Towards an Integrated Methodology of Dating Biblical Texts: The Case of the Book of Jeremiah

What it is about

This is a project overview, not a result paper. The authors want to date the language of the Book of Jeremiah by combining redaction criticism, which splits the book into sources and layers, with linguistic dating of Biblical Hebrew, in which Classical (CBH) and Late (LBH) features are counted. They review the debate: Hurvitz's three tests for a late feature (distribution, contrast with an early equivalent, and attestation outside one text), the requirement that a whole text must show an accumulation of late features, Hornkohl's finding that Jeremiah is a mix of early and late features, and the critique of Young, Rezetko and Ehrensvärd, who hold that language alone cannot date texts. The planned method trains a masked language model on the Hebrew Bible (ETCBC data) and fine-tunes it to segment Jeremiah, with explainability required from the start. Pilot results are small: a linear classifier over a RoBERTa-style model reaches 73.4% validation accuracy, and its explanations recover a known late spelling of David. Earlier work by Naaijer used clause sequences of parts of speech.

Ideas

• I1. Turn Hurvitz's three tests into table rows: each late feature has a distribution count, a contrast partner (the early equivalent), and an extra-biblical attestation flag. A text is scored by how many features pass all three, and the score is an explained count, not a classifier output.
• I2. Represent each clause as a sequence of part-of-speech tags and phrase functions, as in Naaijer's earlier LSTM work, and test whether a small, explainable model reproduces the Jonah and Ruth result on the same features.
• I3. Use the late spelling of David (with an extra yod, against the common spelling) as a regression test: a dating layer that does not flag it on a known LBH text is wrong.

For Mova

I1 goes into 12. Biblical, Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew compared (the CBH/LBH split and its tests) and into The lexicon for the late vocabulary. I2 is a feature set for macula prag rules, run on the Torah first. I3 is a test for the same tables. The paper's insistence that each dating step be explainable matches Mova's own rule: every decision says why.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2025.alp-1.6

@inproceedings{naaijer2025integrated,
  title = {{Towards an Integrated Methodology of Dating Biblical Texts: The Case of the Book of Jeremiah}},
  author = {Naaijer, Martijn and Wilson-Wright, Aren},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Ancient Language Processing},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2025.alp-1.6},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.alp-1.6}
}

References

32 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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