Detecting Narrative Patterns in Biblical H ebrew and G reek (2024)

Abstract: We present a novel approach to extracting recurring narrative patterns, or type-scenes, in Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Greek with an information retrieval network. We use cross-references to train an encoder model to create similar representations for verses linked by a cross-reference. We then query our trained model with phrases informed by humanities scholarship and designed to elicit particular kinds of narrative scenes. Our models can surface relevant instances in the top-10 ranked candidates in many cases.Through manual error analysis and discussion, we address the limitations and challenges inherent in our approach. Our findings contribute to the field of Biblical scholarship by offering a new perspective on narrative analysis within ancient texts, and to computational modeling of narrative with a genre-agnostic approach for pattern-finding in long, literary texts.

## introduction in this study, we present a new approach to extracting recurring narrative patterns, or type-scenes, in biblical hebrew and biblical greek. the term type-scene [typische szene] was coined in the homeric scholarship to refer to the formulaic and recurring narrative patterns or scenes, such as the arming or sacrifice scenes in the iliad @xcite . this term was later adapted to refer to the phenomenon in biblical narratives of repeated use of similar patterns to describe a narrative event @xcite . 1 we pose type-scene extraction as an information retrieval task, where one verse (a query) and its surrounding context can be used to retrieve thematically similar verses (candidates). cross-references provide structured information about linked passages, whether through direct text reuse, thematic parallelism, or common characters. learning representations that maximize the similarity of crossreferenced passages may enable us to surface other forms of narrative connection, i.e. type-scene. in the context of the bible, an example of such a recurrent pattern would be the story of a rivalry between "a barren but favored wife" and "a fertile concubine" (e.g. sarah-hagar, rachel-bilhah and leah-zilpah) @xcite . type-scenes connect to a larger body of literary scholarship concerned with narrative patterns in the form of recurrent structures that could be instantiated by a variety of different characters and settings, such as a hero is tempted. in literary theory, these include dramatis personae and their functions in folktales @xcite or the concept of figura that refers to similarities in the structure of events or in the circumstances that accompany them in biblical stories @xcite . in this study, we focus on the bible since it offers a rich example to study recurrent narrative structures because of its heavily self-referential composition; however, the model we propose can be applied to any long-text genre where repeating narrative patterns may be of interest, such as shakespeare's plays, greek tragedy, even movie scripts. we show that a network fine-tuned on a set of bible cross-references improves recall@k over its respective pre-trained models. although recall values remain low in real terms, our models retrieve relevant candidates in the top-10 results for each type-scene query, showing that this approach holds great promise as a tool for biblical scholars to uncover recurrent narrative patterns in the bible. ## related works recently, studies have emphasized the need to combine theoretical work on narrative within the humanities and computational methods for reason- type-scene description example scholarly support 1. a man meets a woman by a well genesis 24:11 alter (1978) 2. an angel announces a barren woman will bear a child judges 13:3 alter (1983) 3. the younger son is preferred to the older son malachi 1:2-3 davies (1995) 4. god sends a prophet to speak to a rebellious people jonah 1:1-3 long (1973) 5. a man has an epiphany in the field ezekiel 1:1 alter (1978) 6. a prophet veils his face exodus 34:33 britt (2002) 7. a well is found in the desert genesis 16:7 alter (1978) 8. the words of a dying hero genesis 50:25 alter (1978) 9. a hero is tempted judges 16:6 alter (1978) relic @xcite : we draw inspiration from relic's methodology, which employs two separate encoder networks to embed primary source quotations (e.g. taken from "pride and prejudice") and quoting passages in the scholarly literature (e.g. commentaries on jane austen's work). their approach involves minimizing a contrastive loss function with in-batch negative sampling. notably, relic's work demonstrates the effectiveness of crafting out-of-domain queries, such as 'elizabeth is frustrated with her mother,' and finding sometimes useful results. building on this, we explore intra-biblical allusions through the lens of type-scenes, adapting their approach to the unique context of biblical narratives. ## results we present the recall metrics for both untrained and trained models across ancient and modern greek/hebrew in we further investigate the performance disparity between ancient and modern language models, as illustrated in figure 1a and figure 1b . 'ancient greek 1' @xcite and 'ancient greek 2' show a marked difference in their performance despite sharing the same backbone bert model. 