The Bible Code
The Prophet
In his newly published book, _The Bible Code_, author Michael Drosnin
reveals astounding predictions of, among other things, the Holocaust,
the assasination of Rabin, and a yet to be cataclysmic earthquake in
Los Angeles (well that's a no brainer -Ed). The quake is predicted in
the year 2010 but by then Drosnin will have already pocketed his profit.
An Israeli mathematician, Eliyahu Rips, challenges the validity of the
predicting the future by codes embeded in text but supposedly agrees
that there is a poorly understood code buried in the Hebrew Scriptures.
He also states the Bible has predicted future events. In fact it was
Rips who found the code by running a computer analysis on the sequence
of 304,805 letters after removing the spacing between words.
Drosnin seems to equivocate in that he says absolute certainties are not
coded but possibilities are as though they were meant to be warnings. He
also states that codes cannot be found in other literature, such as Moby
Dick, yet I have heard claims of these types of predictions being found
in the Koran.
The author goes on to say that discovery of these codes awaited the advent
of the computer (duh -Ed) hence they were meant for our age which implies
to me that he believes the hoofbeats of the approaching Apocalypse draw
nigh. Yet he also claims to be a non religious Jew who does not believe
in God. What gives?
I suppose a complex predictive code could theoretically be buried in a
long text - kind of like a fractal but using letters. And I suppose such
a code could be the signature of a higher entity. But maybe humans tend
to find codes where non exist. And if one did exist, how would we really
know that the discoverer was not a crackpot?
This isn't the first Bible code I've heard of but it is the most complex.
Are these codes compatible, I wonder, or do they compete in a mutually
exclusive way? And how do they analyze text for such codes? Can any
of this work be taken seriously?
The Prophet
Leon
> This isn't the first Bible code I've heard of but it is the most complex.
> Are these codes compatible, I wonder, or do they compete in a mutually
> exclusive way? And how do they analyze text for such codes? Can any
> of this work be taken seriously?
>
> The Prophet
>
Check out http://www.cybermail.net/~codes/
for some texts on codes in the Torah.
gl...@glass.cv.lexington.ibm.com
>Are these codes compatible, I wonder, or do they compete in a mutually
>exclusive way? And how do they analyze text for such codes? Can any
>of this work be taken seriously?
>
>The Prophet
The burying of messages in otherwise innoouous plain text is
a well known cryptographic technique, although it's usually
regarded as insecure since anyone who knows the algorithm
can break it. The advantage of it is that if someone
doesn't suspect the message is present, they may overlook
it. Of course, one of the other many disadvantages is that
it's usually difficult to embed any significant amount of
information in something that looks like plain text (e.g.,
the information density is relatively low). Additionally,
transcription errors can easily garble the message.
For a good review of all types of cryptography, consult
Bruce Schneier's book "Applied Cryptography" (Hard-cover
ISBN 0-471-12845-7, Paper ISBN 0-471-11709-9, John Wiley &
Sons, Inc., 1996).
One interesting fact is that normal English text contains
about one bit of information per character. Thus, there is
plenty of redundancy which could be exploited, given the
appropriate algorithm. Of course, other languages may
deviate from this.
Dave
P.S. Standard Disclaimer: I work for them, but I do not speak for them.
Yaakov Menken
PRESS RELEASE
Jerusalem
June 4, 1997
Hidden Bible Codes Researchers Condemn Michael Drosnin
"Any attempts to predict the future based on hidden Torah codes are
worthless" (World-Renowned Professor of Mathematics Eliyahu Rips)
(Jerusalem, June 4, 1997) The Israeli research team which uncovered
the scientific basis for the hidden codes in the Book of Genesis
categorically rejected attempts to predict the future based on these
codes. They warned against being taken in by the sensational claims
in Michael Drosnin controversial book, Bible Codes.
All attempts to extract messages from Torah Codes or to make
predictions based on them are futile and of no value, said the
world-renowned Hebrew University Professor of Mathematics, Eliyahu
Rips at a press conference in Jerusalem today. The only conclusion
that can be drawn from the scientific research regarding the Torah
Codes is that they exist and that they are not a mere coincidence.
Professor Rips set out with colleague physicist Doron Witztum to
research seemingly unique patterns encoded in the Book of Genesis.
Scanning the text by computer using a scientific method called
Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS), Witztum and Rips proved that by
skipping an equal number of letters in the Hebrew text of Genesis,
significant clusters of related codes existed that were not due to
chance. They showed that hidden in the text is very detailed
information about many historical events such as the Holocaust, the
French revolution and the Oslo accords.
