Computational Stylometric Approach to the Dead Sea Scrolls: Towards a New Research Agenda

The question of how to classify the different texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls is a central issue in scholarship. There is little agreement or even little reflection, however, on the methodology with which these classifications should be made.This article argues that recent developments in computational stylometry address these methodological issues and that the approach therefore constitutes a necessary addition to existing scholarship. The first section briefly introduces the recent developments in computational stylometry, while the second tests the feasibility of a stylometric approach for research on the Scrolls. Taking into account the particular challenges of the corpus, an exploratory methodology is described, and its first results are presented. In the third and final section, directions for future research in the field are articulated.