Fear and condemnation of women: Biblical translations and Natural Language Processing

The article investigates the dynamics of fear and condemnation in the female context through the analysis of biblical translations using Natural Language Processing () methods. The authors adopt an interdisciplinary approach that combines corpus linguistics and word embedding to analyze the discourse related to female figures associated to sentiments of fear in the Bible. By creating a semantic model based on the probability of term co-occurrence, the authors explore how words associated with fear connect to the female lexicon, revealing semantic and pragmatic patterns that reflect the perception of women in the biblical context. The use of word embedding allows for the exploration of latent semantic dimensions, highlighting relationships between words and their context of use, offering new perspectives on the interpretation of sacred texts and the gender dynamics associated with them, and suggesting new possibilities for close reading investigation also based on the translational strategies of different biblical versions.