Public Health as a Social Phenomenon from a Biblical Perspective: Automated Identification

Abstract

This research focuses on the issue of public health, its protection and promotion of a healthy lifestyle. Public health is one of the most important priorities in society around the world. Notable attention is given to the perception of public health from a Biblical perspective. The corpus of the research contains ‘The Holy Scriptures according to the Masoretic texts: A New translation, with the aid of previous versions and with constant consultation of Jewish authorities.’ The attempt is made to analyse and interpret the notion of public health in the Bible and present it by vocabulary expressing the same meaning. The intention is paid to see a word sketch with the most typical combinations by processing words with collocations and other words in its surrounding. The linguistic processing of the text is done by lemmatisation. The results have been distributed into grammatical categories such as words that serve as an object of the noun, words that serve as a subject of the noun, words that modify the noun, the noun used with ‘and/or’, prepositional phrases, adjective predicates of the noun, pronominal possessors of the noun, and verbs used with the noun. An online text analysis tool Sketch Engine is used to make the linguistic analysis of key terms and process large number of texts in order to identify typical and most frequent usage. Eight lemmas have been singled to denote public health: life, blessing, peace, health, clean, unclean, rest and joy. Findings suggest that life, peace, rest, joy, clean and unclean and are the most frequent lemmas to denote health. The surprising fact is that lemma health is used only nine time in the researched text.