I made word embeddings of each Psalm in the book of Psalms from the Bible, wondering if they can be helpful tools for categorizing Psalms by their genres!

By extension, I wonder if embeddings can be helpful in studying how God uses word relationships to express truth in the Psalms. I am also curious to discover any potential implications for using embeddings as tools for concordances, dictionaries, or other Bible study tools.

This was made in April-May 2025 as a project for the NLP class I took in college, one of my favorite classes! Learning about the relationship between mathematics and language is super fascinating to me, and I wanted to see if the meaningful, deeper-than-the-ocean poetic structure of the Psalms are captured mathematically by embedding matrices.

"The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple; The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes." - Psalm 19:7-8

"For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart." - Hebrews 4:12

Things I hope to improve with this project:

• Apply these embeddings to some kind of study or genre/theme categorization tool
• Overall readability (lol)
• Study the Psalms (including in their original language) more deeply and see if the embedding cosine similarities truly reflect the intentionality of what words and themes are being communicated as similar/dissimilar in the Psalms.
• For example: I observed that embeddings for "Lord" and "God" have extremely low cosine similarities to all other words for many Psalms. It made me wonder if the names of God are intentionally so radically different than all other words to reflect God's utter holiness (uniqueness) compared to all His creation? Is this difference part of the poetry structure, and/or even the etymology of His names? I also want to study the Psalms better so I that I may interpret the Bible, God's Word, correctly!)

If you have any thoughts, feedback, corrections, suggestions, etc. for this project I'd greatly appreciate it! :D