Measuring Style in Isaiah: Isaiah 34–35 and the Tiberias Stylistic Classifier for the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

Abstract Scholars routinely discern the diachronic development of the book of Isaiah with a discreet focus on vocabulary, phrases, themes, and motifs. All but absent from consideration are the distribution and recurrence of grammatical, morphological, and syntactic features within the text. This study serves as a proof-of concept for the linguistic analysis of such features now available with the launch of the Tiberias Stylistic Classifier for the Hebrew Bible (https://tiberias.dicta.org.il/#/). Measuring and weighing the linguistic features of Isa 1–33 and Isa 40–55, the study brings to light the morphological and syntactic features most characteristic of each text corpus. The study also demonstrates that chs. 34 and 35 of Isaiah are much closer in morphology and syntax to chs. 1–33 than they are to chs. 40–55. The implications of these findings are examined in consideration of the scholarly debate concerning the provenance of these two chapters.