Measuring Increasing Abstraction in the Pentateuch

Abstract

Amidst ongoing debate about the Pentateuch’s compositional history, quantitative linguistic analysis is offering powerful new tools for identifying distinctions between its strata. In particular, the measure of syntactic complexity has proved promising for the sociolinguistic implications it warrants, helping link texts to contexts (e.g., early, oral-derived vs. later, writerly-scribal productions). Here I introduce to the discussion a complementary metric: semantic complexity. Scoring linguistic productions for their semantic or “hierarchical complexity” reveals the level of abstraction structuring their meaning, not just their grammatical sophistication. Importantly, this can now be done with considerable quantitative precision. Here I subject the Pentateuch to a hierarchical complexity scoring assessment and demonstrate appreciable differences in the abstraction levels of its hypothesized strata. Findings show that Priestly material (P) is regularly more abstract in character than non-P—but similar to Deuteronomy (D). When we further analyze non-P along neodocumentary lines, we find that J and E are the least complex strata—but similar to one another. These findings corroborate existing sociolinguistic and source-critical insights through entirely novel means, which could offer an important tool for assessing strata in other parts of the biblical corpus.

Keywords: hierarchical complexity, linguistic analysis, sociolinguistics, source criticism