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124 SHOFAR Summer 1993 Vol. 11, No.4 This is a book that specialists and non-specialists alike will enjoy reading. Andre LaCocque Professor of Old Testament The Chicago Theological Seminary Stylometric Authorship Studies in Flavius Josephus and Related Literature, by David S. Williams. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1992. 215 pp. $69.95. Williams' book is fundamentally a stylometric analysis ofsix 1500-word samples in the Josephan corpus to determine the probability of the Jewish historian's authorship of 4 Maccabees and the De Universo. Following Eusebius and Jerome, medieval Christian tradition ascribed 4 Maccabees to Josephus. Modern scholarship, however, has generally rejected this attribution, nor has it been sympathetic to the notion that he wrote the fragmentary De Universo, a critique of Greek philosophy that asserts Moses' superiority to the Greek philosophers. Applying the chi-squared test of statistical significance, Williams isolates from these six samples ten common function words-particles, connectives, prepositions-whichJosephus uses throughout his corpus "in statistically uniform ways." Using these function words, he tests the Josephan samples against samples drawn from texts whose authors are known-Nicolaus of Damascus, Strabo, and Plutarch-as well as other Josephan texts. The test words, he argues, generate statistically significant differences between Josephus and other authors. They do not regularly detect such differences falsely when the Josephan block is tested against a sample drawn from Josephus himself. The test words serve then like fingerprints allowing us to identify their owner within a range of statistical probability. More precisely, however, the constraints of this sort of evidence slant the researcher toward a negative assertion: X did not write Y. Testing the two anonymous works leads Williams to a conclusion that will hardly surprise Josephus scholars: it is extremely improbable that Josephus authored either 4 Maccabees or the De Universo. Though his investigation simply confirms accepted opinion, then, its value lies in the fact that it does so by a quite different methodology. The usual objections Book Reviews 125 to Josephan authorship, moreover, are not, as Williams rightly demonstrates , so convincing as some scholars have supposed. As Williams himself acknowledges, he is not the first scholar to analyze Josephus stylometrically. Nearly twenty years ago, for example, A. Q. Morton and S. Michaelson studied elision as an indicator ofauthorship and dealt with the problematic Book 7 of theJewisb War. What distinguishes Williams' work, however, is the elegant clarity and consistency of his methodological exposition. Especially helpful for the uninitiated is his brief survey ofresearch in stylometryfrom de Morgan's first suggestions through Morton's work on Greek prose. Works critical ofcertain approaches appear here and there in the footnotes. Also, Williams himself does explicitly and correctly reject Morton's use ofsentence length and concentration on only one or two words at a time. Williams cites difficulties in studyingJosephus stylometrically-a long, maturing literary career; the fact that Greek was not his native tongue; his use of assistants; his relationship to sources; Christian interpolation. How then is the researcher to be certain that he is dealing with the ipsissima verba ofJosephus? Williams' solution to this dilemma will inevitably appear subjective to some scholars. Among the passages he chooses are the speeches ofJosephus himself in the War, e.g., the speech against suicide delivered at Jotapata. This, however, is a highly self-conscious oration of the type deliberativum conforming to specific rhetorical conventions. In its argument against suicide it resorts more to Greek philosophy than Jewish teaching. In fact the Platonic Pbaedo informs much of its logic, while its phraseology is couched in an Atticistic, archaizing style. This is not to say that Josephus himself could not have written it. Still, it may be worthwhile to assess its literary qualities before inserting it in a block of material that includes a far less artificial passage from the Life. Traditional philology might usefully supplement stylometry here, though, in fairness to Williams, certainty in these matters is unattainable. Also, Thackeray's assertion that Book 20 of Antiquities contains "some of Josephus' purest writing" needs to be reexamined. To refine the discussion, has the use of the eclectic and sometimes uncritical Loeb edition affected the data? What methods were used to avoid error in the manual counting...

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