'ancient greek 1' is fine-tuned on a corpus of plutarch texts and data from the perseus digital library foot_4 and first thousand years of greek foot_5 and was created to examine authorship identification in plutarch's works. 'ancient greek 2' (singh et al., 2021) is fine-tuned on a varied corpus of modern, ancient, and post-classical greek and was intended for downstream use for pos-tagging. an ablation study on batch size, a critical parameter for contrastive loss functions, is conducted and depicted in figure 3 we find a batch size of 16 to be optimal while increasing the batch size harms recall metrics. additionally, we explore the impact of context window size through an ablation study, as shown in figure 4 two verses on either side of the query verse (a window size of 4) outperform over both smaller and larger context windows. we also assess the effect of masking out the context verse, a strategy employed in the original relic implementation, on our problem, as presented in figure 2 . masking has a substantial impact on recall metrics. not masking the query verse nearly doubles performance over masking. finally, we offer selected examples of verses returned by our model for each type-scene query in ## analysis the task of recalling thematically linked narrative passages presents significant challenges. even when expanding the scope from individual verses to entire chapters, the recall scores remain low. our in general, there tend to be a few relevant results returned in the top 10 for each query, but some queries work better than others, and we find that queries that mention concrete items, e.g. man, woman, desert, etc. fare better on average. n.b. we use english translations from the english standard version 2011. insights from ablations. contrary to expectations, the performance differences between modern and ancient language models were minimal. ## discussion our findings indicate that concrete queries containing specific terms like "man," "woman," "well," and "son" tend to yield better results than more abstract or vague queries. this suggests that the precision of language used in queries significantly impacts the effectiveness of narrative type-scene retrieval. linguistic discrepancies further complicate this process. for instance, the absence of a direct equivalent for the modern concept of a "hero" in biblical texts highlights the challenges of aligning contemporary understandings with ancient languages. this linguistic gap can lead to difficulties in accurately retrieving and interpreting type-scenes that involve heroic figures. circularity in data interpretation poses another challenge. crowd-sourced votes for identifying type-scenes often come from english readers of english translations of the bible. these translations may have been influenced by the translators' biases, potentially overemphasizing or underemphasizing certain narrative connections. this feedback loop can reinforce certain interpretations, making them seem more canonical than they might be in the original texts. additionally, confirmation bias can lead to the perception of type-scenes where none may exist. for example, the narrative of david and bathsheba was identified as part of the "woman at the well" type-scene. however, this might represent an inversion of the type-scene. instead of bathsheba drawing david water, david sees and takes her, echoing the language of eve "seeing and taking" the forbidden fruit, which connotes sinfulness. although their union results in marriage, it is marked by tragedy rather than the celebration of a family lineage. the death of their child as a consequence of david's sin underscores this inversion. this example illustrates how patterns might be perceived where there are none, with the model potentially focusing on superficial cues like "man," "woman," and "water." while such tools can inspire creative scholarly thinking, they cannot replace rigorous scholarly analysis. researchers must remain vigilant against over-interpreting patterns and maintain a critical approach to ensure accurate and meaningful interpretations of biblical narratives. ## conclusions our study demonstrates that training a model to optimize embedding similarity between crossreferenced verses enhances an informationretrieval model's ability to identify repeating narrative patterns, known as type-scenes, in the ancient hebrew and greek versions of the bible. by fine-tuning a siamese network with a contrastive loss function and using queries written in ancient languages, we were able to elicit type-scenes effectively. through manual error analysis and discussion of the returned verses, we conclude that while there is a detectable signal indicating the presence of type-scenes, the current setup has significant room for improvement. the model's potential utility is notable for biblical scholars and personal devotees who are interested in exploring narrative parallelism within the bible. however, further refinement and optimization of the system are necessary to enhance its accuracy and reliability. future work will include a more sophisticated method for dividing books into narrative sections rather than individual verses and will remove masking from the training method. finally, although we use the bible as a case study due to its particularly fascinating self-referential narrative patterns, our approach may be adapted for long-form literary text of any genre to surface underlying narrative patterns.