I heard that ChatGPT seems to be pretty good since version 5 arrived. So I let it check out my old paper on the meaning of chapter 5 in the book of Genesis.
In 1995 I had checked Genesis 5 myself, 'manually'. The results were published three years later in
Rüdiger Heinzerling, "'Einweihung' durch Henoch? Die Bedeutung der Altersangaben in Genesis 5", ZAW 110 (1998) 581-589.
Fortunately, I made an (admittedly crude) English translation for my homepage, so no one was excluded from access by any paywalls and stuff.
It can still be found in the nostalgic basement of my old homepage:
Akzent 6: The Numbers in Genesis 5 - Translation of original and, I believe, useful material.
This translation now comes in handy when offering fodder to an AI.
As a first step, I let ChatGPT 4 have a try, without creating an account, just the completely free version currently available.
It failed when trying to count words in the Hebrew text and prompted me to write a Python script myself, giving me just a scaffold.
Well, nice try, handing me back the decisive part of the work. :-)
Then I created an account with ChatGPT and started version 5 on the same job.
Here is the complete original chat (only my email-address has been changed with some random number, just in case): The links to result-files will not be working from within the chat document, so here are the two interesting files it offered:
The highlighted printout of the token list
The simple graphic diagram
Result:
Yes, ChatGPT 5 confirmed my core findings.
But the interesting part is that it was able to reason its way through the article, count the Hebrew words according to definition, and check the counts against their semantical counterparts... within 3 and a half minutes! And correctly so, which I know because I did it myself three decades ago.
This is, of course, still something completely different than having the decisive idea of the word-count to age-number - correspondence, which came from Claus Schedl.
But it is quite impressive.