Driven IFS and Data Analysis

IFS and the authorship of Genesis

Secular scholars regard the book of Genesis as a combination of three traditions:

the J document written in Judah around 950 B.C.,

the E document written in Ephriam between 900 B.C. and 750 B.C., and

the P document written (by the priestly authors) in Babylon between 588 B.C. and 515 B.C.

An additional complication comes from later authors revising some work of earlier authors.

In their project for the autumn, 2000, fractal geometry course, Andrew Horowitz and Timothy Gambell used gemantria to convert the text of some chapters of Genesis into strings of numbers, and then used these number strings to drive an IFS. Their intention was to try to find visual signatures in the driven IFS for different authors.

First, what is gemantria and is it a plausible choice for converting text to numbers?

Here are the driven IFS for a J chapter, an E chapter, and a P chapter.

Here are some particular features of the J chapter.

Here are some particular features of the E chapter.

Here are some particular features of the P chapter.

Here are Horowitz's and Gambell's analysis of chapters 43 and 20.

Here are Horowitz's and Gambell's analysis of chapters 16 and 36.

Certainly, this work is subject to some reasonable criticism: the coarseness of the four-bin IFS, the use of gemantria to convert text to numbers, the corresponding loss of all literary content. Nevertheless, it represents an interesting first step in using driven IFS to try to deduce authorship of old texts.

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