Bible codes
Brian Trosko
Chris Marriott <ch...@chrism.demon.co.uk> wrote:
: >If the Bible Code program is so effective, why didn't it predict Princess
: >Di death?
: >I say put the codes to a test and give us all a list of predictions for the
: >next six months.
: MUST you make such tasteless and offensive remarks? The situation is bad
: enough without people attempting to make "funny" comments about it.
I don't think he's trying to be humorous. It's a totally valid question.
If the Bible Codes are as valid as some claim, doesn't this predicitve
omissions cast doubt on them?
G. Mark Stewart
Brian Trosko (btr...@primenet.com) wrote:
If someone's religion can't take humor, it's not one I'd sign up for.
"Sure, it's the inviolable bedrock foundation of my life's philosophy and
ultimate purpose. But don't tease me about it, man."
Archangel
Oh, Golly, Gee ... and what do you suppose can be learned from
employing ELS technique upon, say ... the Qu'ran, or Kennedy
Assassination Report, or (gulp) even Pickwick Papers? I can't wait!
--
IMPORTANT - To foil junkmail, I devised a bogus address.
To contact me, remove the word BOGUS.
Bud
If the Bible Code program is so effective, why didn't it predict Princess
Di death?
I say put the codes to a test and give us all a list of predictions for the
next six months.
Enquiring minds want to know.
BJ
David wrote in article <34099d3c...@news.inter.net.il>...
> Are Rabin's, Kennedy's and Sa'adat's assassinations and
> the next nuclear war all scripted in the Bible?
> The existence of the "hidden codes" phenomenon was first
> discovered by Professor Eliyahu Rips along with his colleagues
> Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg. They researched into the
> seemingly unique patterns encoded in the Book of Genesis.
> Scanning the text by computer using a scientific method called
> Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS) has disclosed that "hidden
>
> in the Torah text are words or meaningful combinations letters.
>
> Now you can find out by yourself with Bible Codes Program.
>
> http://www.grapho.net/codes/
>
>
> You must see it !!!
> It is AMAZING !!!!!!!
>
June Gill
In article <01bcb635$b2a34e20$a174...@bwagner.ionet.net>, Bud
<bwa...@ionet.net> writes
>If the Bible Code program is so effective, why didn't it predict Princess
>Di death?
You can bet they'll find it _now_, Bud.
--
June G
# 364
Robert Billing
In article <5uco2h$oah$8...@brownfox.svs.com>
gm...@grayfox.svs.com "G. Mark Stewart" writes:
> If someone's religion can't take humor, it's not one I'd sign up for.
No, Mark, we in the UK are all very upset about the loss of Diana, and
don't think people should make comments like that while the poor girl
is lying dead in St George's. It has nothing to do with religion, just
proper respect for the dead.
--
I am Robert Billing, Christian, inventor, traveller, cook and animal
lover, I live near 0:46W 51:22N. http://www.tnglwood.demon.co.uk/
"The internet is weirder than we imagine. Parts of it are possibly
weirder than we can manage to imagine..."
Bud
Chris Marriott <ch...@chrism.demon.co.uk> wrote in article
<avAfnFAK...@chrism.demon.co.uk>...
> In article <01bcb635$b2a34e20$a174...@bwagner.ionet.net>, Bud
> <bwa...@ionet.net> writes
> >If the Bible Code program is so effective, why didn't it predict
Princess
> >Di death?
> >I say put the codes to a test and give us all a list of predictions for
the
> >next six months.
>
> MUST you make such tasteless and offensive remarks? The situation is bad
> enough without people attempting to make "funny" comments about it.
>
> Chris, in England
I didn't make the remarks about Princess Diana to be humorous. The
original post was trying to prove the accuracy of the Bible Codes by
claiming it had predicted the deaths of several notable people. I proably
didn't say it very well, but what I meant was that if the Bible Codes were
so good at predicting things, why could they have predicted Princess
Diana's accident and maybe help prevent it.
The authors of the Bible Codes are using the death of others to sell their
book -- which I find tasteless and offensive. I really believe that these
same people will turn around and say "see, our Bible Codes predicted
Princess Diana's death" and use this to help sell even more books.
BJ
George Lowry
It is obvious from the posts that people commenting on "The Bible Code" have
not yet taken time to read the book. If they had done so, such comments would
not be made.
As I read the book, the code breaking so far has only allowed them to confirm
events in the past. To predict events in the future requires some information
that has yet to be uncovered.
You really need to read the book to understand.
George
Jim Rooke
On 1 Sep 1997 17:52:57 GMT, "Bud" <bwa...@ionet.net> wrote:
>
>
>Chris Marriott <ch...@chrism.demon.co.uk> wrote in article
>
>The authors of the Bible Codes are using the death of others to sell their
>book -- which I find tasteless and offensive. I really believe that these
>same people will turn around and say "see, our Bible Codes predicted
>Princess Diana's death" and use this to help sell even more books.
>
>BJ
As I understand the Bible codes as of today, they don't "predict"
anything. Under the present status of it, they take an instance
which has already happened, then search for and find some relative
information that could possible be relevant!
“Let There be Peace on Earth and let it begin with me”
http://kpt1.tricon.net/Personal/jrooke
Bud
George Lowry <ww...@ns.net> wrote in article <340B1732...@ns.net>...
> It is obvious from the posts that people commenting on "The Bible Code"
have
> not yet taken time to read the book. If they had done so, such comments
would
> not be made.
>
> As I read the book, the code breaking so far has only allowed them to
confirm
> events in the past. To predict events in the future requires some
information
> that has yet to be uncovered.
>
> You really need to read the book to understand.
>
> George
Tomorrow's racing form will be "able to confirm" the results of today's
races. Why would I need to buy a book that tells me what already happened.
I don't know if "To predict events in the future requires some information
that has yet to be uncovered." is strictly your comment or based on
comments of the Bible Codes author, but to me this is a cop out. Gee I
could predict the future if only I had some more information -- like what
was going to happen.
BJ
Bud
Jim Rooke <jro...@tricon.net> wrote in article
<340b1f8d...@news.tricon.net>...
The following is a quote from the web site listed in the original "Bible
Codes" post:
<Quote on>
Recently, an explosive book has been published, The Bible Code (264 pages,
Simon & Schuster) by Michael Drosnin, which is causing a sensation around
the world, due to its author having found, among many other codes, an
encrypted warning about Rabin’s assasination a year before the prime
minister was killed.
<quote off>
As you can see, the author of the Bible Codes claims to have "known" about
Rabin's death a year before it happened. I personally feel that I could
use almost any book and use it to "predict" events that have already
happened. Now if I could figure out a way to do this "before" it happen,
then I be rich. IMO, the Bible Codes is just a dressed up version of the
National Enquiror or some other supermarket tabloid.
BJ
BJ
Bud
George Lowry <ww...@ns.net> wrote in article <340B1732...@ns.net>...
> It is obvious from the posts that people commenting on "The Bible Code"
have
> not yet taken time to read the book. If they had done so, such comments
would
> not be made.
>
> As I read the book, the code breaking so far has only allowed them to
confirm
> events in the past. To predict events in the future requires some
information
> that has yet to be uncovered.
>
> You really need to read the book to understand.
>
> George
>
If you go to the web site listed in the oriaginal post, you can find the
following quote:
"Recently, an explosive book has been published, The Bible Code (264 pages,
Simon & Schuster) by Michael Drosnin, which is causing a sensation around
the world, due to its author having found, among many other codes, an
encrypted warning about Rabin's assasination a year before the prime
minister was killed."
Maybe the book itself doesn't "claim" to predict events, but the author
appears to be trying to convince potential buyers that it does.
BJ
George Lowry
Read the book BEFORE you judge. Don't be misled by quotes of mine or
others.
George
Bud wrote:
> Jim Rooke <jro...@tricon.net> wrote in article
> <340b1f8d...@news.tricon.net>...
> > On 1 Sep 1997 17:52:57 GMT, "Bud" <bwa...@ionet.net> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >
> > >Chris Marriott <ch...@chrism.demon.co.uk> wrote in article
> > >
> > >The authors of the Bible Codes are using the death of others to sell
> their
> > >book -- which I find tasteless and offensive. I really believe that
> these
> > >same people will turn around and say "see, our Bible Codes predicted
> > >Princess Diana's death" and use this to help sell even more books.
> > >
> > >BJ
> > As I understand the Bible codes as of today, they don't "predict"
> > anything. Under the present status of it, they take an instance
> > which has already happened, then search for and find some relative
> > information that could possible be relevant!
> >
> > “Let There be Peace on Earth and let it begin with me”
> > http://kpt1.tricon.net/Personal/jrooke
> >
> The following is a quote from the web site listed in the original "Bible
> Codes" post:
>
> <Quote on>
> Recently, an explosive book has been published, The Bible Code (264 pages,
> Simon & Schuster) by Michael Drosnin, which is causing a sensation around
> the world, due to its author having found, among many other codes, an
> encrypted warning about Rabin’s assasination a year before the prime
> minister was killed.
Simon Slavin
In article <5uclp0$p...@nntp02.primenet.com>,
Brian Trosko <btr...@primenet.com> wrote:
> Chris Marriott <ch...@chrism.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> : >If the Bible Code program is so effective, why didn't it
> : >predict Princess
> : >Di death?
>
> : MUST you make such tasteless and offensive remarks? The situation is bad
> : enough without people attempting to make "funny" comments about it.
>
> I don't think he's trying to be humorous. It's a totally valid question.
Not on alt.folklore.urban it isn't. Matters to do with religion are
specifically declared off-charter for that group by the FAQ. Please
modify your followups accordingly.
Simon.
--
Simon Slavin -- Computer Contractor. | Oh, sorry, you neglected to
http://www.hearsay.demon.co.uk | mention above that the child
Check email address for spam-guard. | was the antichrist. -- sharkey@
Junk email not welcome at this site. | ee.mu.OZ.AU (Nicholas MOORE)
Brian Trosko
Chris Marriott <ch...@chrism.demon.co.uk> wrote:
: The only other situation which probably parallels it is the public
: reaction to the death of John Kennedy in the USA.
This doesn't even compare. Perhaps a truer comparison would be the death
of Princess Grace.
Judson D. McClendon
Stewart Brinn <sbr...@netcomuk.co.uk.nospam> wrote:
> While I agree with your sentiments, there is a valid point made. It is
> unlikely that any other event this decade will match the tragedy in
> Paris. It is also unlikely that any person this century has caused
> such an outpouring of grief and public sympathy. Should there be a
> valid bible code, surely the events of sunday should be represented. I
> wonder why nothing seems to be predicted, rather only found after the
> event.
Let me respond to that last sentence, because there has been a lot said in
this thread and others who do not understand what the Bible Codes really
are. I am not a statistics expert, but unlike most of the people writing
on these threads, I have spent some time researching and actually working
with the Bible Codes and used some programs to check it out first hand. If
you want to know the facts, read the article "Equidistant Letter Sequences
in the Book of Genesis" by Witzum, Rips and Rosenberg, in Statistical
Science magazine (vol. 9, no. 3), August 1994. In my opinion and, much
more importantly, in the opinion of the authors of the article, you cannot
predict the future with the Bible Codes. But that doesn't mean that the
Bible Codes aren't real. They are real and have been objectively
demonstrated under peer review. The reason why you can't predict the
future with Bible Codes is pretty simple, but to understand why, you need
to understand what the Bible Codes (Equidistant Letter Sequences, ELS for
short) actually are.
In any text, even random combinations of letters, you can select every Nth
letter from the text and here and there find actual words. The point is
that in any other text other than the original Hebrew of the Bible, the
words you find will fit what would be expected from statistical analysis of
the frequency of the letters. In other words, you find random words
scattered at random intervals. Any 'meaningful' word pairings, for
instance, occur only as frequently as you would expect from a random sample
of text with the same letter distribution. However, study of the original
Hebrew Bible text shows something quite different. The frequencies of
certain kinds of word pairings have been demonstrated to be far, far above
any random expectation. Not a little bit more, but thousands of TIMES
more! There has been petty squabbling about how the word pairings were
selected and tested, but in fact, it doesn't really matter, because no
other text has been shown to have this property to any degree at all,
except for text where patterns were coded on purpose. Which is the point,
that these patterns simply must have been put there by some intelligence.
Now here's where the future bit actually comes into play, though not in a
way we could use to predict the future. There are names and events and
dates coded in the Bible which only happened hundreds or thousands of years
after the text was written. You must remember that in *no other text* has
this been found! What this means is that, not only was some superior
intelligence involved to actually code these things in the text, but that
the intelligence also knew the future, because the names and events were
coded long before they actually happened.
Then why can't we simply examine the Bible Codes and tell the future?
Because, not only are those obviously coded words in there, but there are
as many 'random' words as you would find in any other text. You simply
don't know what words to search for, and when you find words coded, you
don't know if they're part of the actual codes words or just some of the
random words. The point to remember though, is that every single pair of
names/dates used in the Statistical Science article were found. The odds
against that happening from random chance are simply staggering. Somebody
coded those names and dates in there. In my opinion, nobody but God could
have done it, and the Bible Codes are simply a Divine authentication that
the Bible is His Word.
--
Judson McClendon This is a faithful saying and worthy of all
Sun Valley Systems acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the
ju...@mindspring.com world to save sinners (1 Timothy 1:15)
Quixote Digital Typography
In article <01bcb7e3$ca6c84e0$4c34b9ce@juddesk>,
Judson D. McClendon <ju...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>with the Bible Codes and used some programs to check it out first hand. If
>you want to know the facts, read the article "Equidistant Letter Sequences
>in the Book of Genesis" by Witzum, Rips and Rosenberg, in Statistical
>Science magazine (vol. 9, no. 3), August 1994. In my opinion and, much
>more importantly, in the opinion of the authors of the article, you cannot
>predict the future with the Bible Codes. But that doesn't mean that the
>Bible Codes aren't real. They are real and have been objectively
>demonstrated under peer review.
>In any text, even random combinations of letters, you can select every Nth
>letter from the text and here and there find actual words. The point is
>that in any other text other than the original Hebrew of the Bible, the
>words you find will fit what would be expected from statistical analysis of
>the frequency of the letters. In other words, you find random words
>scattered at random intervals. Any 'meaningful' word pairings, for
>instance, occur only as frequently as you would expect from a random sample
>of text with the same letter distribution. However, study of the original
>Hebrew Bible text shows something quite different. The frequencies of
>certain kinds of word pairings have been demonstrated to be far, far above
>any random expectation. Not a little bit more, but thousands of TIMES
>more! There has been petty squabbling about how the word pairings were
>selected and tested, but in fact, it doesn't really matter, because no
>other text has been shown to have this property to any degree at all,
>except for text where patterns were coded on purpose.
Were the control texts also in Hebrew? There is a lot less difference
in letter frequency in Hebrew than there is in, say, English. Add in
Hebrew's non-written vowels and it turns out that nearly any random
combination of letters is a word.
Frequent word pairings can be the result of certain formulaic
phrases. Was this controlled for?
Bogus science is usualy the result of lack of proper controls and
analysis of the experiment.
There's a lot of smoke around the so-called Bible codes that could use
some clearing.
-dh
--
Don Hosek dho...@quixote.com Quixote Digital Typography
708-788-1501 fax: 708-788-1530 orders: 800-810-3311
For information about SERIF: THE MAGAZINE OF TYPE & TYPOGRAPHY,
http://www.quixote.com/serif/ or mail serif...@quixote.com
Judson D. McClendon
Yes, of course. The control texts are explained in the article (the text
of which is available on the web), but they were versions of Genesis
randomized in various ways and a Hebrew translation of part of War and
Peace the same size as Genesis.
> Frequent word pairings can be the result of certain formulaic
> phrases. Was this controlled for?
Yes. One of the control texts was Genesis with all the verses intact but
rearranged in random order. This control text was essentially identical in
result to the other random texts. You really should read the article.