Following a rigorous six-year peer review process, the codes research
results were published in the scholarly journal Statistical Science.
More recently, the results were duplicated and expanded by Harold
Gans, former US Defense Department senior cryptologist.
Codes don't reveal any secret messages or prophecies about whom to
marry or who will win the NBA championship, said Witztum was the first
one to investigate the possibility of divining the future through
these codes. Following logical and empirical tests, I found
incontrovertible evidence proving its impossible to predict the future
with the hidden codes.
Drosnin claim that he predicted the horrible assassination of the late
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has captured the public imagination.
Drosnin showed Rips what Drosnin considered the hidden prophecy.
Unfortunately, Drosnin like many others at the time guessed something
terrible might happen, said Rips. But, it is scientifically impossible
to make any predictions with codes.
Yaakov Menken
Statement from Harold Gans, Mathematician, N.S.A.
I have reviewed the book "The Bible Code" by Michael 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
Yaakov Menken
Statement by Doron Witztum
A. People often ask why, over the last 12 years, I have spent so much
time in the field of hidden codes in the Torah, instead of my original
field of interest-modern physics and general relativity. The discovery
we have made concerning hidden patterns in the Torah is ultimately
much more far-reaching and significant. The repercussions of our
discovery touch on the very nature of human existence. It can be
looked at as the same feeling Robinson Crusoe had when he first
discovered the tracks in the sand, that he wasn't alone on the island.
We have called this press conference as the researchers who did the
original research on the topic of hidden codes. We will be focusing on
three issues:
1) How, using standard scientific and statistical tools, we found that
details of ancient and modern history are encoded in the original
Hebrew text of the Torah. 2) To discuss the many books and works that
have been published related to this field that have no scientific
basis, and are therefore meaningless 3) As the researchers, we will
explain why it is impossible to use codes to predict the future.
B. A brief overview of the development of codes research
1. According to mystical sources in Jewish tradition, the Torah can be
read and understood on many levels, including the level of a "hidden
text." It is composed of words spelled out by skipping equal numbers
of letters through the original Hebrew text. We call this phenomenon
ELS- Equidistant Letter Sequences. The problem with measuring the
significance of what we find is that ELSs will certainly appear in any
text, and any word may appear many times at many skip distances.
2. Twelve years ago, I developed a method to see if this hidden text
could be scientifically and objectively validated. The idea is as
follows: It is a natural property of any text that words that are
conceptually related are likely to appear in the same area of the
text. Therefore we decided to see if the ELSs of related words also
tend to appear in the same area of the text of the Torah. In order for
the convergence of two ELSs to be considered successful, we developed
two criteria. a) A close proximity of two ELSs b) That the ELSs that
appear are ELSs with a relatively short skip distances between the
letters, compared to other ELSs of that word.
*For example: hammer and anvil. Figure 1
3. Professor Eliyahu Rips developed the mathematical system for
measuring the statistical significance of the results. Yoav Rosenberg
took Eliyahu's ideas and developed an appropriate computer program to
carry out these experiments.
4. In 1986, an extensive experiment was conducted which checked the
overall tendency of convergence of a large list of pairs of words:
names of famous personalities and their dates of birth and death. The
experiment succeeded. A paper describing the results was sent to a
scientific publication, and this became the beginning point of a
rigorous six year process of review and analysis until it was finally
published. Several referees checked the work and asked for further
testing. One of these involved re-running the experiment with a
completely fresh set of data, and also checking other control texts.
This was done and the research passed all tests with very highly
significant results. The article was finally published by Statistical
Science in 1994.
5. Harold Gans, formerly a senior cryptologic mathematician at the
U.S. Department of Defense, conducted an independent experiment to
test the phenomenon that we discovered, using a different set of data.
His experiment also succeeded with highly significant results. He sent
his paper for publication to a scientific journal. Their response was
"This phenomenon has already been scientifically established, so your
work is just another example of the phenomenon."
6. We have conducted seven other experiments that are available as
pre-prints.
7. At present, I am completing a book that gives a true view of this
fantastic phenomenon, and that will describe not only the ten
experiments I mentioned, but also many other successfull experiments
which reveal a vast spectrum of subjects, ancient and modern.
C. Our comments on the book of Michael Drosnin, and other similar
books that have been published 1. On the one hand, we are happy to see
publicity for the phenomenon of Torah codes 2. On the other hand,
there is a danger that the entire credibility of codes research will
be destroyed. Mr. Drosnin's work employs no scientific methodology. No
distinction is made between statistically valid codes, and accidental
appearances, which can be found in any book. For example, Drosnin's
"code" of the comet Shoemaker Levy crashing into Jupiter is
statistically meaningless. Such a code can be found by accident in 1
out of any 3 books checked!
