Unsupervised Learning of Two Bible Books: Proverbs and Psalms

Wei Hu

Department of Computer Science, Houghton College, New York, USA.

DOI: 10.4236/sm.2012.23043                

Abstract

The book of Proverbs teaches the wisdom of life that was relevant in the days of King Solomon, the principal author of this book and a son of King David, but more importantly it is still applicable and needed in the life of today. The book of Psalms is the longest book and perhaps the most widely read book of the Bible, which contains 150 songs and prayers with King David as its main composer. The proverbs imparts that the success in life depends on personal choices and actions that relate to other people, while the psalms are used in worship that relates to God. In this report, we apply unsupervised learning to the study of these two books because of their shared association with wisdom. The chapters in each of the two books are grouped by content. Similar chapters and verses between these two books, written by a father and a son, are also identified, allowing one book to illuminate the other. Our computational findings match those by Biblical scholars at large, but have made a few new discoveries that could not be accomplished by traditional methods.

Keywords

Bible; Proverbs; Psalms; Affinity Propagation; Clustering Algorithm; Topic Model; Machine Learning; Text Mining

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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