> Bogus science is usualy the result of lack of proper controls and
> analysis of the experiment.
That article went through a particularly aggressive peer review process,
and the final selection of names/dates for the search was suggested by one
of the more skeptical reviewers, I understand.
> There's a lot of smoke around the so-called Bible codes that could use
> some clearing.
You are correct, and that is what prompted my post. So many people are
making unsubstantiated claims that the real issue is becoming clouded.
That there are intelligently placed hidden codes in the Hebrew text of the
Bible is a demonstrable fact, as far as I am concerned. The problem is
that much more research needs to be done before we know the scope of these
codes and how best to understand them.
Pamela
On 1 Sep 1997, Bud wrote:
> > <bwa...@ionet.net> writes
> > >If the Bible Code program is so effective, why didn't it predict
> Princess
> > >Di death?
> > >I say put the codes to a test and give us all a list of predictions for
> the
> > >next six months.
>
> I didn't make the remarks about Princess Diana to be humorous. The
> original post was trying to prove the accuracy of the Bible Codes by
> claiming it had predicted the deaths of several notable people. I proably
> didn't say it very well, but what I meant was that if the Bible Codes were
> so good at predicting things, why could they have predicted Princess
> Diana's accident and maybe help prevent it.
>
> BJ
>
>
One thing that I've noticed, that I think is trying to be said, is that
the death of a notable person is only predictable through Bible Codes
after it has happened. We can go back through the bible, pick how we
want the codes to turn out and I'm sure you'll find a way to do it...but
can you decode the bible for an event (be it a death or wedding or
whatever) before it happens rather than afterwards?
Sincerely,
<signature here>
Pamela Schorr
Pamela
Well, I read one message before all the others and it seems as though my
thoughts were already expressed....
Chris Marriott
In article <340b2ad8...@nntp.netcomuk.co.uk>, Stewart Brinn
<sbr...@netcomuk.co.uk.nospam> writes
>While I agree with your sentiments, there is a valid point made. It is
>unlikely that any other event this decade will match the tragedy in
>Paris. It is also unlikely that any person this century has caused
>such an outpouring of grief and public sympathy.
The only other situation which probably parallels it is the public
reaction to the death of John Kennedy in the USA.
Chris
----------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Marriott, Microsoft Certified Solution Developer.
SkyMap Software, U.K. e-mail: ch...@skymap.com
Visit our web site at http://www.skymap.com
Peter Kerr
> If the Bible Code program is so effective, why didn't it predict Princess
> Di death?
It didn't need to.
rich arab + fast car + drunken driver + no seatbelt = certain death
Yes, I'm of British heritage, and I too am asking why did it have to
happen to a nice girl like that.
Followups redirected.
--
Peter Kerr bodger
School of Music chandler
University of Auckland NZ neo-Luddite
Rod Hibberd
David wrote:
: in the Torah text are words or meaningful combinations letters.
: Now you can find out by yourself with Bible Codes Program.
: http://www.grapho.net/codes/
Well I tried the program on the collection of posts in this thread
and it found as statistical significant repetition code group and
repeatedly printed out the following:
" S.C.A.M."
Does anyone know what this might signify?
-RodH-
John Holmes
<snip>
>I
> wonder why nothing seems to be predicted, rather only found after the
> event.
>
The Bible does not contain a complete set of predictions.
Actually, everything that ever happened or will ever happen is cleverly
encoded in the *alphabet*. However the encryption algorithm is so devious,
it can only be discerned after the event.
Cheers
John
Neil Chambers
In article <340b2ad8...@nntp.netcomuk.co.uk>, Stewart Brinn
<sbr...@netcomuk.co.uk.nospam> writes
>On Mon, 01 Sep 97 07:13:35 GMT, Robert Billing
><uncl...@tnglwood.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
>> No, Mark, we in the UK are all very upset about the loss of Diana, and
>>don't think people should make comments like that while the poor girl
>>is lying dead in St George's. It has nothing to do with religion, just
>>proper respect for the dead.
>
>While I agree with your sentiments, there is a valid point made. It is
>unlikely that any other event this decade will match the tragedy in
>Paris. It is also unlikely that any person this century has caused
>such an outpouring of grief and public sympathy. Should there be a
>valid bible code, surely the events of sunday should be represented. I
>wonder why nothing seems to be predicted, rather only found after the
>event.
>
>Stu!
--
Christ-on-a-bike! I am from the UK and I couldn't give 2 hoots about Diana, or
should I say about her any more than the 1000's of other people who died that
night. What is so special about her. Give me a few million and some decent press
coverage and I'll go touch a few lepers etc. I don't remember people queuing up
for 8 hours to sign my Grandad's book of condolances when he smoked himself to
death, why the f**k should they!
BTW Sorry for A) being petty, B) giving offence to anyone (well, the people that
actually KNEW her!). I could find another newsgroup where I could rant about it
- this mass hysteria is really getting on my tits...
Jacob Love
In article <01bcb7e3$ca6c84e0$4c34b9ce@juddesk>,
Judson D. McClendon <ju...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>Let me respond to that last sentence, because there has been a lot said in
>this thread and others who do not understand what the Bible Codes really
>are.
There's also a lot that has been said by people who *do* understand
statistics, and others who know a great deal about the texts in
question.
>I am not a statistics expert, but unlike most of the people writing
>on these threads, I have spent some time researching and actually working
>with the Bible Codes and used some programs to check it out first hand.
Excellent. So perhaps you can comment on the following. One of the
chief objections coming from those who actually know something about
the text is that the entire concept of "equidistant" letters seems to
be dependent on the notion that there is a single, precise text of the
Torah. But all of the reputable scholars in the field agree that no
such thing exists. For example, the Leningrad Codex of Deuteronomy
differs from the text used in Rabbinic Bibles (Miqra'ot G'dolot) by 41
consonants. What does this do to your statistical model?
>If
>you want to know the facts, read the article "Equidistant Letter Sequences
>in the Book of Genesis" by Witzum, Rips and Rosenberg, in Statistical
>Science magazine (vol. 9, no. 3), August 1994.
No, if you want to know the "facts" you can start with this article,
but you must then look at the rather large amount of evidence which
is accumulating against the validity of their points. Let's start
with the point raised above.
>In my opinion and, much
>more importantly, in the opinion of the authors of the article, you cannot
>predict the future with the Bible Codes. But that doesn't mean that the
>Bible Codes aren't real.
That depends on your definition of "real." If you mean that by
playing a statistical game you can extract odd data from any
text string which is long enough, then they are indeed real. If
you mean that they are useful for anything or prove anything,
then they aren't.
[Balance of apologetic deleted]
--
-----------------------
Jack F. Love
Opinions expressed are mine alone, unless you happen to agree
Jacob Love
In article <01bcb887$cb8f6780$4b34b9ce@juddesk>,>It is true that there is no 'single absolutely perfect text' of the Old
>Testament. But that objection neatly sidesteps some issues.
Bzzzt, hold on. Until you can deal with the fact that it clobbers
the most salient aspect of all of this nonsense, it doesn't matter
what other "issues" are "sidestepped."
>The Hebrew
>text used is almost certainly very close to the original, and the nature of
>the possible textual differences and ELS structure are such that most of
>the coded sequences would still be found.
Well, here we have an interesting assertion. The entire notion is based
on finding exact names and dates and such but a letter missing or added
would still yield the same results? I don't think so.
>Also, the phenomena of the ELSs
>are there and nobody has been able to show this phenomenon in any other
>text.
This has been demonstrated to be incorrect a sufficient number of times
and publicized sufficiently well that you are either clueless or
deliberately deceiving. A well known participant in these NewsGroups
has shown both here and been cited in an article in the most recent
Bible Review having demonstrated that a whole bevy of assassination
"predictions" can be found in the text of Moby Dick.
>If there is nothing to this, then it would seem a fairly
>straightforward process to demonstrate this thousands-to-one 'statistical
>anomaly' in other known texts, no?
Already done. Give it up. Sheesh.
Judson D. McClendon
Jacob Love <jl...@engin.umich.edu> wrote in article
<5uk8e6$c...@srvr1.engin.umich.edu>...
> In article <01bcb887$cb8f6780$4b34b9ce@juddesk>,
> Judson D. McClendon <ju...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> >It is true that there is no 'single absolutely perfect text' of the Old
> >Testament. But that objection neatly sidesteps some issues.
>
> Bzzzt, hold on. Until you can deal with the fact that it clobbers
> the most salient aspect of all of this nonsense, it doesn't matter
> what other "issues" are "sidestepped."
You cleverly did not read my answer.
> >The Hebrew
> >text used is almost certainly very close to the original, and the nature
of
> >the possible textual differences and ELS structure are such that most of
> >the coded sequences would still be found.
>
> Well, here we have an interesting assertion. The entire notion is based
> on finding exact names and dates and such but a letter missing or added
> would still yield the same results? I don't think so.
Then you think wrong. I did not say that textual errors would not affect
the ELS codes at all, I said that most of the ELS codes would still be
there. For a given ELS, if there is a textual error of a wrong letter that
the particular ELS code skips, then the error has *no effect* on the ELS.
An additional or missing letter would only affect an ELS which spanned it.
If you know anything at all about Biblical texts you know that the vast
majority of 'errors' are simple copying errors made by scribes, changing
one letter into another which looks similar. These errors would *only*
affect ELS codes in which that particular letter appears, and would have
*no effect* on ELS codes which spanned it but did not use it.
> >Also, the phenomena of the ELSs
> >are there and nobody has been able to show this phenomenon in any other
> >text.
>
> This has been demonstrated to be incorrect a sufficient number of times
> and publicized sufficiently well that you are either clueless or
> deliberately deceiving. A well known participant in these NewsGroups
> has shown both here and been cited in an article in the most recent
> Bible Review having demonstrated that a whole bevy of assassination
> "predictions" can be found in the text of Moby Dick.
Thank you for agreeing with exactly what I have been saying. I agree with
the authors of the original article in Statistical Science, that the Bible
Codes can not be used to make 'predictions'. Your paragraph above only
substantiates what I have been saying and has nothing to do with the
validity of the original article in Statistical Science, which is what I
have been discussing.
> >If there is nothing to this, then it would seem a fairly
> >straightforward process to demonstrate this thousands-to-one
'statistical
> >anomaly' in other known texts, no?
>
> Already done. Give it up. Sheesh.
Already answered. Sheesh.
Quixote Digital Typography
In article <01bcb89b$33691e60$4334b9ce@juddesk>,
Judson D. McClendon <ju...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>Then you think wrong. I did not say that textual errors would not affect
>the ELS codes at all, I said that most of the ELS codes would still be
>there. For a given ELS, if there is a textual error of a wrong letter that
>the particular ELS code skips, then the error has *no effect* on the ELS.
>An additional or missing letter would only affect an ELS which spanned it.
>If you know anything at all about Biblical texts you know that the vast
>majority of 'errors' are simple copying errors made by scribes, changing
>one letter into another which looks similar. These errors would *only*
>affect ELS codes in which that particular letter appears, and would have
>*no effect* on ELS codes which spanned it but did not use it.
Actually copying errors include reduplication (repeating an entire
word or phrase), inadvertently copying marginal glosses into the text,
among other things.
Judson D. McClendon
Quixote Digital Typography <qui...@shell2.bayarea.net> wrote in article
<5ukfdf$i...@shell2.bayarea.net>...
> In article <01bcb89b$33691e60$4334b9ce@juddesk>,
> Judson D. McClendon <ju...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>
> >Then you think wrong. I did not say that textual errors would not
affect
> >the ELS codes at all, I said that most of the ELS codes would still be
> >there. For a given ELS, if there is a textual error of a wrong letter
that
> >the particular ELS code skips, then the error has *no effect* on the
ELS.
> >An additional or missing letter would only affect an ELS which spanned
it.
> >If you know anything at all about Biblical texts you know that the vast
> >majority of 'errors' are simple copying errors made by scribes, changing
> >one letter into another which looks similar. These errors would *only*
> >affect ELS codes in which that particular letter appears, and would have
> >*no effect* on ELS codes which spanned it but did not use it.
>
> Actually copying errors include reduplication (repeating an entire
> word or phrase), inadvertently copying marginal glosses into the text,
> among other things.
True enough, but the great majority of errors are simple letter miscopying,
as I stated earlier. The Hebrew scribes were much too careful to make
those kinds of mistakes very often, and comparison between texts has
enabled most (if not all) of them to be corrected.
Judson D. McClendon
Jacob Love <jl...@engin.umich.edu> wrote:
> Judson D. McClendon <ju...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> >Then you think wrong. I did not say that textual errors would not
affect
> >the ELS codes at all, I said that most of the ELS codes would still be
> >there. For a given ELS, if there is a textual error of a wrong letter
that
> >the particular ELS code skips, then the error has *no effect* on the
ELS.
> >An additional or missing letter would only affect an ELS which spanned
it.
> >If you know anything at all about Biblical texts you know that the vast
> >majority of 'errors' are simple copying errors made by scribes, changing
> >one letter into another which looks similar.
>
> With regard to "know anything at all about Biblical texts", I can read
> them in the original including professional training with
> *manuscripts*. Your statement regarding the "vast majority" of errors
> is flat-out wrong. The most common divergence among manuscripts is the
> insertion or removal of vowel letters *which are consonants* for the
> purposes of this idiotic venture. Thus a single such error within the
> string being tested would cause a different result. In fact, there are
> dozens of such errors scattered throughout the Pentateuch (hundreds to
> perhaps thousands for the remainder of the Bible), and to the best of
> my knowledge, no two manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible are identical with
> respect to the count of consonants. This is the essential point that
> Ripps, Witzum, Drosnin, et al either do not deal with at all, or gloss
> over by claiming to use the "Masoretic Text" which they, like you,
> allege to be perfectly identifiable. The only problem is that none of
> you can actually identify that text as it doesn't exist.
You just don't seem to realize that nothing you claim in the above
paragraph would make any difference. Most of these ELS sequences only
cover a few hundred letters at most. Adding or removing some characters at
only a 'few dozen' places would impact few ELS codes, leaving the vast
majority intact. Your insistence that the text has to be 'perfect' to
matter is simply false.
Take any non-Bible text and any published list of names and birth/death
dates you like, as long as the text and list were published before the
Statistical Science article, and do the same type of search that was done
for the article. You find all the names and dates from your list in that
text and you will have shown that the Bible Codes are not unique. Until
then, friend, you are simply howling in the wind.
J Giffen
David wrote:
>
> Are Rabin's, Kennedy's and Sa'adat's assassinations and
> the next nuclear war all scripted in the Bible?
> The existence of the "hidden codes" phenomenon was first
> discovered by Professor Eliyahu Rips along with his colleagues
> Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg. They researched into the
> seemingly unique patterns encoded in the Book of Genesis.
> Scanning the text by computer using a scientific method called
> Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS) has disclosed that "hidden
>
> in the Torah text are words or meaningful combinations letters.
>
> Now you can find out by yourself with Bible Codes Program.
>
> http://www.grapho.net/codes/
>
> You must see it !!!
> It is AMAZING !!!!!!!
Bible Codes is built on the premise that since the Bible was written
by men inspired by divine sources, then that those superintelligences
inserted encrypted messages in the text. If meanings are precipitated
by such simple concepts as ELS, then who's to say this isn't just the
beginning? Maybe now they should work on cascading a pyramid of
random number generators, inserting Bible text into it, and building
neural networks to bring order out of the randomness and see what
pans out. Then they can insert text of other books and see what they
say. Who knows; by then, people might be able to design a matrix of
encryptions, which no matter how it's decoded, it always has a meaning..
Gesi Rovario
Chris Marriott <ch...@chrism.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> : >If the Bible Code program is so effective, why didn't it predict Princess
> : >Di death?
> : >I say put the codes to a test and give us all a list of predictions for the
> : >next six months.