2. What is the danger of research done with no scientific parameters?
For example, we know that the field of health involves systematic
rigorous testing of new medicines. If someone freely distributes a
medicine that has undergone no scientific testing, there are two areas
of damage: 1) The credibility of useful and helpful medicines will be
severely compromised. 2) People may end up using useless medicines in
place of helpful ones.
In codes research, we are dealing with a similar situation: 1) The
credibility of serious codes research will be compromised by amateurs
whose "discoveries" are scientifically meaningless 2) People will
exploit the Torah to present all kinds of counterfeit proofs, by
finding "hidden messages", that bolster their ideology.
We have a very important and valuable phenomenon that has been
discovered. It's a scientific discovery that can really help us get a
better understanding of the nature of our existence. Rather than have
it watered down with people's personal exploitation or
misunderstanding, we should be investing more in serious research and
understanding of the phenomenon.
In summary, one who wishes to show legitimate examples of Torah codes
should at least follow two basic rules: A. Use mathematical tools that
can provide a level of statistical measurement between the minimal
occurrences of ELSs. B. Use an objectively chosen list of words to
look for:
I will now show an example of what I mean by an objective list. This
example has never been shown before publicly:
Figure 2
The process is to take one central word, find it's minimal occurrence
in the text, and then construct a tableau based on it. In this case,
our topic is the death camp Auschwitz. We take an objectively chosen
list of related words. In this case, we are looking for the names of
the subcamps that comprised the Auschwitz complex. We make a tableau
based on the words "of Auschwitz". With our tableau set, the computer
will systematically look throughout the text for a minimal occurrence
of each of the sub-camps. Any one of these words can appear anywhere
in the text of Genesis. We find something very unexpected- that they
consistently appear in the area of the words "of Auschwitz."
D. The Future: Mr. Drosnin's book is based on a false claim. It is
impossible to use Torah codes to predict the future.
I myself as the original researcher of the phenomenon of Torah codes,
investigated thoroughly the question of predicting the future. I
reached the conclusion that it is impossible. I saw this through
experimentation and also as a simple point of logic. There are several
reasons why it's impossible. I will give the most basic reason. In
general, we always have difficulty understanding a text where we don't
have any syntax or punctuation. In the plain Hebrew text of the Torah,
without punctuation, I could easily read the ten commandments as
telling me to steal and murder. There's a verse that describes Moses
being commandment to bring incense. I could easily read it as a
commandment to use drugs. All we have is a few isolated encoded words
of a hidden text. Maybe we're missing some very critical words. It's
literally impossible to learn a coherent story out of the
juxtaposition of a few words that may be somehow related.
Additionally, just like there is a code that Rabin will be
assassinated, I also found a code saying that Churchill will be
assassinated!
Figure 3 "Churchill will be assassinated"
Even regarding past events, there are ELSs of words that appear near
each other that have no relation to each other. It is therefore
unwise, and one could say irresponsible, to make "predictions" based
on ELSs of words appearing near each other.
In summary, we see that predicting the future is impossible. We see
that by publicizing books and works of examples of codes that have no
scientific basis, it ruins the integrity of serious research. And
finally, we see that the scientific phenomenon of Torah codes is a
real one, and is one that deserves serious attention.
Doron Witztum
Jerusalem
June 4, 1997
Charlie Gibbs
In article <5n7n6u$dd...@sunshine.atl.com> pro...@solomons.temple.com (The
Prophet) writes:
>An Israeli mathematician, Eliyahu Rips, challenges the validity of the
>predicting the future by codes embeded in text but supposedly agrees
>that there is a poorly understood code buried in the Hebrew Scriptures.
>He also states the Bible has predicted future events. In fact it was
>Rips who found the code by running a computer analysis on the sequence
>of 304,805 letters after removing the spacing between words.
Which translation was this based on? KJV? NIV? And would this
be even valid? I'd think you'd have to go back to the original
language. And, of course, any dependencies on ASCII, if they
exist, would invalidate the results unless you got the same results
working in, say, an EBCDIC version. By the same token, removing
the spacing between words would destroy any significance that
word lengths might have.
You could probably find an algorithm that would "prove" anything
you wanted - especially if you had your choice of translation
of the original text, whether you add the Apocrypha, etc.
--
cgi...@sky.bus.com (Charlie Gibbs)
Remove the first period after the "at" sign to reply.
sregoR .M divaD
If I remember correctly, the analysis was done in the original hebrew on
only the Torah.
--
The Young American
===========================
"I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru."
