Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <bsr15 AT cantsl.it.canterbury.ac.nz>]

Karl wrote:-

>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.

I thought it was clear from my post that I was not proposing that
cladistic analysis could be used to test the documentary hypothesis.  But
I guess not. So to clarify, I was pointing out that it all probability new
software would have to be developed. Given the payoff is so small (i.e.
those who doubt the DH do so for reasons other than its parsimony and
would reject any conclusions supporting the DH anyway) I doubt anyone
would devote the time required to develop such a tool. To do the type of
test Moshe was asking for would require that the software already exist.
Which means it would already have another function -- in the same way the
cladistic analysis software already existed and could be applied without
further adaption to the problem of reconstruction text family trees.



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