>
> MUST you make such tasteless and offensive remarks? The situation is bad
> enough without people attempting to make "funny" comments about it.
I don't find the question tasteless at all. I gather that the "Bible Code"
didn't predict the Princess's death then?
Gesi
--
And in the end, those we love are simply those we love.
-Lestat
John Hughes
sbr...@netcomuk.co.uk.nospam (Stewart Brinn) writes:
> It is unlikely that any other event this decade will match the
> tragedy in Paris.
This is a joke, right?
Brendan McKay
In article <01bcb8ac$e9ac4c40$4b34b9ce@juddesk>,
Jacob is completely correct. The majority of differences between
existing manuscripts of the Massoretic text are differences of
spelling
due to insertion or deletion of single letters (usually waw or yud).
Looking back to earlier times, there is abundant evidence of much
greater differences. As well as fragments of text, there are a large
number of Torah quotations in the Talmud and other early rabbinic
literature that disagree with the present text. The overwhelming
opinion of experts is that the present text is very different from
the original one.
> You just don't seem to realize that nothing you claim in the above
> paragraph would make any difference. Most of these ELS sequences
only
> cover a few hundred letters at most. Adding or removing some
characters at
> only a 'few dozen' places would impact few ELS codes, leaving the
vast
> majority intact. Your insistence that the text has to be 'perfect'
to
> matter is simply false.
I wonder what evidence your claims are based on.
In fact, many of the ELS's important for the Witztum/Rips result
are quite long. I know this because I have investigated the
experiment in detail. I have also done trials to test the effect
of insertion or deletion of letters in random places. On average
only 7 such changes degrade the result by 1000 times and 12 degrade
it by 10,000 times. I consider it essentially proven that much of
the result was created by the historic textual corruption. You can
believe that the errors of the scribes were part of the divine plan
if you like, but you can't believe that they didn't matter.
> Take any non-Bible text and any published list of names and
birth/death
> dates you like, as long as the text and list were published before
the
> Statistical Science article, and do the same type of search that was
done
> for the article. You find all the names and dates from your list in
that
> text and you will have shown that the Bible Codes are not unique.
Until
> then, friend, you are simply howling in the wind.
One has to also show that the original claims are valid.
Brendan.
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/torah.html
-------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====-----------------------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Post to Usenet
Jacob Love
In article <01bcb8ac$e9ac4c40$4b34b9ce@juddesk>,
Judson D. McClendon <ju...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>You just don't seem to realize that nothing you claim in the above
>paragraph would make any difference. Most of these ELS sequences only
>cover a few hundred letters at most. Adding or removing some characters at
>only a 'few dozen' places would impact few ELS codes, leaving the vast
>majority intact. Your insistence that the text has to be 'perfect' to
>matter is simply false.
You are absolutely wrong. Although you claim to know something about
Hebrew manuscripts and this piece of statistical trivia, you evidently
know nothing about either. The authors of the drivel accepted an
electronic form of the text for no better reason than that was the only
text in electronic form. Although I would welcome correction, to the
best of my knowledge, there is only one digitized version of the text
and it is based on only one of the many variant texts. I don't claim
to understand the statistics underlying this drivel, but those who
do tell me that the equidistant sequences are extremely long and would
be refuted easily by any number of such errors.
But what is more important is that you don't seem to understand that
the entire premise is absurd. Hebrew spelling is extremely variable
with respect to vowel letters. When we go back from the medieval
manuscripts (the oldest Masoretic manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible going
back only to roughly 900 CE) to the Dead Sea Scrolls, we find that
spelling discrepancies are commonplace. The closest example in English
would be to look at something like "night" versus "nite". The latter is
becoming increasingly common in colloquial English. It is pronounced
the same as the former and means the same thing, but it has only four
letters instead of five. Now consider a language in which this sort of
things happens constantly with almost every word and you will have a
good representation of the case for Hebrew. In other words, the entire
notion that you can rely upon a precise length of Hebrew text from any
one version to any other is simply absurd.
>Take any non-Bible text and any published list of names and birth/death
>dates you like, as long as the text and list were published before the
>Statistical Science article, and do the same type of search that was done
>for the article. You find all the names and dates from your list in that
>text and you will have shown that the Bible Codes are not unique. Until
>then, friend, you are simply howling in the wind.
As I said two cycles ago, this has already been done and shown. There
are no such things as "codes". There are only pointless coincidences.
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on Thu, 04 Sep 1997 00:22:59 -0600 Brendan McKay
<b...@cs.anu.edu.au> posted:
>In article <01bcb8ac$e9ac4c40$4b34b9ce@juddesk>,
> "Judson D. McClendon" <ju...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>>
>> Jacob Love <jl...@engin.umich.edu> wrote:
>> > Judson D. McClendon <ju...@mindspring.com> wrote:
Errors in the Bible outside the Pentateuch are irrelevant because no
one maintains those book were written by G-d. The words of the
Prophets were inspired by G-d, but they were still the words of human
beings.
>> > and to the best of
>> > my knowledge, no two manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible are identical
>with
>> > respect to the count of consonants.
Proper copying ended by counting the number of letters in each of the
5 books and comparing the count with the counts listed at the end of
each book in the source manuscript. Anyone who failed to get the
compare portion right is unreliable.
>> > This is the essential point that
>> > Ripps, Witzum, Drosnin, et al either do not deal with at all, or gloss
>> > over by claiming to use the "Masoretic Text" which they, like you,
>> > allege to be perfectly identifiable. The only problem is that none of
>> > you can actually identify that text as it doesn't exist.
>Jacob is completely correct. The majority of differences between
>existing manuscripts of the Massoretic text are differences of
>spelling
>due to insertion or deletion of single letters (usually waw or yud).
>Looking back to earlier times, there is abundant evidence of much
>greater differences. As well as fragments of text, there are a large
>number of Torah quotations in the Talmud and other early rabbinic
>literature that disagree with the present text. The overwhelming
>opinion of experts is that the present text is very different from
>the original one.
>> You just don't seem to realize that nothing you claim in the above
>> paragraph would make any difference. Most of these ELS sequences
>only
>> cover a few hundred letters at most. Adding or removing some
>characters at
>> only a 'few dozen' places would impact few ELS codes, leaving the
>vast
>> majority intact. Your insistence that the text has to be 'perfect'
>to
>> matter is simply false.
>I wonder what evidence your claims are based on.
>In fact, many of the ELS's important for the Witztum/Rips result
>are quite long. I know this because I have investigated the
>experiment in detail. I have also done trials to test the effect
>of insertion or deletion of letters in random places. On average
>only 7 such changes degrade the result by 1000 times and 12 degrade
>it by 10,000 times. I consider it essentially proven that much of
>the result was created by the historic textual corruption. You can
>believe that the errors of the scribes were part of the divine plan
>if you like, but you can't believe that they didn't matter.
If you are going to argue the pro-code side, you don't phrase it in
the most pro-code way. It is essential to do that. That is, that
there were errors in some manuscripts and that every place where there
were choices, they were compared and by using the oral tradition or by
using context, the *proper* meaning and spelling were chosen. So
that, the text used by Witzum and Rips and then by Gans IS the
original text given by G-d on Sinai, and that is why even your results
are phenomneally more successful with this text than with any other
you chose.
So here I am not saying the 'errors of the scribes' were part of the
divine plan, but that they were a detour, and that the codes tend to
prove that the text we use now is free of any mistakes. That would be
one reason that we were allowed to find codes now, and given the
computers with which to do so, for two reasons. 1) Because there had
been errors and people need to be assured that they have been removed.
2) Because this is a time of greater doubt than usual, skepticism in
part based on scientific semi-alternatives, and based on improved
technology which both increases the power of cruelty of this world and
the ability of all of us to know about it.
Back to the mathematics of codes, I hate to say this to you, but by
showing that 7 changes from the text yield a weaker result that is
1000 times less improbable and 12 lowers it 10,000 times, I think you
present evidence that can as likely confirm the validity of codes and
the authenticity of the text as dispute them. You show how unlikely it
is that any other text than the Masora would contain such codes at the
same level of closeness as is contained in the Masoretic text as used
by Jews currently, and that shows how incredibly unlikely it is that
such things are found at the observed level of closeness in the Masora
itself.
(Of course not every letter of the Torah is confirmed by codes, since
I am sure some amount at the beginning or end is beyond the range of
any code found so far, and that within the target area, not every
letter by any means is used in a code, and therefore such letters can
be exchanged without changing any code. This limits the ability of the
codes to verify the text but does not prove or disprove the codes
themselves.
I am not sure that I have presented the argument as well as can be
done, but it is at least as strong as I have made it.
>> Take any non-Bible text and any published list of names and
>birth/death
>> dates you like, as long as the text and list were published before
>the
>> Statistical Science article, and do the same type of search that was
>done
>> for the article. You find all the names and dates from your list in
>that
>> text and you will have shown that the Bible Codes are not unique.
>Until
>> then, friend, you are simply howling in the wind.
>One has to also show that the original claims are valid.
You are disputing the peer review? I think the writers showed their
mathematics in total detail and no reviewer has found a mistake.
The ball is in their court now.
>Brendan.
I just want to make clear that I am only referring to codes by Witzum,
Rips,..., and Gans. To the best of my understanding the book by
Drosnin is silly. (Predicting the future is also a silly claim, not
made by the first three.)
Nor have I reached a conclusion as to what I think the 'codes' mean.
I have heard the mathematics explained in great detail and I am
impressed that all the possible mistakes and omissions that I foresaw
are accounted for, but I haven't SEEN it in detail, and there sadly is
no point for me to do so because I am not the mathemetician that the
authors or the Harvard reviewers are, and I never will be.
Mr. McKay, I don't know one way or the other about your skill in
mathematics but I have limited myself here to non-mathematical issues.
P&M
I miss many posts so please e-mail if you want me to answer.
Judge all men favorably. Mishna Avos 1:6 from Lev 19:15,
B'tsedek tishpot amitecho. You shall judge your neighbor with righteousness.
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on Wed, 03 Sep 1997 23:29:50 -0400 J Giffen
<jgi...@hgo.net> posted:
>David wrote:
>>
>> Are Rabin's, Kennedy's and Sa'adat's assassinations and
>> the next nuclear war all scripted in the Bible?
>> The existence of the "hidden codes" phenomenon was first
>> discovered by Professor Eliyahu Rips along with his colleagues
>> Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg. They researched into the
>> seemingly unique patterns encoded in the Book of Genesis.
>> Scanning the text by computer using a scientific method called
>> Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS) has disclosed that "hidden
>>
>> in the Torah text are words or meaningful combinations letters.
>>
>> Now you can find out by yourself with Bible Codes Program.
>>
>> http://www.grapho.net/codes/
>>
>> You must see it !!!
>> It is AMAZING !!!!!!!
>Bible Codes is built on the premise that since the Bible was written
>by men inspired by divine sources,
I don't think that's it. I think the premise is that G-d Himself
dictated the Five Books of Moses word for word, letter for letter, at
Sinai (Conceivably revelation could have continued in the 40 years
afterwards, but that is not the point here. The point is that each
lettter comes from G-d.) The rest of the Bible was merely divinely
inspired and is of no use in finding codes.
> then that those superintelligences
>inserted encrypted messages in the text.
change it to 'that superintelligence' and we are in agreement.
Edward Rice
In article <01bcb86b$0e05bdc0$LocalHost@default>,
"John Holmes" <hol...@smart.net.au> wrote:
>Actually, everything that ever happened or will ever happen is cleverly
>encoded in the *alphabet*. However the encryption algorithm is so devious,
>it can only be discerned after the event.
We're getting back, as all searches for truth ultimately do, to a quip made
by Mark Twain a century or more ago. He'd listened to a long political
speech, always a favorite target of his, and at the conclusion accosted the
speaker, to tell him, "Nice speech, but hardly original." When the pol
hemmed and hawed and asked what Twain meant, he said, "I have a book at
home with every word of that speech in it." The speaker denied he'd been
copying, and Twain said he'd send the man a copy of the book. And three
days later, a dictionary arrived in the mail.
Now can we trim the newsgroups a little, puh-leaze?
Brendan McKay
Joe Slater wrote:
>
> Brendan McKay <b...@cs.anu.edu.au> writes:
> >The majority of differences between existing manuscripts of the
> >Massoretic text are differences of spelling due to insertion or deletion
> >of single letters (usually waw or yud).
>
> so-called Codes.
No, many are in the Pentateuch. For example, the oldest
complete manuscript of the Pentateuch (the Leningrad Codex)
differs from the Koren edition in 130 places, most of which have
the form of single-letter insertions or deletions. There are 23
differences in Genesis alone. The Leningrad Codex is regarded
as belonging to the second tier of Masoretic manuscripts in terms
of quality (the first tier contains the Aleppo Codex alone, but
most of the Pentateuch is missing from that). The majority of
early manuscripts differ in many more places, often thousands.
> >Looking back to earlier times, there is abundant evidence of much
> >greater differences. As well as fragments of text, there are a large
> >number of Torah quotations in the Talmud and other early rabbinic
> >literature that disagree with the present text. The overwhelming
> >opinion of experts is that the present text is very different from
> >the original one.
>
> You're conflating several issues. There are a few quotations in the Talmud
> of texts which differ from ours. I don't believe any of these are in the
> Pentateuch, which as I said above is what we are considering.
There are many in the Pentateuch, including some in Genesis.
The following summary was sent by Rabbi Shlomo Sternberg, who
refers to the book "Mishpahat Soferim" by Shmuel Rosenfeld.
The number of discrepanicies between the Talmud version and our
current version of Genesis is relatively small, on the order of
five or so. However, if we include the translations (from the
Talmudic period or so) of Onkelos and of Jonathan, as well as
the Midrasic literature this figure grows: approximately 20 for
Onkelos, 76 for Jonathan. Also 16 for Midrash Rabba on Genesis.
All of this is approximate (since one can not always be sure that
there is a discrepancy) and taken from Rosenfeld's list. Rosenfeld
also includes the classical cabbalistic literature (the Zohar etc.)
which was traditionally thought to be from the early centuries of
the current era but most academic scholars now believe to have
been composed in the 1280's by Moses de Leon. (The fact that the
Zohar is late, after the intense massoretic period, might make
these discrepancies more, rather than less interesting.)
Rosenfeld has a list of 10 discrepancies between the Zohar's
version and our version of Genesis. The total number on Rosenfeld's
list for Genesis is 118 and for the Pentateuch as a whole is 556.
> Besides
> this we have fragments (in some cases large fragments) of Biblical books
> including those of the Pentateuch which differ from the present text. The
> "overwhelming opinion of experts" does not relate to either of these
> facts, but is instead the Documentary Hypothesis, based principally on
> study of the Masoretic Text.
Experts are allowed to have opinions on more than one subject.
The majority opinion is that our present text probably differs
very greatly from the texts of, say, 3000 years ago. That is
independent of questions such as whether there was a single
original text or a family of independent original texts.
> This is quite irrelevant, though, since the claim of the so-called Code
> supporters is that the text is of divine origin. Presumably G-d would have
> interfered in its transmission to ensure that we have the correct text
> represented in our present tradition.
Yes, one can always postulate an extra miracle as a band-aid
when the original miracle has logical difficulties. One can
even suppose God interferred in the work of the experimenters,
causing them to choose more appellations which worked than
appellations which wouldn't have.
> >In fact, many of the ELS's important for the Witztum/Rips result
> >are quite long. I know this because I have investigated the
> >experiment in detail. I have also done trials to test the effect
> >of insertion or deletion of letters in random places. On average
> >only 7 such changes degrade the result by 1000 times and 12 degrade
> >it by 10,000 times.
>
> Giving what results? Still statistically significant? That's the crux.
