a matter of minutes and
> essentially reconstructed the whole family tree of the texts which had
> been pains-takingly worked out by humans.
>
> The problem with doing something like Moshe suggests is that unless
> the software already exists and is currently used for other purposes
> its unlikely anyone would devote the time require build such an
> thing. Codifying the process humans go through in determining which
> strand of the text a particular verse or set of verses belongs to
> would be a huge amount of work.
>
> The article at Wikipedia on cladistics is reasonable but has little
> on applications outside genetics.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladistics
>
> Bill Rea, ICT Services, University of Canterbury \_
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