Q&A: Statistical Anomaly in the Book of Deuteronomy
Statistical Anomaly in the Book of Deuteronomy
Question
Hello Rabbi,
Recently I got hold of a script writer that checks the frequency of word appearances in texts, and I ran it on the books of the Torah. I noticed that the common function words appear with anomalous frequency in the Book of Deuteronomy relative to the other books. Here are the frequencies in percentages, in the order of the books:
“et”: 3.3 | 4 | 3.72 | 2.77 | 3.14
“asher”: 1.78 | 1.55 | 2.39 | 1.63 | 3.74
“el”: 1.71 | 1.92 | 1.69 | 1.83 | 1
“ki”: 1.41 | 1.13 | 1.12 | 0.78 | 1.94
“kol”: 1.02 | 1.16 | 1.23 | 1.4 | 1.49
“ve-et”: 1.04 | 1.35 | 1.54 | 0.79 | 0.69
“al”: 1.05 | 1.7 | 1.78 | 1.1 | 0.92
When I calculated the average distance of the frequencies between the books (for each function word, and then an average over all the words), this was the result (in the order of the books):
Genesis: 0 | 2.51 | 2.78 | 2.13 | 4.32
Exodus: 2.51 | 0 | 1.7 | 3.15 | 6.54
Leviticus: 2.78 | 1.7 | 0 | 3.79 | 5.42
Numbers: 2.13 | 3.15 | 3.79 | 0 | 4.84
Deuteronomy: 4.32 | 6.54 | 5.42 | 4.84 | 0
It seems that all the books are farthest from Deuteronomy by a significant margin in terms of the frequency of function words, except for Deuteronomy, which of course is not farthest from itself but rather farthest from Exodus.
I also learned that a check was done regarding the percentage of verses that begin with the letter vav, and this was the result, in the order of the books:
84.1 | 78 | 72.5 | 67.1 | 46.5
Here too, you can see that the Book of Deuteronomy is the most statistically anomalous. a0
Do you think there is really something to this anomaly? Or is it incidental? And if so, what do you think it means? Or what can be learned from it?
Best regards,
Answer
I have no idea. But one has to distinguish between two kinds of takeaways:
- You know that the text was written by the Holy One, blessed be He, and the question is what He wants to tell us through this.
- This itself proves that the text was written by the Holy One, blessed be He, or that the text is saying something.
There is a difference between these two. Claims of the second type I usually treat with a lot of skepticism (see the thread you posted about the appearance of digits in the census of the children of Israel in the Torah). Statistics can be deceptive. Claims of the first type are more acceptable, because if the Holy One, blessed be He, composed it and did something special in the text, I understand people who look for what it means. But even here one has to be careful, because the answers offered to explain it can be many and varied. Different homiletic ideas get hung on these phenomena. So it is hard to draw clear conclusions from this.
Discussion on Answer
Definitely possible. In the book itself there are strong indications that Moses wrote it.
But that is one possible suggestion among several others for explaining the phenomenon.
“Mishneh Torah” was said by Moses in his own words.
There is the Talmud in tractate Bava Batra 14b:
“Moses wrote his book, the section of Balaam, and Job.”
The commentators explained there that “his book” means the Five Books of the Torah (and they were pressed to resolve the difficulty posed by the additional mention of the section of Balaam, which is included in the Five Books of the Torah). Maybe in light of the statistical finding I brought above, it would be correct to interpret that “the book of Moses” is specifically Deuteronomy.
What do you think?