The original claimed result was 16/million. Multiply that
by a thousand or so. However, that is NOT the crux of the
matter. One cannot keep reanalysing the same data by different
means and claiming that the results have much meaning. The
result of my experiment was that the StatSci result depends
very strongly on the text used, and that most random textual
corruptions make it worse. The quality of the text is only
one of a great many problems, and not the most serious one.
> Moreover, the more so-called Codes that are used, the less individual
> errors in letters would erase the result.
Not necessarily; it depends how the data is analysed.
Brendan.
(mailed and posted)
Chris Dollin
Robert Billing <uncl...@tnglwood.demon.co.uk> writes:
No, Mark, we in the UK are all very upset about the loss of Diana,
Not *all* of us are ``very upset''.
Saddened and sympathetic, yes, but I'm not ``very upset''.
and don't think people should make comments like that while the poor girl
is lying dead in St George's. It has nothing to do with religion, just
proper respect for the dead.
I don't think the original remark showed any ``lack of respect for the dead''.
Why do you?
--
Regards, | ``In fingers of trees, and valleys of gold | Judy Tzuke
Kers. | I watch as you outshine the charlatan foe.'' | Higher & Higher
Jacob Love
In article <5una52$i...@winter.news.erols.com>, <mei...@erols.com> wrote:
>Errors in the Bible outside the Pentateuch are irrelevant because no
>one maintains those book were written by G-d. The words of the
>Prophets were inspired by G-d, but they were still the words of human
>beings.
You are wrong. Many Christian and other religious groups do claim that
the remainder of the Bible was written directly by God. In fact, there
are Protestant sects which claim that no recourse to original language
texts is necessary because the "spirit" of God blessed the King James
Version and somehow made it the equivalent of the original languages.
Under this theory, codes unearthed via the same statistical gobbledy
gook for the KJV would also constitute "proof" of something.
>Proper copying ended by counting the number of letters in each of the
>5 books and comparing the count with the counts listed at the end of
>each book in the source manuscript. Anyone who failed to get the
>compare portion right is unreliable.
Yes, this is true. Unfortunately for you, none of the extant
manuscripts of the Torah evidently got it right, as they all disagree
with one another. Maimonides complained bitterly that the Torah scrolls
of his day were badly corrupted and created a "model Torah". We
believe, although we are not sure, that he used the Aleppo Codex, part
of which is now at the Hebrew University (and a few additional leaves
of which were recently discovered and sent to HU), but unfortunately
this great manuscript is in poor shape and remains fairly incomplete.
But even if it were complete, there is no evidence that on any
individual matter it would have been any more reliable than a variety
of other codices from other Masoretes, including some from the same
family which produced the Aleppo Codex.
>If you are going to argue the pro-code side, you don't phrase it in
>the most pro-code way. It is essential to do that. That is, that
>there were errors in some manuscripts and that every place where there
>were choices, they were compared and by using the oral tradition or by
>using context, the *proper* meaning and spelling were chosen. So
>that, the text used by Witzum and Rips and then by Gans IS the
>original text given by G-d on Sinai, and that is why even your results
>are phenomneally more successful with this text than with any other
>you chose.
Here we have an absolutely preposterous claim in which someone is so
bamboozled by the Codes drivel that they actually think that they could
achieve some sort of sanctification of one text over another by using
it. [Hopefully it clear to all readers that I am not arguing the
"pro-codes" side. If not, I don't know what else I could say.] Since
the Aleppo Codex has not been digitized to the best of my knowledge,
this might constitute a claim that they have proven that the text used
by Maimonides was not the best, but rather either the Lenningrad Codex
or even more improbably the composite text adopted by Bomberg which has
become the basis for most Rabbinic Bibles is the correct one. But since
the Codes idiocy has not been performed (to the best of my knowledge)
upon other digitized texts, we don't know what other sorts of magical
letter combinations may materialize from the same type of analysis of
Aleppo or the Ehrfut manuscripts. So in the future we can look forward
to dualing codes from several sources showing that their codes are
better than the other guys codes. I can hardly wait.
[Balance of this time destroying insanity deleted for reasons of
contempt.]
Flurpy
I'm new to this discussion.
If I'm not mistaken the idea behind this whole Bible Code thing, is
that God inserted this code with a bunch of messages irrelevant to
religion, so that some get-rich-quick schemer in the year 1997, who by
the way is an atheist, can make a couple of bucks.
Also, the relevant books in the Bible (Genesis - Joshua) was
originally written in Aramic, and only later translated into Hebrew.
Only the New Testament was written in Hebrew originally.
How can anyone belief is such nonsense!
Why didn't it warn Lady Di about 31 August. (It is bigger than
Rabhin's death, or am I wrong?)
Always easy to claim future predictions after the events actually
happened.
Quixote Digital Typography
In article <340f1be9...@news.saix.net>,
Flurpy <flu...@shisas.co.za> wrote:
>If I'm not mistaken the idea behind this whole Bible Code thing, is
>that God inserted this code with a bunch of messages irrelevant to
>religion, so that some get-rich-quick schemer in the year 1997, who by
>the way is an atheist, can make a couple of bucks.
That's about right
>Also, the relevant books in the Bible (Genesis - Joshua) was
>originally written in Aramic, and only later translated into Hebrew.
>Only the New Testament was written in Hebrew originally.
That's not so much right. The OT was written in Hebrew with some
passages in Aramaic. The NT was written in Greek. There are some OT
books which were written in Greek or only Greek versions are extant
(although some lost Hebrew sources have been discussed). These are
called deuterocanonicals (aprocrypha by protestants) and include
Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, etc.
>How can anyone belief is such nonsense!
>Why didn't it warn Lady Di about 31 August. (It is bigger than
>Rabhin's death, or am I wrong?)
Publicity-wise, Di's death is bigger, but in terms of real effects on
the world, Rabin's death easily had more impact. A year from now Di's
death will not be much of an issue. Today's headlines, however, were
directly a result of changes that happened because of Rabin's
assassination.
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on 5 Sep 1997 13:59:42 GMT jl...@engin.umich.edu
(Jacob Love) posted:
>In article <5una52$i...@winter.news.erols.com>, <mei...@erols.com> wrote:
>>Errors in the Bible outside the Pentateuch are irrelevant because no
>>one maintains those book were written by G-d. The words of the
>>Prophets were inspired by G-d, but they were still the words of human
>>beings.
>You are wrong. Many Christian and other religious groups do claim that
>the remainder of the Bible was written directly by God. In fact, there
>are Protestant sects which claim that no recourse to original language
>texts is necessary because the "spirit" of God blessed the King James
>Version and somehow made it the equivalent of the original languages.
>Under this theory, codes unearthed via the same statistical gobbledy
>gook for the KJV would also constitute "proof" of something.
Thanks. Who would'a believed it?
Have a gut Shabbes,
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on 5 Sep 1997 13:40:47 -0700
qui...@shell2.bayarea.net (Quixote Digital Typography) posted:
>In article <340f1be9...@news.saix.net>,
>Flurpy <flu...@shisas.co.za> wrote:
>>Also, the relevant books in the Bible (Genesis - Joshua) was
>>originally written in Aramic, and only later translated into Hebrew.
>>Only the New Testament was written in Hebrew originally.
>That's not so much right. The OT was written in Hebrew with some
>passages in Aramaic. The NT was written in Greek. There are some OT
>books which were written in Greek or only Greek versions are extant
>(although some lost Hebrew sources have been discussed). These are
>called deuterocanonicals (aprocrypha by protestants) and include
>Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, etc.
That's close but still off a little. I suppose since OT is a
Christian, Christians could attribute anything they want to it, but I
don't think they do. I think they use the same list that Jews do when
they refer to their Bible. As such it is in Hebrew with only a teeny
bit of Aramaic (In Daniel, a paragraph, and 2 or 3 words somewhere
else.) The other books you mention may be from a so-called OT era,
but none of the Jewish Bible (Tanach) was written in Greek, and all
except the little listed above was written in Hebrew and exists in
Hebrew and in translation from that Hebrew.
P&M
Robert Billing
In article <340f1be9...@news.saix.net> flu...@shisas.co.za "Flurpy" writes:
> Only the New Testament was written in Hebrew originally.
This of course comes as a surprise for those of us who have spent many
years reading the NT in the original greek...
--
I am Robert Billing, Christian, inventor, traveller, cook and animal
lover, I live near 0:46W 51:22N. http://www.tnglwood.demon.co.uk/
"The internet is weirder than we imagine. Parts of it are possibly
weirder than we can manage to imagine..."
Zol...@netcom.ca
assumed that the first scriptures were written in Aramaic.
Michael :]
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on Sat, 06 Sep 97 08:01:51 GMT Robert Billing
<uncl...@tnglwood.demon.co.uk> posted:
>In article <340f1be9...@news.saix.net> flu...@shisas.co.za "Flurpy" writes:
>> Only the New Testament was written in Hebrew originally.
> This of course comes as a surprise for those of us who have spent many
>years reading the NT in the original greek...
Actually this is the opposite of what one 25 year old xian told me
once, that the NT was written in Latin, and the Jewish Bible in Greek.
Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle.
David Ellis
"Judson D. McClendon" <ju...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>the phenomena of the ELSs [equidistant letter sequences]
>are there and nobody has been able to show this phenomenon in any other
>text. If there is nothing to this, then it would seem a fairly
>straightforward process to demonstrate this thousands-to-one 'statistical
>anomaly' in other known texts, no?
Some years ago, before Witztum and Rips published their paper, I ran a
number of ELS tests on randomly generated text using the Hebrew
letters in trigraphic distribution matching that of the Torah.
Trigraphic distribution is the relative frequency of three-letter
sequences. So my algorithm for generating random text was to look at
the two letters preceding a given position and to generate the next
letter with the probability of a given letter being selected matching
the probability of that letter appearing in the Torah following
occurrences of the two preceding letters.
I generated a thousand different random texts matching the length
(304805 characters) and the trigraphic frequency distribution of the
Torah text. Investigation of the ELS properties of the random texts
showed that all the ELS messages I selected appeared approximately as
often and as closely spaced in the random texts as in the original
Torah text.
I never had the opportunity to apply the specific measures of the
Witztum/Rips paper to these random texts. Readers of this message who
have access to the online Torah text are welcome to run their own
experiments. I will be happy to share my software (written in C)
with any interested readers.
>
>[snip]
>> >In my opinion and, much
>> >more importantly, in the opinion of the authors of the article, you
>cannot
>> >predict the future with the Bible Codes. But that doesn't mean that the
>> >Bible Codes aren't real.
>>
>> That depends on your definition of "real." If you mean that by
>> playing a statistical game you can extract odd data from any
>> text string which is long enough, then they are indeed real. If
>> you mean that they are useful for anything or prove anything,
>> then they aren't.
>
>My definition of "real" in this instance is that the codes can be (and have
>been) objectively demonstrated under pretty rigorous peer review.
>
>If this is a 'statistical game', then please prove it by trotting out a
>comparable phenomena from some other known Hebrew (or any other) text. If
>you cannot do this (and you certainly cannot), then intellectual honesty
>alone should prevent such claims of 'statistical games'. That's assuming
>you're intellectually honest, of course.
>
>I think they are very useful as a demonstration to anyone with an open mind
>that the Bible truly is the Word of God, and I believe that is why they are
>in there. I don't see any real utility beyond that.
>--
>Judson McClendon This is a faithful saying and worthy of all
>Sun Valley Systems acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the
>ju...@mindspring.com world to save sinners (1 Timothy 1:15)
>
>
--
David J Ellis
92 Wilson Drive / Framingham, MA 01702
d...@mkitso.ultranet.com
Robert Billing
In article <5ut2sk$s...@winter.news.erols.com> mei...@erols.com writes:
> Actually this is the opposite of what one 25 year old xian told me
> once, that the NT was written in Latin, and the Jewish Bible in Greek.
Go to any good Christian bookshop and ask to see an interlinear NT (I
use Nestle-Marshall) and you will see for yourself the *original* greek
with a word for word translation underneath. A good interlinear will
also indicate the fine differences between different mss of the NT. If
you really want to go wild get the BFBS critical edition and examine
all the mss differences in detail.
Better still, learn some greek, and discover not only the vibrancy of
Paul's writing, but how he could be a *total* *anarchist* with the
grammar at times.
ObURC Alexander Cruden spent his whole life compiling by hand a
concordance to the AV. The concordance to the NIV was IIRC compiled on
a Control Data machine in about 15 minutes.
kosh
Jacob Love <jl...@engin.umich.edu> wrote:
: The authors of the drivel accepted an
: electronic form of the text for no better reason than that was the only
: text in electronic form. Although I would welcome correction, to the
: best of my knowledge, there is only one digitized version of the text
: and it is based on only one of the many variant texts.
: ...the entire premise is absurd. Hebrew spelling is extremely variable
: with respect to vowel letters.
Yes, that's a critical point. Many of the things the advocates of
the bible codes scam find are phonetic rather than exectly spelled.
So, it greatly increases the chances of finding a "meaningful"
word or at least one that just sounds like it.
To make matters worse, because Hebrew represents mostly consonants,
the chances of finding a sound-alike word are even further heightened.
Same is true of even a word or phrase that is spelled precisely.
And, words containing several of the most common Hebrew letters, such as
"Y", "W", and "Sh" are very easily found "encoded" in the Hebrew Bible.
It's a miracle of statistics, not a miracle of the Bible.
To make matters even worse, you can find many "encoded" phrases
such as "Jesus is messiah" or "SADDAM HUSSEIN is messiah" in just about
any large Hebrew text -- religious or otherwise. It's just a property
of the Hebrew alphabet and spelling.
Evangelists will not tell you about the undesirable phrases
they find. One tried to tell me how he found "Jesus (Yeshua) his name"
encoded backwards in Isaiah 53. I acknowledged this,
but showed him how the word "Satan" is encoded right on top of this,
only forwards..... (thus, "Satan: Jesus (is) his name"). Don't know
what to make of that, but it sure knocked the wind out of that
Evangelist's sails.
Kosh
Michael Swiney
> Didn't Drosnin claim that he tried to warn Rabin because of what he
> found and isn't that equivalent to predicting the future.
>
> P&M
It sure is the equivalent of predicting the future. However, I believe
that the key word here is that "HE CLAIMS".
Ok everyone, I want you to know that I tried to warned Princess Di what
was going to happen.
You prove me wrong, it can't be done.
TA-DA! I am now a profit (yes, spelled intentionally). Now all I need
to do is call Uri Geller to learn some marketing skills and I'm all set.
MJS
Greg Hartman
Jacob Love <jl...@engin.umich.edu> wrote:
> : ...the entire premise is absurd. Hebrew spelling is extremely variable
> : with respect to vowel letters.
Excuse me? Ancient Hebrew doesn't HAVE "vowel letters" at all. The vowel
pointing used in most Bible manuscripts today was developed by the
Massoretes in about 1000 AD. They did it to standardize pronunciation,
by the way, not because there's much variation in spelling.
--
Christian Humor!
http://christianhumor.miningco.com
"Do We Have To Give Up Our Brains For Jesus?"
http://www.aracnet.com/~ghartman/index.shtml
(Return address modified to block unsolicited commercial e-mail; remove
"nospam")
Greg Hartman
mei...@erols.com writes:
>
> > Actually this is the opposite of what one 25 year old xian told me
> > once, that the NT was written in Latin, and the Jewish Bible in Greek.
Notwithstanding the last poster's point--that the NT was actually
written in Hebrew--what exactly do you mean by "Jewish Bible"? If you
mean the _Hebrew_ Bible, you're even further off, because the Hebrew
Bible is what Christians call the Old Testament; it doesn't include the
New Testament at all.
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on Sun, 7 Sep 1997 22:13:43 GMT Michael Swiney
<dysl...@earthlink.net> posted:
I heard that someone put an ad in some paper or magazine that said
"SEND ONE DOLLAR -- [address]"
and never promised anything in return or even referred to anything.
The story was he made a lot of money.