--part of a student's essay in an application to NYU
Jason Stokes
On 06 Jun 97 14:41:55 -0800, Charlie Gibbs <cgi...@sky.bus.com> wrote:
>>An Israeli mathematician, Eliyahu Rips, challenges the validity of the
>>predicting the future by codes embeded in text but supposedly agrees
>>that there is a poorly understood code buried in the Hebrew Scriptures.
>>He also states the Bible has predicted future events. In fact it was
>>Rips who found the code by running a computer analysis on the sequence
>>of 304,805 letters after removing the spacing between words.
>Which translation was this based on? KJV? NIV? And would this
>be even valid? I'd think you'd have to go back to the original
>language. And, of course, any dependencies on ASCII, if they
>exist, would invalidate the results unless you got the same results
>working in, say, an EBCDIC version. By the same token, removing
>the spacing between words would destroy any significance that
>word lengths might have.
>You could probably find an algorithm that would "prove" anything
>you wanted - especially if you had your choice of translation
>of the original text, whether you add the Apocrypha, etc.
That was what I was thinking. This Eliyahu Rips may be a mathemetician, but
unless he has a background in cryptography his results have to be taken with
a grain of salt.
On the other hand, there *are* ciphers and so forth in the Bible and the
Torah so I could accept the notion of the names of the prophets being coded
in the text. But it seems the technique the Hebrew scriptures is supposed
to use in this article is a little too "steganographic" for a civilisation
writing a thousand years BCE. I'm inclined to be skeptical.
--
Jason Stokes: j%stokes <at> bohm%anu%edu%au
Replace <at> with @ and % with . to discover my email address.
zoner
Charlie Gibbs (cgi...@sky.bus.com) wrote:
: In article <5n7n6u$dd...@sunshine.atl.com> pro...@solomons.temple.com (The
: Prophet) writes:
: >An Israeli mathematician, Eliyahu Rips, challenges the validity of the
: >predicting the future by codes embeded in text but supposedly agrees
: >that there is a poorly understood code buried in the Hebrew Scriptures.
: >He also states the Bible has predicted future events. In fact it was
: >Rips who found the code by running a computer analysis on the sequence
: >of 304,805 letters after removing the spacing between words.
:
: Which translation was this based on? KJV? NIV? And would this
: be even valid? I'd think you'd have to go back to the original
: language. And, of course, any dependencies on ASCII, if they
: exist, would invalidate the results unless you got the same results
: working in, say, an EBCDIC version. By the same token, removing
: the spacing between words would destroy any significance that
: word lengths might have.
Uhhh, it is based on the ORIGINAL Hebrew, no translation. Also, just from
the above paragraph it is obvious you don't know anything about the
phenomenon.
:
: You could probably find an algorithm that would "prove" anything
: you wanted - especially if you had your choice of translation
: of the original text, whether you add the Apocrypha, etc.
:
Wow, you act as though you have actually studied the codes, you act as
though it is so easy to prove them false. Sorry, many secular scientists
who are much smarter than you have tried, and failed.
: --
:
zoner
Jason Stokes (j.st...@bogus-addres.anu.edu.au) wrote:
: On 06 Jun 97 14:41:55 -0800, Charlie Gibbs <cgi...@sky.bus.com> wrote:
:
: >>An Israeli mathematician, Eliyahu Rips, challenges the validity of the
: >>predicting the future by codes embeded in text but supposedly agrees
: >>that there is a poorly understood code buried in the Hebrew Scriptures.
: >>He also states the Bible has predicted future events. In fact it was
: >>Rips who found the code by running a computer analysis on the sequence
: >>of 304,805 letters after removing the spacing between words.
:
: >Which translation was this based on? KJV? NIV? And would this
: >be even valid? I'd think you'd have to go back to the original
: >language. And, of course, any dependencies on ASCII, if they
: >exist, would invalidate the results unless you got the same results
: >working in, say, an EBCDIC version. By the same token, removing
: >the spacing between words would destroy any significance that
: >word lengths might have.
: >You could probably find an algorithm that would "prove" anything
: >you wanted - especially if you had your choice of translation
: >of the original text, whether you add the Apocrypha, etc.
:
: unless he has a background in cryptography his results have to be taken with
: a grain of salt.
:
: On the other hand, there *are* ciphers and so forth in the Bible and the
: Torah so I could accept the notion of the names of the prophets being coded
: in the text. But it seems the technique the Hebrew scriptures is supposed
: to use in this article is a little too "steganographic" for a civilisation
: writing a thousand years BCE. I'm inclined to be skeptical.
