AI doing God’s work: now it knows who really wrote the Bible

It wasn’t even the long dash that gave it away—but word patterns instead.

Researchers from the US, Israel, and France examined how often certain words or word combinations appear in one of the oldest texts in the world. This helped them to determine which parts of the Bible were likely written by the same person or group of people, and which weren’t.

This means the team employed an AI-based word frequency analysis, a form of natural language processing (NLP), to examine the holy texts. The technique is often used in modern authorship attribution studies and has now been applied to ancient Hebrew texts. It’s called advanced computational linguistics.

How did AI understand who wrote what in the Bible?

The team focused on three groups of biblical texts that scholars already think come from different authors or traditions: Older parts of Deuteronomy, the so-called Deuteronomistic History: Joshua through Kings, and the priestly writings, including sections of Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus.

These texts were treated like “training data,” which was “fed” to other, less certain texts into the system to see which style they matched, or if they didn’t match at all.

The method doesn’t just check vocabulary but looks for unique patterns in how words are used. It’s smart enough to work with fairly short texts and subtle linguistic differences that humans might overlook.

Did AI find the author of the Bible?

The AI-powered system was able to correctly identify the likely author group 84% of the time. It confirmed that:

The AI-powered system was able to correctly identify the likely author group 84% of the time. It confirmed that:

• Priestly writings have a very distinct style, different from the others.
• Some texts were misattributed, suggesting parts of the Bible thought to be written by one author may actually come from another.
• Some stories that appear connected, like two parts of the Ark narrative, were actually written by different authors in different periods of time.- A few texts, like the Book of Esther, didn’t fit any known author groups, supporting the idea that they came later or from a separate tradition.

In simple terms, the study provides new data-driven evidence that not all parts of the Bible were written by the same people, even when tradition says otherwise. It challenges long-held ideas about who wrote what, when, and how. It also backs up what many biblical scholars have suspected for years: that the Bible is a patchwork of texts from many hands across many centuries.