BTW, where I said "Drosnin claimed", that certainly was an editorial
comment. At least in a news story the only proper verb is 'said' but
often that isn't the verb used.
Posted
Jacob Love
In article <341395...@deathtospam.aracnet.com>,
Greg Hartman <ghar...@deathtospam.aracnet.com> wrote:
[Replying to me]
>> : ...the entire premise is absurd. Hebrew spelling is extremely variable
>> : with respect to vowel letters.
>
>Excuse me? Ancient Hebrew doesn't HAVE "vowel letters" at all. The vowel
>pointing used in most Bible manuscripts today was developed by the
>Massoretes in about 1000 AD. They did it to standardize pronunciation,
>by the way, not because there's much variation in spelling.
And how much study of Hebrew manuscripts have you done Mr. Hartman?
Instead of writing such silliness to the world, why not look at any
standard Hebrew grammar such as Gesenius-Kautsch? "Vowel letters"
refers to the use of aleph, heh, waw and yod to indicate vowel sounds.
This usage dates to a very early period and is already in full swing by
the era of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Differences in spelling due to the
phonetic issues involved with such vowel letters is the single largest
source of discrepancy between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic
manuscripts.
"Vowel pointing" as you refer to it began centuries prior to the date
you provide, perhaps as early as the second century CE. We simply do
not have any manuscripts which can be reliably dated earlier than about
900 CE. But that has nothing to do with my point, so I won't bother
to elaborate.
David N. Smith
I got into this discussion late, so someone else may have already
reported their version of an experiment I tried.
I wrote a random text generator using English bigraph frequencies (taken
from Decoding Secrets by Bauer, a wonderful technical book on
pre-computer era cryptography). Given the most recently generated letter
I randomly chose the next from the a list of the post probable next
letters, weighted by their actual occurrence.
I only generated about ten pages of this stuff, but I found globs (a new
mathematical term meaning more than 'a lot' and less than 'a whole, whole
lot') of perfectly good English words, and a phrase or two.
I suspect, but got tired of the game before I wasted more time on it,
that by computer-comparing the text against a good dictionary, and by
looking forwards, backwards, up and down in columns, etc. that I'd have
found a whole lot more that my old eyes actually saw.
I became convinced, on minimal real data, that one could find most
anything if one just looked really, really hard, and generated enough
text (and maybe used trigrams).
I had forgotton that Hebrew has no vowels. That would sure make things
easier. No more 'timeflyes' or 'dyanacartunnel' problems where one vowel
is wrong.
Hummmm... English with no vowels. Anyone got a good machine readable
word list? I need to know which stocks are going to be hot next week...
:-)
Dave
_____________________________________________
David N. Smith
IBM T J Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY
Mailto: dns...@watson.ibm.com
Home Page: http://www.dnsmith.com/
_____________________________________________
Any opinions or recommendations are those
of the author and not of his employer.
Michael Pelletier
In article <3411FC...@netcom.ca>, <Zol...@netcom.ca> wrote:
>I'm no scholar, but I thought Jesus spoke Aramaic, and I therefore
>assumed that the first scriptures were written in Aramaic.
>
> Michael :]
I'm no scholar, but I thought that the first letters of the
NT were recorded decades after Jesus' death.
-Mike Pelletier.
Fred Galvin
On Thu, 4 Sep 1997, Brendan McKay wrote:
> In fact, many of the ELS's important for the Witztum/Rips result
> are quite long. I know this because I have investigated the
> experiment in detail. I have also done trials to test the effect
> of insertion or deletion of letters in random places. On average
> only 7 such changes degrade the result by 1000 times and 12 degrade
> it by 10,000 times.
Maybe this answers the perplexing question *why* the Almighty would have
put those codes in the Torah: they were put there so we would have a way
of telling which version is the true text. Error-control coding.
Jacob Love
In article <Pine.SOL.3.96.970908115857.26759B-100000@titania>,
Fred Galvin <gal...@math.ukans.edu> wrote:
>Maybe this answers the perplexing question *why* the Almighty would have
>put those codes in the Torah: they were put there so we would have a way
>of telling which version is the true text. Error-control coding.
Well, the Almighty didn't do anything of the kind, but the Masoretes
certainly attempted to. They were among the first to realize that
various statistics could be used for textual control purposes.
Unfortunately, there were simply too many errors (albeit very small
errors) for this method to have worked. Take a look at the page of any
Masoretic manuscript and you will see a vast amount of data which was
assembled to attempt to keep things accurate, but which nevertheless
tell us of the problems of doing so.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, in order to claim that this sort of
"crc check" was used would require performing similar experiments on
the other mss and demonstrating that they would *not* have similar such
codes. My strong suspicion is that we *would* find similar kinds of
"codes" but with different names, dates, etc and therefore we would
have "dueling codes".
Be that as it may, no number of codes can get around the fact that even
our best Masoretic texts are based on a linguistic base which did not
place a high value on spelling. So unless you think that the Almighty
was interested in the Masoretes rather than Moses, you still have much
ado about nothing.
Tom Harrington
Greg Hartman (ghar...@deathtospam.aracnet.com) wrote:
: mei...@erols.com writes:
: >
: > > Actually this is the opposite of what one 25 year old xian told me
: > > once, that the NT was written in Latin, and the Jewish Bible in Greek.
I think NT supports ISO-Latin-1, but that's not really the same thing
as being "written in Latin".
: Notwithstanding the last poster's point--that the NT was actually
: written in Hebrew
Either case is exceedingly bizarre. I always thought that Windows NT
was written in C, or C++, probably with some assembly code in there
as well. Are you referring to some Hebrew translation of C and C++
statements, or is this some entirely different programming language?
You WERE talking about Windows NT, right? I mean, I can't think of
any other reason that you'd post such a message to alt.folklore.computers.
--
Tom Harrington --------- t...@rmii.com -------- http://rainbow.rmii.com/~tph
Small forest creatures have become one with their surroundings due to
Hand Grenades. -"MAKE FRAGMENTS FAST", by de...@te.com
Cookie's Revenge: ftp://ftp.rmi.net/pub2/tph/cookie/cookies-revenge.sit.hqx
Judson D. McClendon
Some of Jesus words were in Aramaic, but the vast majority of the NT was
written in Greek.
--
Judson McClendon This is a faithful saying and worthy of all
Sun Valley Systems acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the
ju...@mindspring.com world to save sinners (1 Timothy 1:15)
Zol...@netcom.ca wrote in article <3411FC...@netcom.ca>...
> Robert Billing wrote:
> >
> > In article <340f1be9...@news.saix.net> flu...@shisas.co.za
"Flurpy" writes:
> >
> > > Only the New Testament was written in Hebrew originally.
> >
> > This of course comes as a surprise for those of us who have spent many
> > years reading the NT in the original greek...
> >
> > --
> > I am Robert Billing, Christian, inventor, traveller, cook and animal
> > lover, I live near 0:46W 51:22N. http://www.tnglwood.demon.co.uk/
> > "The internet is weirder than we imagine. Parts of it are possibly
> > weirder than we can manage to imagine..."
Peter Kerr
> > > Actually this is the opposite of what one 25 year old xian told me
> > > once, that the NT was written in Latin, and the Jewish Bible in Greek.
>
> mean the _Hebrew_ Bible, you're even further off, because the Hebrew
> Bible is what Christians call the Old Testament; it doesn't include the
> New Testament at all.
Shouldn't this go to alt.linguistics or somewhere?
And somebody had better dig up the server logs showing
how native speakers of Aramaic mostly wrote Greek for
official and commercial documents, whilst the Roman
colonial power never enforced the use of Latin on the
local population, so the Hebrews could continue to
speak and write their native tongue/script.
--
Peter Kerr bodger
School of Music chandler
University of Auckland NZ neo-Luddite
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on Sun, 07 Sep 1997 22:02:22 -0800 Greg Hartman
<ghar...@deathtospam.aracnet.com> posted:
>mei...@erols.com writes:
>>
>> > Actually this is the opposite of what one 25 year old xian told me
>> > once, that the NT was written in Latin, and the Jewish Bible in Greek.
>Notwithstanding the last poster's point--that the NT was actually
>written in Hebrew--what exactly do you mean by "Jewish Bible"? If you
>mean the _Hebrew_ Bible, you're even further off, because the Hebrew
>Bible is what Christians call the Old Testament; it doesn't include the
>New Testament at all.
It is not I who is off but that 25 year-old xian. I think she was
referring to only the 'Old Testament' because she had already said the
NT was in Latin. And yes she was way off. The amount of
misinformation in this world is incredible.
I am glad you wrote because I got an e-mail about something related to
this and I am still waiting for the post. I do use Jewish Bible the
same as others use Hebrew Bible. I don't think the language it is
written in is its most important feature. Christians have already
coined the term Old Testament so there is no reason they should insist
on Hebrew Bible, and I don't know that anyone else does.
I said a while back that I thought the 'Old Testament' was the same as
the Jewish Bible, and I was wrong. I don't have many Christain
sources in my libray but my American Heritage dictionary lists a
Jerusalem Version, used by Catholics, and a King James Version, used
by many Protestants. The 'Hebrew Scriptures' as the dictionary refers
to it, has 39 books, just as the KJV and except for calling Shir
haShirim, the Song of Songs as the Song of Solomon, the list is
identical. But the 'Jerusalem Version' also includes Tobit, Judith,
Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and first and second Maccabees. None
of which are in the Jewish Bible. So it is vague and misleading to
say that Hebrew Bible is the same as the OT. I gather these book and
5 others constitute a Christian Apocrypha, but they have no status
within the Hebrew Bible. [Is it true that the books of Maccabees are
accepted as historical. Do any of the books have any value at all to
Jews?]
If I am not mistaken, excluding the Apocrypha from the total Christian
Bible, by the Protestants, was one more attempt to capture the Jewish
roots of Christianity, similar to returning to full body immersion for
baptising/mikvah in contrast to the 'sprinkling' done by Catholics. I
am sure there are many other examples.
BTW, of course I object to the terms Old and New Testaments, because
even though the terms predate the New Improved Tide detergent, the
sub-meaning is the same. New and improved, Old and obsolete. Of
course Christians are entitled to call their book whatever they want,
but when they refer to mine as the Old Testament, even when using it
in the context of Jews, Judaism, and Jewish writing, I hope they
realize they are participating on their side of the propaganda war
which has been going at least since the terms were coined.
Posted
BTW I have been saying posted sometimes, as opposed to posted and
mailed, so the one who receives the e-mail knows there should be a
posted copy coming, which he may prefer to wait for, but does not feel
HE has to respond, so that he knows it is a courtesy copy but that his
response is welcome among many. P&M seems a little to imply that HIS
response is more wanted than others, or that HIS statements were
challenged.
It also means that if he never receives the posted
BTW, of course I object to the terms Old and New Testaments, because
even though the terms predate the New Improved Tide detergent, the
sub-meaning is the same. New and improved, Old and obsolete. Of
course Christians are entitled to call their book whatever they want,
but when they refer to mine as the Old Testament, even when usi
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on Tue, 09 Sep 1997 03:02:43 GMT
mei...@erols.com posted:
>Posted
>BTW I have been saying posted sometimes, as opposed to posted and
>mailed, so the one who receives the e-mail knows there should be a
>posted copy coming, which he may prefer to wait for, but does not feel
>HE has to respond, so that he knows it is a courtesy copy but that his
>response is welcome among many. P&M seems a little to imply that HIS
>response is more wanted than others, or that HIS statements were
>challenged.
>It also means that if he never receives the posted
and then I wrote the previous paragraph a second time. I don't how
that happened.
The phrase 'posted' also means that if the e-mail recipient never
receives the corresponding post, he knows that it was posted and he is
free to answer the e-mail and transfer it to USENET and post it there
without violating anyones privacy.
Ken
Actually the New Testament was written in Kion or common Greek which was
the closest thing to a universal launguage since the internet. BTW ever
since the dead sea scrolls the athenticity of the Tanach or old testament
is unquestioned. In a 900 year spread the hebrews managed to keep the
original text exactly as it was written across milenia. Aparently they
didn't use unix so things didn't crash every milenia like American
mainframes.
Greg Hartman <ghar...@deathtospam.aracnet.com> wrote in article
<341394...@deathtospam.aracnet.com>...
>
> mei...@erols.com writes:
> >
> > > Actually this is the opposite of what one 25 year old xian told me
> > > once, that the NT was written in Latin, and the Jewish Bible in
Greek.
>
> Notwithstanding the last poster's point--that the NT was actually
> written in Hebrew--what exactly do you mean by "Jewish Bible"? If you
> mean the _Hebrew_ Bible, you're even further off, because the Hebrew
> Bible is what Christians call the Old Testament; it doesn't include the
> New Testament at all.
>
Chris Dollin
Robert Billing <uncl...@tnglwood.demon.co.uk> writes:
In article <KERS.97S...@cdollin.hpl.hp.com>
ke...@hplb.hpl.hp.com "Chris Dollin" writes:
> I don't think the original remark showed any ``lack of respect for the dead''.
> Why do you?
Because the original remark (long snipped) said something about "if
you can't take a joke..." which I still find inappropriate.
Oh. I don't remember that; if that's so, then I, too, would regard it as
disrespectful.
But I *definitely* don't remember that. Er .. is it possible that we saw
different ``original'' posts? Ah well.
--
Regards, | ``"I can't suit myself," said Weinbaum, a little petulantly.
Kers. | "I work for the Government".'' - Blish, "The Quincunx of Time".
Zev Sero
Michael Swiney <dysl...@earthlink.net> posted:
>> Didn't Drosnin claim that he tried to warn Rabin because of what he
>> found and isn't that equivalent to predicting the future.
>It sure is the equivalent of predicting the future. However, I believe
>that the key word here is that "HE CLAIMS".
>Ok everyone, I want you to know that I tried to warned Princess Di what
>was going to happen.
>You prove me wrong, it can't be done.
Me, I warned President Kennedy not to go to Kings Lynn that day,
because he might be hit by falling bricks, and he listened to me;
that's why he decided to go to Dallas instead.
Jacob Love
In article <5v2e66$m...@winter.news.erols.com>, <mei...@erols.com> wrote:
>I am glad you wrote because I got an e-mail about something related to
>this and I am still waiting for the post. I do use Jewish Bible the
>same as others use Hebrew Bible. I don't think the language it is
>written in is its most important feature. Christians have already
>coined the term Old Testament so there is no reason they should insist
>on Hebrew Bible, and I don't know that anyone else does.
The discussion is very similar to the one which surrounds "BC" versus
"BCE" and "AD" versus "CE". The question is whether it is worth the
effort to attempt to replace extremely common notions which may be
inaccurate or even offensive. Personally, I think it is worth the
effort even if I risk being labelled "PC".
>I said a while back that I thought the 'Old Testament' was the same as
>the Jewish Bible, and I was wrong.
No, you were right. The problem is that different Christian groups
define the "Old Testament" in slightly different ways. But the equation
of Jewish Bible = Old Testament works very well because even those
Christian groups (such as the Roman Catholic Church) which have the
Apocrypha have long been accustomed to identifying the latter as a
separate portion of their Bible to avoid confusion with other Christian
discussions.
[Deletia]
>But the 'Jerusalem Version' also includes Tobit, Judith,
>Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and first and second Maccabees. None
>of which are in the Jewish Bible. So it is vague and misleading to
>say that Hebrew Bible is the same as the OT. I gather these book and
>5 others constitute a Christian Apocrypha, but they have no status
>within the Hebrew Bible. [Is it true that the books of Maccabees are
>accepted as historical. Do any of the books have any value at all to
>Jews?]
"Hebrew" is somewhat misleading as well, as some parts of the Jewish
Bible, including more than half of one of its books is written in
Aramaic. "Jewish Bible" really works best, imo.
As for the two books of Maccabees in the Apocrypha (there are two more
books called Maccabees in the pseudepigrapha but they have little to do
with the Hasmoneans and are not regarded as sacred by anyone), they are
neither "accepted as historical" any more than any other part of the
Bible nor are they devoid of value to Jews. They were written by Jews
(as were the other books of the Apocrypha) and therefore have enormous
literary and religious value. Ecclesiasticus, also known as the Wisdom
of Ben Sirach, is the most frequently quoted non-scriptural book in the
Talmud. A complete copy in the original Hebrew was found in the Cairo
Geniza. As for history, while Maccabees is no more "historical" than
any other obviously religious tract, it certainly has much data that
can be of use to historians who are trying to assemble a history of the
Hasmonean period, particularly a history of religious and social
development.
>If I am not mistaken, excluding the Apocrypha from the total Christian
>Bible, by the Protestants, was one more attempt to capture the Jewish
>roots of Christianity, similar to returning to full body immersion for
>baptising/mikvah in contrast to the 'sprinkling' done by Catholics. I
>am sure there are many other examples.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. There was unquestionably a
theological reason for the Protestants' exclusion of the Apocrypha, but
attributing this to any aspect of Judaism is, I think, a little
paranoid. By the Reformation, Protestants had nothing to fear from Jews
but everything to fear from the Roman Catholic Church. Among the many
important theological issues was the extent to which the authority to
interpret the religious tradition belonged to the Church, its Pope,
canon law, and the ruling bodies associated with these institutions. By
attempting to focus more attention on the "New" Testament and less on
other Scriptures, Protestants were able to argue that more of the
decision making power lay with their assemblies. I'm highly unqualified
to discuss Christian doctrine so I'll leave at this and apologize for
any fuzziness in the presentation.
Brendan McKay
In article <5v2qb8$su0$3...@news.jumpnet.com>,
About the only thing interesting about Drosnin's stupid book is that
he really did send a letter to warning to Rabin. I have met the poet
Haim Guri who acted as intermediary. Guri forwarded the letter with
a note "I expect this will make you smile as it did me". Guri
confirms that Drosnin predicted absolutely no details of any sort.
He also angrily denies reacting to the assassination in the way
that Drosnin claims.
So, the situation is that at a time when people were writing "Death
to Rabin" on walls around Israel, Drosnin found something in the
Bible that can be found in any text but was unable to predict even
that the assassin would be a Jew. He had little to lose and much
to gain by trying his luck. The rest is history.
Brendan.
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/torah.html
-------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====-----------------------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Post to Usenet
Serene & Sanguine Sagacity
gm...@grayfox.svs.com (G. Mark Stewart) wrote:
>If someone's religion can't take humor, it's not one I'd sign up for.
You needn't concern yourself either way.
~~~"Serene" *Sheila Green* "Sagacity"~~~
[aka Word Warrior green*@tristate.pgh.net]
"Eat me, and use your head for better than
the mere absorption of monitor radiation."
Rick Cortese
David N. Smith <dns...@watson.ibm.com> wrote in article
<5v1305$gn0$1...@watnews2.watson.ibm.com>...
>
> I got into this discussion late, so someone else may have already
> reported their version of an experiment I tried.
Sounds like a new hobby. IMHO, an experiment that would be goofy enough to
be fun:
1) Generate a random word lenght
2) Fill the array with random letters
3) Do a spell check to make sure it exist<eliminates having to search
through garbage>
4) Check for normal rules of English to see if its context is right i.e.
noun verb
5) Repeat steps 1-4 until you have a sentence that is sytactically correct,
add a bit of punctuation & spew out a sentance.
Rick
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on 9 Sep 1997 14:26:18 GMT jl...@engin.umich.edu
(Jacob Love) posted:
>In article <5v2e66$m...@winter.news.erols.com>, <mei...@erols.com> wrote:
>>I am glad you wrote because I got an e-mail about something related to
>>this and I am still waiting for the post. I do use Jewish Bible the
>>same as others use Hebrew Bible. I don't think the language it is
>>written in is its most important feature. Christians have already
>>coined the term Old Testament so there is no reason they should insist
>>on Hebrew Bible, and I don't know that anyone else does.
>The discussion is very similar to the one which surrounds "BC" versus
>"BCE" and "AD" versus "CE".
Yes, it is something like that.
> The question is whether it is worth the
>effort to attempt to replace extremely common notions which may be
>inaccurate or even offensive. Personally, I think it is worth the
>effort even if I risk being labelled "PC".
Well of course there are different levels of PC, some of which are
accepted by almost everyone (e.g. personal racist eptithets
face-to-face) to almost no one (e.g. one must refer to 13 y.o. females
as women.)
I think it is worth the effort too, and once it dawns on me what a
word means and that I was using it inaccurately, it is really hard to
say it that way again.
>>I said a while back that I thought the 'Old Testament' was the same as
>>the Jewish Bible, and I was wrong.
>No, you were right. The problem is that different Christian groups
>define the "Old Testament" in slightly different ways. But the equation
>of Jewish Bible = Old Testament works very well because even those
>Christian groups (such as the Roman Catholic Church) which have the
>Apocrypha have long been accustomed to identifying the latter as a
>separate portion of their Bible to avoid confusion with other Christian
>discussions.
OK, glad to hear it.
>[Deletia]
>>But the 'Jerusalem Version' also includes Tobit, Judith,
>>Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and first and second Maccabees. None
>>of which are in the Jewish Bible. So it is vague and misleading to
>>say that Hebrew Bible is the same as the OT. I gather these book and
>>5 others constitute a Christian Apocrypha, but they have no status
>>within the Hebrew Bible. [Is it true that the books of Maccabees are
>>accepted as historical. Do any of the books have any value at all to
>>Jews?]
>"Hebrew" is somewhat misleading as well, as some parts of the Jewish
>Bible, including more than half of one of its books is written in
>Aramaic. "Jewish Bible" really works best, imo.
Daniel, right? Didn't realize it was so much.
>As for the two books of Maccabees in the Apocrypha (there are two more
>books called Maccabees in the pseudepigrapha but they have little to do
>with the Hasmoneans and are not regarded as sacred by anyone), they are
>neither "accepted as historical" any more than any other part of the
>Bible nor are they devoid of value to Jews. They were written by Jews
>(as were the other books of the Apocrypha) and therefore have enormous
>literary and religious value. Ecclesiasticus, also known as the Wisdom
>of Ben Sirach, is the most frequently quoted non-scriptural book in the
>Talmud. A complete copy in the original Hebrew was found in the Cairo
>Geniza. As for history, while Maccabees is no more "historical" than
>any other obviously religious tract, it certainly has much data that
>can be of use to historians who are trying to assemble a history of the
>Hasmonean period, particularly a history of religious and social
>development.
>>If I am not mistaken, excluding the Apocrypha from the total Christian
>>Bible, by the Protestants, was one more attempt to capture the Jewish
>>roots of Christianity, similar to returning to full body immersion for
>>baptising/mikvah in contrast to the 'sprinkling' done by Catholics. I
>>am sure there are many other examples.
>I'm not sure what you mean by this. There was unquestionably a
>theological reason for the Protestants' exclusion of the Apocrypha, but
>attributing this to any aspect of Judaism is, I think, a little
>paranoid.
Well, I didnn't mean it negatively, or even positively. Somehow I got
the impression that, after the initial complaint of Luther which may
havve been limited to selling indulgences, and the English king who
wanted a divorce, they found lots of other things to complain about,
and one was that there was too much superstructure on top of their
Bible and too few people reading it. So in all sincerity, I presume,
at least some Protestants instituted total immersion in place of
sprinkling because that is the way we did it, and I was guessing that
they returned to our list of which 'OT' books are holy. If there was
politics and a purposeful use of image, I don't know.
> By the Reformation, Protestants had nothing to fear from Jews
>but everything to fear from the Roman Catholic Church. Among the many
>important theological issues was the extent to which the authority to
>interpret the religious tradition belonged to the Church, its Pope,
>canon law, and the ruling bodies associated with these institutions.
I agree. I meant to get authority within the Christian population, or
from petty dislike of Catholicism or from sincere belief that the
older Jewish way was better. I wish I could think of more examples.
By
>attempting to focus more attention on the "New" Testament and less on
>other Scriptures, Protestants were able to argue that more of the
>decision making power lay with their assemblies. I'm highly unqualified
>to discuss Christian doctrine so I'll leave at this and apologize for
>any fuzziness in the presentation.
I think I should do that to.
>--
>-----------------------
>Jack F. Love
>Opinions expressed are mine alone, unless you happen to agree
Christine Gonzales
In article <5v2qb8$su0$3...@news.jumpnet.com>, zs...@idt.net wrote:
> Michael Swiney <dysl...@earthlink.net> posted:
>
> >> Didn't Drosnin claim that he tried to warn Rabin because of what he
> >> found and isn't that equivalent to predicting the future.
>
> >It sure is the equivalent of predicting the future. However, I believe
> >that the key word here is that "HE CLAIMS".
>
> >Ok everyone, I want you to know that I tried to warned Princess Di what
> >was going to happen.
>
> >You prove me wrong, it can't be done.
>
> Me, I warned President Kennedy not to go to Kings Lynn that day,
> because he might be hit by falling bricks, and he listened to me;
> that's why he decided to go to Dallas instead.
Gee how lucky he was to have listened to you.
Christine Gonzales
Gee how lucky he was to have listen to you.
Judson D. McClendon
Kevin D. Quitt <Ke...@Quitt.net> wrote in article
<34177203....@news.pacificnet.net>...
> On 2 Sep 1997 22:40:47 GMT, "Judson D. McClendon" <ju...@mindspring.com>
> wrote:
> >That there are intelligently placed hidden codes in the Hebrew text of
the
> >Bible is a demonstrable fact, as far as I am concerned.
>
> How can that be, given that the author specified what it would take to
> debunk the idea, and that criterion has been met? There is no evidence
> that the original analysis is anything but wishful thinking and a great
> deal of evidence that that's all it is. As has been shown, almost ANY
> text has "hidden" messages.
>
> For the ultimate refutation of the Bible Code nonsense, see:
>
> http://www.primenet.com/~lippard/skeptical.html#archives-bible-code
That's a very interesting statement, considering that I found the article
below on that web page. You're not going to hear me defending the Drosnin
book, because much of it is mush. But the Bible code discovered by Dr.
Rips exists, and I stand by my statement, as does Harold Gans below.
--
Judson McClendon This is a faithful saying and worthy of all
Sun Valley Systems acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the
ju...@mindspring.com world to save sinners (1 Timothy 1:15)
PUBLIC STATEMENT BY HAROLD GANS
SENIOR CRYPTOLOGIC MATHEMATICIAN, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, RETIRED.
PRESENTLY INDEPENDENT MATHEMATICAL CONSULTANT.
I have reviewed the book "The Bible Code" by M. Drosnin.
1. The book states that codes were found in the book of Genesis by Doron
Witztum and Eliyahu Rips. An experiment was performed using scientific
protocols specified by independent reviewers. The results of the experiment
provided extremely strong statistical evidence for the existence of the
encoding of great Jewish sages' names and dates of birth and death in the
Hebrew text of the book of Genesis. This is all true.
2. The book states that I undertook an independent evaluation of the
Witztum - Rips experiment. I duplicated their experiment and provided
corroboration of their results. This is correct.
3. The book states that I also performed a new experiment, using the same
methodology of Witztum and Rips, in which I found that the sages' names
were also encoded in Genesis with their respective cities of birth and
death. The statistical results obtained were even stronger than that
obtained for the first experiment. This is all true.
4. The book also indicates that in spite of concerted efforts by many, no
fatal mathematical flaw has been uncovered in the Witztum - Rips
experiment. This too, is correct.
5. The book states that the codes in the Torah can be used to predict
future events. This is absolutely unfounded. There is no scientific or
mathematical basis for such a statement, and the reasoning used to come to
such a conclusion in the book is logically flawed. While it is true that
some historical events have been shown to be encoded in the Book of Genesis
in certain configurations, it is absolutely not true that every similar
configuration of "encoded" words necessarily represents a potential
historical event. In fact, quite the opposite is true: most such
configurations will be quite random and are expected to occur in any text
of sufficient length. Mr. Drosnin states that his "prediction" of the
assasination of Prime Minister Rabin is "proof" that the "Bible Code" can
be used to predict the future. A single success, regardless of how
spectacular, or even several such "successful" predictions proves
absolutely nothing unless the predictions are made and evaluated under
carefully controlled conditions. Any respectable scientist knows that
"anecdotal" evidence never proves anything.
6. A plethora of books have appeared over the last several months,
concerning the codes. Unless the work is reviewed by qualified scientists
or mathematicians, the reader accepts such a book at his own risk.
7. After exhaustive analysis, I have reached the conclusion that the only
information that can be derived from the codes discovered in Genesis is
that they exist, and the probability that they are mere coincidence is
vanishingly small.
Harold Gans, June 3, 1997
Greg Hartman
mei...@erols.com wrote:
>
> If I am not mistaken, excluding the Apocrypha from the total Christian
> Bible, by the Protestants, was one more attempt to capture the Jewish
> roots of Christianity, similar to returning to full body immersion for
> baptising/mikvah in contrast to the 'sprinkling' done by Catholics. I
> am sure there are many other examples.
The Protestants didn't really exclude the Apocrypha from the Bible, at
least not the way you just described.
The early church fathers left out the Apocrypha simply because it had
_never_ been recognized as canonical. As someone else here pointed out,
the Apocrypha does have a lot of literary value, but the Jews never
considered it the Word of God.
Many, many years later, in 1546, the Catholic Church declared the
Apocrypha to be "deuterocanonical," which means "We think it's canonical
but we're going to use a fancy word to tiptoe around the issue." Until
that time no one save a handful of folks in the third century had ever
considered the Apocrypha canonical. These folks added the Apocrypha to
Jerome's Latin Vulgate, over his vociferous protests and refusal to
translate it himself.
Well, the Catholic Church also decided in 1546 that the Vulgate was the
only authoritative translation of the Bible. So they included the
Apocrypha.
The Reformationists, on the other hand, refused to acknowledge Rome's
position on the issue and left the Apocrypha out of their Bibles.
It's really about as simple as that. No attempt to return to Jewish
roots or anything like that, not that I've heard at least. (In fact,
Luther was, sadly, rather Antisemitic in his early days, although he
later recanted and said he was wrong).
Greg Hartman
Peter Kerr wrote:
>
> > > > Actually this is the opposite of what one 25 year old xian told me
> > > > once, that the NT was written in Latin, and the Jewish Bible in Greek.
> >
> > Notwithstanding the last poster's point--that the NT was actually
> > written in Hebrew--what exactly do you mean by "Jewish Bible"? If you
> > mean the _Hebrew_ Bible, you're even further off, because the Hebrew
> > Bible is what Christians call the Old Testament; it doesn't include the
> > New Testament at all.
>
> And somebody had better dig up the server logs showing
> how native speakers of Aramaic mostly wrote Greek for
> official and commercial documents, whilst the Roman
> colonial power never enforced the use of Latin on the
> local population, so the Hebrews could continue to
> speak and write their native tongue/script.
Your point being?
Yes, many Jews in first-century Palestine knew Greek for trade, Hebrew
for synagogue, Latin for dealing with the Romans, and Aramaic for
day-to-day conversation.
But Koine Greek was the lingua franca of the day, and that's what the
New Testament was originally written in. AND my orginal point stands:
that the "Hebrew Bible" is what Christians call the Old Testament.
Helge Moulding
Judson D. McClendon wrote:
> [...]the Bible code discovered by Dr.
> Rips exists, and I stand by my statement, as does Harold Gans below.
> the probability that they are mere coincidence is vanishingly small.
Gans says that what is called "Bible code" is a phenomenon he has
observed, and that by some statistical analysis it appears to be
quite a remarkable phenomenon. Whether or not they "exist" in the
sense that they were put there on purpose is not a statement to
which Gans commits without qualification.
I have no idea what these people mean by "vanishingly small"
probabilities. By some measure, my individual existence has a
"vanishingly small" probability. Yet here I am.
I'm not inclined to worry too much about "vanishingly small"
probabilities. Aren't the names and dates and whatnot of these
sages already in the OT in plain text? If so, then finding that
some transformations turn up the names again, although "encoded"
may be a forgone conclusion. Has that hypothesis been tested?
Also, to me finding that the Jews returning from Babylon decided to
make their first organized shot at holy writ more than just a
collection of stories isn't too unbelievable. It's just that if I
were writing such a document I'd try a bit harder to impose a sense
of order on the hidden names and dates - why else go to the trouble?
So, while I can believe that it was done, I don't think that the
discovered "codes" are evidence of this, since they appear to be
much too random.
I'm thinking that if the codes are in fact there on purpose, then
it is likely that Ezekiel didn't come up with this on his own. Does
anyone know if Babylonian religious writings had similar codes
embedded? Or were the post Babylonian Jews the first group from this
part of the world to come up with this idea?
(I'm basing my assumption that the Jews didn't bother writing their
Bible until this time on Kromer's assertion in _Testament_ that
there are no known written fragments of any biblical text dated
from before the Babylonian captivity.)
--
Helge "Look for the hidden name of
the next president of the USA in my text!" Moulding
mailto:h...@slc.unisys.com Just another guy
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/1401 with a weird name
Judson D. McClendon
Helge Moulding <h...@slc.unisys.com> wrote in article
<3416AA...@slc.unisys.com>...
> Judson D. McClendon wrote:
> > [...]the Bible code discovered by Dr.
> > Rips exists, and I stand by my statement, as does Harold Gans below.
> > [quotes H.Gans}
> > the probability that they are mere coincidence is vanishingly small.
>
> Gans says that what is called "Bible code" is a phenomenon he has
> observed, and that by some statistical analysis it appears to be
> quite a remarkable phenomenon. Whether or not they "exist" in the
> sense that they were put there on purpose is not a statement to
> which Gans commits without qualification.
Sorry, I didn't express that very well. I simply intended to express that
I believe what Gans says, that the phenomena of the Bible codes is a real,
demonstrable phenomena.
> I have no idea what these people mean by "vanishingly small"
> probabilities. By some measure, my individual existence has a
> "vanishingly small" probability. Yet here I am.
Statistically significant to at least 100 times greater than would normally
be considered conclusive.
> I'm not inclined to worry too much about "vanishingly small"
> probabilities. Aren't the names and dates and whatnot of these
> sages already in the OT in plain text? If so, then finding that
> some transformations turn up the names again, although "encoded"
> may be a forgone conclusion. Has that hypothesis been tested?
No, these are names and birth/death dates of prominent Jewish people who
lived LONG after the Bible was written. The significant point, and the
actual point of the Statistical Science article, is not just that the names
and dates are there, but that there is an extremely significant statistical
correlation between the names and the dates historically associated with
that particular individual. If the names and dates were in there
accidentally, there would be no significant correlation in placement
between a person's name and that person's birth/death dates.
> Also, to me finding that the Jews returning from Babylon decided to
> make their first organized shot at holy writ more than just a
> collection of stories isn't too unbelievable. It's just that if I
> were writing such a document I'd try a bit harder to impose a sense
> of order on the hidden names and dates - why else go to the trouble?
> So, while I can believe that it was done, I don't think that the
> discovered "codes" are evidence of this, since they appear to be
> much too random.
But they are NOT random! In fact, they are 'un-random' to an extreme
degree. This is the whole thrust of the Statistical Science article.
> I'm thinking that if the codes are in fact there on purpose, then
> it is likely that Ezekiel didn't come up with this on his own. Does
> anyone know if Babylonian religious writings had similar codes
> embedded? Or were the post Babylonian Jews the first group from this
> part of the world to come up with this idea?
You are missing the main points of this particular code being there. First
of all, how could *anyone* in Babylon, or anywhere else, (other than God)
know about people who would be born many hundreds of years later? And even
if they did know, they would be unable to create a code of such
sophistication. We are not capable of duplicating such a feat today, even
with our computer technology.
Helge Moulding
mei...@erols.com wrote:
> >I'm not inclined to worry too much about "vanishingly small"
> >probabilities. Aren't the names and dates and whatnot of these
> >sages already in the OT in plain text?
> am sure this is true no matter whose date is used for the Torah.
Now wait a second. The article at
http://www.cybermail.net/~codes/genesis.htm says that
"2. Names and designations taken from the Pentateuch are spelled as
in the original."
I took that to mean that the names are from the Pentateuch. Not from
some later time. Does anyone have the actual list?
> Again, none of the material written after Babylon is involved here,
I think I pointed out that I know of no evidence that any of this
material was written before Babylon. If you know of such evidence,
please let us know.
> If you think it was written later, you
> probably think it wasn't dictated by G-d,
If you are trying to say that my point carries no weight because
I'm just being skeptical, then I think that you are trying to have
it both ways. But you can't go and wave peer reviewed articles
about, proclaiming that something remarkable was discovered, and
then complain when someone asks for scientific evidence for one of
your basic assumptions, that the Pentateuch is much older than
Ezekial.
--
Helge "Scientific rigor - statistical mortis" Moulding
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on Wed, 10 Sep 1997 08:09:33 -0600 Helge
Moulding <h...@slc.unisys.com> posted:
>Judson D. McClendon wrote:
>> [...]the Bible code discovered by Dr.
>> Rips exists, and I stand by my statement, as does Harold Gans below.
>> [quotes H.Gans}
>> the probability that they are mere coincidence is vanishingly small.
>Gans says that what is called "Bible code" is a phenomenon he has
>observed, and that by some statistical analysis it appears to be
>quite a remarkable phenomenon. Whether or not they "exist" in the
>sense that they were put there on purpose is not a statement to
>which Gans commits without qualification.
>I have no idea what these people mean by "vanishingly small"
>probabilities. By some measure, my individual existence has a
>"vanishingly small" probability. Yet here I am.
Very good point. This is why I complain when newspaper writers say
the experiment had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent, say.
Actually there was, say, a 92% probability that the margin of error
was within 3%, but still a chance it was much greater than that.
The rest of my answer just deals with facts.
>I'm not inclined to worry too much about "vanishingly small"
>probabilities. Aren't the names and dates and whatnot of these
>sages already in the OT in plain text?
No, these are all people who lived *after* the Torah was written. I
am sure this is true no matter whose date is used for the Torah.
>If so, then finding that
>some transformations turn up the names again, although "encoded"
>may be a forgone conclusion. Has that hypothesis been tested?
>Also, to me finding that the Jews returning from Babylon decided to
>make their first organized shot at holy writ more than just a
>collection of stories isn't too unbelievable. It's just that if I
>were writing such a document I'd try a bit harder to impose a sense
>of order on the hidden names and dates - why else go to the trouble?
>So, while I can believe that it was done, I don't think that the
>discovered "codes" are evidence of this, since they appear to be
>much too random.
Again, none of the material written after Babylon is involved here, at
least in the Witzum, Rips, Gans material, which is the only stuff
stuff which has been peer reviewed (I am not sure Gans has but he used
I think the same program and the same analysis, and the same text).
Because all Jews and almost all Christians (I am told a few Xians are
exceptions) believe that the Prophets and other Writings were written
by man, inspired by G-d, there is no point to looking for codes in
them, unless to show that apparent codes are possible without the hand
of God. So none of the experiments of W, R, and G, used any text
other than the Five Books of Moses, and for the most/entire? part,
Genesis.
>I'm thinking that if the codes are in fact there on purpose, then
>it is likely that Ezekiel didn't come up with this on his own. Does
>anyone know if Babylonian religious writings had similar codes
>embedded? Or were the post Babylonian Jews the first group from this
>part of the world to come up with this idea?
Again, Babylonia is not involved.
>(I'm basing my assumption that the Jews didn't bother writing their
>Bible until this time on Kromer's assertion in _Testament_ that
>there are no known written fragments of any biblical text dated
>from before the Babylonian captivity.)
None of the pro-codes Jews believe that. They take it that the Five
Books of Moses were written on Sinai and perhaps during the 40 years
that followed in the desert. If you think it was written later, you
probably think it wasn't dictated by G-d, and although I guess humans
could have spent their time putting such codes in, no human could know
when some great rabbi would die or even what his name would be to
begin with.
An average Torah scroll in use only lasts about 200 years, despite how
well we try to take care of them. After that they are buried and
written on parchment, they degrade. The exceptions that I know of are
two cases where the storage situation was unusual: the Dead Sea
Scrolls which are about 2100 years old and the Cairo genizah (a dry
attic where unusable scrolls and books were put and then, as it
happens, forgotten. The fact that none of these scrolls go back 3300
years I don't find surprising at all. 2100 years is a tremendous
length of time. Outside of the material contained in the pyramids,
how much written material on the original parchment or papyrus do we
have from the Egyptians of 3000 years ago or more, or of any other
society?
OTOH, serious question, has anyone searched this same text for my
grandparents and is there any reason the level of closeness within
their names and between their names and dates should also not be
amazingly high?
>--
> Helge
mei...@erols.com
Subject: Re: Bible codes
At 09:27 PM 9/9/97 -0800, Greg Hartman wrote:
>mei...@erols.com wrote:
>
>>
>> If I am not mistaken, excluding the Apocrypha from the total Christian
>> Bible, by the Protestants, was one more attempt to capture the Jewish
>> roots of Christianity, similar to returning to full body immersion for
>> baptising/mikvah in contrast to the 'sprinkling' done by Catholics. I
>> am sure there are many other examples.
>
>The Protestants didn't really exclude the Apocrypha from the Bible, at
>least not the way you just described.
>d of God.
Sorry, I'm not surprised I got it wrong.
>
>Well, the Catholic Church also decided in 1546 that the Vulgate was the
>only authoritative translation of the Bible. So they included the
>Apocrypha.
>
>The Reformationists, on the other hand, refused to acknowledge Rome's
>position on the issue and left the Apocrypha out of their Bibles.
>
>It's really about as simple as that. No attempt to return to Jewish
>roots or anything like that, not that I've heard at least. (In fact,
>Luther was, sadly, rather Antisemitic in his early days, although he
>later recanted and said he was wrong).
Sorry again. What about the immersion vs. sprinkling.
I thought Luther was antisemitic in his later days and it is blamed on
his age and that he never said he was wrong.
>
>>
>>--
>>
>>Christian Humor!
>>http://christianhumor.miningco.com
>
>
I took a look at this. Very funny.
Meir
>
mei...@erols.com Baltimore, MD, USA
Anno Siegel
Helge Moulding <h...@slc.unisys.com> wrote in alt.folklore.urban:
[...]
>Now wait a second. The article at
>http://www.cybermail.net/~codes/genesis.htm says that
>
>"2. Names and designations taken from the Pentateuch are spelled as
>in the original."
>
>I took that to mean that the names are from the Pentateuch. Not from
>some later time. Does anyone have the actual list?
The article you mention above has a link to the list that was used.
Basically, they selected people from a biographical dictionary.
Further details of the selection process are described in the article.
The dictionary they used lists Jewish personalities from the 9th to the
18th century, so they are all much later than the time the Torah was
written. In that light, the reference to "names and designations taken
from the Pentateuch" doesn't make much sense.
My general impression of the article is they have done all they could
to make it scientifically sound (which doesn't mean it is, I don't know).
Occasionally the measures taken verge on kookiness, for example when
they ask "three prominent scientists" for binary numbers to seed their
random generator with.
Btw, the article isn't quite complete. An illustration mentioned in
the text is missing, and more importantly, appendices A1 and A2, which
describe crucial parts of the procedure aren't there.
Anno "appendectomy" Siegel
Judson D. McClendon
Anno Siegel <anno...@lublin.zrz.TU-Berlin.DE> wrote:
> Helge Moulding <h...@slc.unisys.com> wrote:
>
> >Now wait a second. The article at
> >http://www.cybermail.net/~codes/genesis.htm says that
> >
> >"2. Names and designations taken from the Pentateuch are spelled as
> >in the original."
> >
> >I took that to mean that the names are from the Pentateuch. Not from
> >some later time. Does anyone have the actual list?
>
> The article you mention above has a link to the list that was used.
> Basically, they selected people from a biographical dictionary.
> Further details of the selection process are described in the article.
> The dictionary they used lists Jewish personalities from the 9th to the
> 18th century, so they are all much later than the time the Torah was
> written. In that light, the reference to "names and designations taken
> from the Pentateuch" doesn't make much sense.
One supposes that a person in the 9th to 18th centuries could have a name
like 'Joshua', which is also in Genesis, in which case one could make sure
the spelling was the same as in the Bible. Makes sense to me.
G. Mark Stewart
Robert Billing (uncl...@tnglwood.demon.co.uk) wrote:
: In article <5uco2h$oah$8...@brownfox.svs.com>
: gm...@grayfox.svs.com "G. Mark Stewart" writes:
: > If someone's religion can't take humor, it's not one I'd sign up for.
: No, Mark, we in the UK are all very upset about the loss of Diana, and
: don't think people should make comments like that while the poor girl
: is lying dead in St George's. It has nothing to do with religion, just
: proper respect for the dead.
I'm afraid the context is lost about now.
Helge Moulding
Judson D. McClendon wrote:
> Anno Siegel <anno...@lublin.zrz.TU-Berlin.DE> wrote:
> > Helge Moulding <h...@slc.unisys.com> wrote:
> > >I took that to mean that the names are from the Pentateuch.
> > The article you mention above has a link to the list that was used.
> One supposes that a person in the 9th to 18th centuries could have
> a name like 'Joshua', which is also in Genesis,
Of course. My apologies for misunderstanding. So that leaves the
search checking for common Hebrew names in a text chock full with
common Hebrew names. Still not impressive; just the idea that they
were put there on purpose is a lot less likely.
--
Helge "And I bet my name is in there, too." Moulding
mitcho
mei...@erols.com wrote:
>
> Greg Hartman <ghar...@deathtospam.aracnet.com> posted:
>
> >mei...@erols.com writes:
> >>
> >> > once, that the NT was written in Latin, and the Jewish Bible in Greek.
>
> >Notwithstanding the last poster's point--that the NT was actually
> >written in Hebrew--what exactly do you mean by "Jewish Bible"? If you
> >mean the _Hebrew_ Bible, you're even further off, because the Hebrew
> >Bible is what Christians call the Old Testament; it doesn't include the
> >New Testament at all.
>
> referring to only the 'Old Testament' because she had already said the
> NT was in Latin. And yes she was way off. The amount of
> misinformation in this world is incredible.
Indeed. It is also incredible that you would resort to conjecture on
such a point, considering some of the newsgroups to which this thread
has been crossposted. I'm sure there are one or two folks in the
religion froups who are well aware that most of the New Testament was
recorded in *Greek*, your 25 year old girlfriend notwithstanding (I have
found that a lot of 25 year old Christians are much more comfortable
with going to church and watching GodTV than actually sitting down and
reading the Bible, my copy of which is really really thick, with tiny
type and hardly any pictures at all).
> I said a while back that I thought the 'Old Testament' was the same as
> the Jewish Bible, and I was wrong. I don't have many Christain
There are a number of on-line Bibles, some of which include discussions
of the origins of the various texts. One of my favorites is
http://www.gospelcom.net/bible [no discussion here, just the
texts]
You don't have to be Christian to enjoy the Bible, or the study of its
origins. In fact, anyone living today in the thick of Western
Civilization could do worse than to study the Bible to get a better
understanding of the roots of our collective cultural inheritance.
> BTW, of course I object to the terms Old and New Testaments, because
> even though the terms predate the New Improved Tide detergent, the
> sub-meaning is the same. New and improved, Old and obsolete. Of
Excuse me, but you seem to be confusing a soap powder with the holy
texts of several of the major religions on this planet. Christians
don't have any concept of the Old Testatemnt being obsolete, since
Christianity was originally evangelized (and continues to be) to
Gentiles with no experience with the older texts. If the Old Testament
was considered to be obsolete, it would never have been included in the
holy canon used by all Christians everywhere.
The Old Testament is coined as such because parts of it were probably
first recorded over a thousand years before the New Testament was
written. That's pretty old.
Duh.
Your interpretation of the term "Old Testament" is yours alone, and
perhaps shared with a few dim lights on Madison Avenue. You would be
better served to use the well-recognized terms, and refrain from made-up
names like "Jewish Bible," which no one understands and which causes
nothing but confusion, which you are then compelled to attempt to clear
up by crossposting still more confusing guff.
Mitcho
Salvation in rats
A note on the newsgroup headers:
I deleted sci.skeptic, sci.math, comp.misc, alt.folklore.science and
alt.folklore.computers from the headers. I left in all the religious
newsgroups. I also left in AFU because that's where I spend most of my
time, and I'm sure it's important folks there know when I crosspost
irresponsibly as I am doing now. I left in ROM because it's early and
I'm feeling cranky. I left in alt.atheism because, in my experience,
studied atheists often know far more about the holy texts then their
puported respective adherents. -MB
David
Are Rabin's, Kennedy's and Sa'adat's assassinations and
the death of PRINCESS DIANA ???
The existence of the "hidden codes" phenomenon was first
discovered by Professor Eliyahu Rips along with his colleagues
Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg. They researched into the
seemingly unique patterns encoded in the Book of Genesis.
Scanning the text by computer using a scientific method called
Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS) has disclosed that "hidden
in the Torah text are words or meaningful combinations letters.
Now you can find out by yourself with Bible Codes Program.
You must see it !!!
It is AMAZING !!!!!!!
ki...@nospamamuon.imep.univie.ac.at
Rips, Witztum, and Rosenberg, along with Michael Drosnin, are thoroughly
debunked at the following web site by mathematician Brendan McKay:
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/torah.html
Required reading for anybody posting to this thread.
- Ross
Michael Edelman
David wrote:
>
> Are Rabin's, Kennedy's and Sa'adat's assassinations and
> the death of PRINCESS DIANA ???
> The existence of the "hidden codes" phenomenon was first
> discovered by Professor Eliyahu Rips along with his colleagues
> Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg. They researched into the
> seemingly unique patterns encoded in the Book of Genesis.
> Scanning the text by computer using a scientific method called
> Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS) has disclosed that "hidden
>
> in the Torah text are words or meaningful combinations letters.
>
> Now you can find out by yourself with Bible Codes Program.
>
Yes, for only $70 you, too, can find just about any short phrase you
want, courtesy of a gross misunderstanding of statistics!
Yet another tax on mathematical illiteracy ;-)
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Edelman m...@pass.wayne.edu
Wayne State University voice: (313) 577-0742
Computing & Information Technology fax: (313) 577-8787
Academic Computing & Support Services
Detroit MI 48070 http://www.pass.wayne.edu/~mje/home.html
Judson D. McClendon
Helge Moulding <h...@slc.unisys.com> wrote in article
<3417F6...@slc.unisys.com>...
> Judson D. McClendon wrote:
> > Anno Siegel <anno...@lublin.zrz.TU-Berlin.DE> wrote:
> > > Helge Moulding <h...@slc.unisys.com> wrote:
> > > >I took that to mean that the names are from the Pentateuch.
> > > The article you mention above has a link to the list that was used.
> > One supposes that a person in the 9th to 18th centuries could have
> > a name like 'Joshua', which is also in Genesis,
>
> Of course. My apologies for misunderstanding. So that leaves the
> search checking for common Hebrew names in a text chock full with
> common Hebrew names. Still not impressive; just the idea that they
> were put there on purpose is a lot less likely.
You apparently haven't studied the original article in Statistical Review.
To put it simply, the significance is not just that the names and
birth/death dates were found, because one would expect to do so in a
sufficiently large text. The significance of the statistical finding is
that there was an enormously significant correlation (on the order of
100,000 to 1) that the birth and death dates were found in 'close
proximity' to names to which they belong, but not to the names with which
they did not belong.
The actual correlation is somewhat analogous to selecting several dozen
prominent people, and for each person writing the name, birth date and
death dates on three identical pieces of cardboard and placing all of the
pieces into three bowls, one bowl for names, one for birth dates and one
for death dates. Then you repeatedly draw one piece of cardboard from each
bowl and find that every time you are drawing a name and the dates which
match that name! This situation could only happen if somebody messed with
the order of the cards to make it happen. And that is the point, that no
such correlation would be present unless some 'intelligence' arranged it
so. And this particular 'intelligence' knew the future, because all the
people in the test were born many hundreds of years after Genesis was
written.
Michael Edelman
Zol...@netcom.ca wrote:
>
> Robert Billing wrote:
> >
> > In article <340f1be9...@news.saix.net> flu...@shisas.co.za "Flurpy" writes:
> >
> > > Only the New Testament was written in Hebrew originally.
> >
> > This of course comes as a surprise for those of us who have spent many
> > years reading the NT in the original greek...
> I'm no scholar, but I thought Jesus spoke Aramaic, and I therefore
> assumed that the first scriptures were written in Aramaic.
You're right- that is, you're no scholar. ;-) The NT was mainly written
in Koine Greek. Jesus didn't actually write anything down....
Quixote Digital Typography
In article <341990...@nospam.pass.wayne.edu>,
>> Robert Billing wrote:
>> > In article <340f1be9...@news.saix.net> flu...@shisas.co.za "Flurpy" writes:
>> > > Only the New Testament was written in Hebrew originally.
>> > This of course comes as a surprise for those of us who have spent many
>> > years reading the NT in the original greek...
>> I'm no scholar, but I thought Jesus spoke Aramaic, and I therefore
>> assumed that the first scriptures were written in Aramaic.
>You're right- that is, you're no scholar. ;-) The NT was mainly written
>in Koine Greek. Jesus didn't actually write anything down....
There is some internal evidence that there was an Aramaic source
document from which the gospels of Matthew and Mark (and Luke where he
quotes M&M) were derived. This includes some bits of quoted text in
Aramaic and occasional uses of semitic idioms in Greek.
The Gospel of Q (or something like that) was a contemporary attempt at
reconstructing this lost source (Q comes from Quelle, German for
"source") but the actual text is unknown... the only direct evidence
that it may have existed was a reference in the writings of St Jerome
to a "gospel written in Hebrew letters" that he decided not to
translate. Whether this might have been a Q survival or a later
translation is not known.
The conversations recorded in the Gospels almost certainly were in
Aramaic. Notably the "You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my
church" speech has evidence of its Aramaic origins elsewhere in the NT
where Peter is referred to as Kephas, Aramaic for "rock" (and a clear
counterpoint to those who attempt to claim that the petra and Petros
of the Greek had different referents).
-dh
--
Don Hosek dho...@quixote.com Quixote Digital Typography
708-788-1501 fax: 708-788-1530 orders: 800-810-3311
For information about SERIF: THE MAGAZINE OF TYPE & TYPOGRAPHY,
http://www.quixote.com/serif/ or mail serif...@quixote.com
mi...@aishdas.org
In soc.culture.jewish Jacob Love <jl...@engin.umich.edu> wrote:
: The authors of the article base their conclusions on the notion that
: there is a fixed text of the Hebrew Bible which can be relied upon for
: such purposes.
I'm not sure this is a flawed assumption. If the current text, regardless
of history, must be relied upon for halachah, why not for codes (if I
believed in their value) as well?
: Brendan McKay ...
: such "codes" can be
: found in *any* text of sufficient length.
This only addresses Drosnin's book. The point made in the original
book "Hamaymad Hanosaf" (The Added Dimension) is that they have a
model for predicting the frequency of such patterns in Hebrew
text. And the model works -- for the Samaritan text, for war and
peace in Hebrew, for random permutations of verses, etc...
However, when looking at the current, halachically accepted, text
of the Torah, the number of finds jumps by orders of magnitude.
Therefor, no single "code" has any value, since it may be one of
those findable in any text. It's the number of them in total that
raised eyebrows.
Frankly, I think the whole trend into experimental religion is not
what Judaism is about.
-mi
--
Micha Berger (973) 916-0287 Help free Ron Arad, held by Syria 3909 days!
mi...@aishdas.org (16-Oct-86 - 12-Sep-97)
For a mitzvah is a candle, and the Torah its light.
http://aishdas.org -- Orthodox Judaism: Torah, Avodah, Chessed
Jacob Love
In article <01bcbfa4$86539e60$4334b9ce@juddesk>,
Judson D. McClendon <ju...@mindspring.com> wrote:
[Replying to others]
>You apparently haven't studied the original article in Statistical Review.
[Balance of irrelevant material deleted]
It appears that the poster belongs to the school of thought that if
he posts irrelevant expostulations with sufficient frequency, he can
prove his point by the sheer weight of the posts.
For the purposes of most readers, reference to the article in
Statistical Review is unnecessary. The authors of that article made
several fundamental errors which could not have been known by the peer
reviewers, because their expertise was not to be found in the requisite
areas. While the statistics may be reliable as presented, the
conclusions do not have to be. The editor of the journal was quite open
in presenting the material as a lightweight matter for amusement and
speculation. He probably did not know the extent to which
fundamentalists and other religious fanatics might be inclined to
"canonize" the article.
The authors of the article base their conclusions on the notion that
there is a fixed text of the Hebrew Bible which can be relied upon for
such purposes. While the Hebrew text is, in fact, very reliable, any
student of the textual transmission knows that it is not reliable
enough for the tests proposed. In addition, if the test is meant to
show something about the "original" text, it cannot, as that text is
known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to have been subject to a relatively
fluid spelling convention for many centuries prior to the final form of
the Masoretic text.
In addition to this critical point, Brendan McKay is in the process
of publishing, and has made his research freely available, a
refutation of the other saliant point of the article, namely that
such codes are sui generis. Rather, similar such "codes" can be
found in *any* text of sufficient length.
In other words, the whole long-winded nonsense is simily a lengthy
demonstration of the infamous statistical point that if given a long
enough time, a monkey would produce the works of Shakespeare by banging
on a typewriter. Drosnin, of course, is laughing all the way to the
bank.
Helge Moulding
Judson D. McClendon wrote:
> You apparently haven't studied the original article
You are right. I read it on the web, and my understanding of the
author's procedure may be flawed. However, nothing you've
written so far has helped me figure out what, if anything, I've
missed.
> the birth and death dates were found in 'close proximity' to
> names to which they belong, but not to the names with which
> they did not belong.
That is a test I looked for, but did not find. The authors seem
to have relied on scrambling the names or the text. If they did
compare the frequency with which they could find the names "near"
the correct dates as opposed to "near" some arbitrary dates, I
never read about it. Can you point out the passage to me?
I merely found the test to be one of being surprised to find that
it was possible to construct lots of instances of common names
using a text that contained lots of instances of the same common
names, and then finding that these instances often were "near"
the birth or death dates associated with real people who actually
had these common names.
If you'll look at the table of names, you'll find that most names
have a Hebrew version in common with some other name. I suspect
that there are millions of Jews who were given these common names,
and that their importance to Judaism has nothing to do with the
likelihood of being able to construct their names and dates using
ELSs from the Torah. This is even easier when you notice that the
Hebrew ways of spelling a given date are at least as varied as the
ways to spell these names. And then add in the point that the
method used by the authors to chose their names is about as
haphazard as looking for a name in the phonebook by pointing at
random.
In any case, you seem to be convinced that the presence of these
codes means something. That opinion is probably off topic for half
of the groups to which this thread is crossposted, so let's leave
it out of the discussion, ok? What's on topic is the question if
the discovery of these "codes" is in fact a surprising statistical
anomaly.
I am saying that given the parameters, the codes are about as
unusual as finding two people with the same first names and
birthdates in New York City. The authors' haven't convinced me
otherwise.
--
Helge "Statistical certainties are flukes!" Moulding
Jacob Love
In article <EGEv0s.Fn...@deshaw.com>, <mi...@aishdas.org> wrote:
[replying to me]>: The authors of the article base their conclusions on the notion that
>: there is a fixed text of the Hebrew Bible which can be relied upon for
>: such purposes.
>
>of history, must be relied upon for halachah, why not for codes (if I
>believed in their value) as well?
As I have already pointed out a dozen times, if you have to rely on the
text you find printed in any book being accurate to the extent of
matching fully consonant for consonant with anything else, then you
have nothing, "halakhic" or otherwise. Have you ever actually examined
any of the Masoretic manuscripts such as the Leningrad Codex, the
Aleppo Codex or one of the the three Erfurt manuscripts? Do you know
how the text you find in the Miqra'ot G'dolot was actually assembled?
I'll give you a hint: none of them match to the precision you would
need to verify the "codes" nonsense. So be careful before you claim
that halakhah requires a notion that such precision exists, because
instead of merely being without an idiotic theory, you may be without a
basis in halakhah.
Again, regardless of what your religious position may be, there is no
doubt whatsoever that the Masoretic text which scribes *attempted* but
*failed* to precisely reproduce is based on an earlier text which had a
much more fluid system of spelling. Indeed, it is partially because of
the fluidity and ambiguity of Hebrew spelling that the Masoretic work
became necessary.
>This only addresses Drosnin's book. The point made in the original
>book "Hamaymad Hanosaf" (The Added Dimension) is that they have a
>model for predicting the frequency of such patterns in Hebrew
>text. And the model works -- for the Samaritan text, for war and
>peace in Hebrew, for random permutations of verses, etc...
My understanding is that this is not true. In fact, I'm not sure how
any comparative work could be done since I don't believe the digitized
texts actually exist for manuscript comparison. (I would be happy to
receive correction on this point.) However, if you are merely
claiming that some form of "codes" can be reproduced via this method,
I don't disagree. As Brendon McKay has stated repeatedly, *any* text
of sufficient length can be made to yield up "codes."
>However, when looking at the current, halachically accepted, text
>of the Torah, the number of finds jumps by orders of magnitude.
There is no such thing as "the current halakhically accepted text of
the Torah" if you mean by that some precisely accurate text no matter
how much you want one to exist. Today's scribes rely on a Tikkun (a
standard text) which is in turn based on the printed texts which were
the product of the press of Daniel Bomberg (a Christian) working from
expertise supplied by Jews who converted to Christianity. This version
was produced before the best texts became available for study; in
particular, it was produced without any knowledge of the Aleppo Codex
which is believed to be the text upon which Maimonides based his model
Torah scroll.
>Therefor, no single "code" has any value, since it may be one of
>those findable in any text. It's the number of them in total that
>raised eyebrows.
Well, keep raising those eyebrows, because if enough texts are tested
you will soon be finding ones that have even more codes! What are
you going to do then--decide that War and Peace must be more holy
than the Bible because we can find even more codes?
>Frankly, I think the whole trend into experimental religion is not
>what Judaism is about.
I really don't understand what this means or what it has to do with
the topic. But maybe I don't want to know.
David Ellis
<Zol...@netcom.ca> wrote:
>I'm no scholar, but I thought Jesus spoke Aramaic, and I therefore
>assumed that the first scriptures were written in Aramaic.
mi...@comshare.com (Michael Pelletier) wrote:
>I'm no scholar, but I thought that the first letters of the
>NT were recorded decades after Jesus' death.
The Gospels were written in Greek well after Jesus died.
This thread dealing with languages and Jesus reminds me of an account
I once read about a fundamentalist Christian school superintendent who
opposed the teaching of foreign languages in his town. His rationale
was "If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for us."
--
David J Ellis
92 Wilson Drive / Framingham, MA 01702
d...@mkitso.ultranet.com