Jason,
Be skeptical, but don't just stop there, study it and try and prove that
it doesn't exist. Many have tried and failed, maybe you could make a name
for yourself. You might want to start with the August, 1994 issue of
Statistical Science.
:
: --
zoner
sregoR .M divaD (mca...@Auburn.campus.mci.net) wrote:
: Charlie Gibbs wrote:
: >
: > In article <5n7n6u$dd...@sunshine.atl.com> pro...@solomons.temple.com (The
: > Prophet) writes:
: >
: > >predicting the future by codes embeded in text but supposedly agrees
: > >that there is a poorly understood code buried in the Hebrew Scriptures.
: > >He also states the Bible has predicted future events. In fact it was
: > >Rips who found the code by running a computer analysis on the sequence
: > >of 304,805 letters after removing the spacing between words.
: >
: > Which translation was this based on? KJV? NIV? And would this
: > be even valid? I'd think you'd have to go back to the original
: > language. And, of course, any dependencies on ASCII, if they
: > exist, would invalidate the results unless you got the same results
: > working in, say, an EBCDIC version. By the same token, removing
: > the spacing between words would destroy any significance that
: > word lengths might have.
: >
: > You could probably find an algorithm that would "prove" anything
: > you wanted - especially if you had your choice of translation
: > of the original text, whether you add the Apocrypha, etc.
:
: only the Torah.
: --
:
You are correct, but there are codes found throughout the rest of
Scripture as well.
: The Young American
Libertarius
In <5n99cc$dd...@sunshine.atl.com> pro...@solomons.temple.com (The
Prophet) writes:
>
>In his newly published book, _The Bible Code_, author Michael Drosnin
>reveals astounding predictions of, among other things, the Holocaust,
>the assasination of Rabin, and a yet to be cataclysmic earthquake in
>Los Angeles (well that's a no brainer -Ed). The quake is predicted in
>the year 2010 but by then Drosnin will have already pocketed his
profit.
>
>An Israeli mathematician, Eliyahu Rips, challenges the validity of the
>predicting the future by codes embeded in text but supposedly agrees
>that there is a poorly understood code buried in the Hebrew
Scriptures.
>He also states the Bible has predicted future events. In fact it was
>Rips who found the code by running a computer analysis on the sequence
>of 304,805 letters after removing the spacing between words.
>
===>Of course. It is a serious manifestation of human ingenuity
and ability to hack away series of Hebrew letters of the
alphabet until something pops.
It is easier with space-free Hebrew script, because it lacks
any vowels, so it can be sliced many different ways and a
WRDCNMNLTSFTHNGS (word can mean lots of things).
Libertarius
Joe Myers
att...@ix.netcom.com(Libertarius) wrote:
>===>Of course. It is a serious manifestation of human ingenuity
> and ability to hack away series of Hebrew letters of the
> alphabet until something pops.
> It is easier with space-free Hebrew script, because it lacks
> any vowels, so it can be sliced many different ways and a
> WRDCNMNLTSFTHNGS (word can mean lots of things).
And it reminds me of the "Number Man" who used to call up Larry King's
overnight show with numerological explanations for all sorts of
just-happened news events. Usually they were on the order of "Waco
has four letters, and the type of truck Tim McVeigh drove to the
federal building in OKC was a 'Ford,' __ALSO__ FOUR LETTERS!!!!"
I've heard discussions about the Biblical code on Christian radio
programs . . . .they all claim that no other piece of literature
reveals the kind of information of the code of the Torrah. They
ignore all the supposed correlations found in Shakespeare, the
Gettysburg Address, and (for all I know) this post.
It's a scam. Trust me.
M. Scott or D. Everard
You'll have to do better than that! Just because you say it's a scam
doesn't make it one. Why should I trust you?
Let's see your scientific work on the subject. THEN, maybe I'll trust you.
Meanwhile... I think I'll continue to follow this fascinating story.
Regards,
M. Scott Everard
da...@taic.net
In soc.culture.jewish Yaakov Menken <men...@torah.org> wrote:
: All attempts to extract messages from Torah Codes or to make
: predictions based on them are futile and of no value, said the
: world-renowned Hebrew University Professor of Mathematics, Eliyahu
: Rips at a press conference in Jerusalem today. The only conclusion
: that can be drawn from the scientific research regarding the Torah
: Codes is that they exist and that they are not a mere coincidence.
The only proposition more difficult to swallow than the one put
forth by Drosnin, that there is significant information encoded concerning
past and future events, is the proposition that even though they are
there, and significant, one cannot look at the prior to an event taking
place and draw useful information from them.
Either information is there above a statistically relevant
criteria, or it is not. If it is, then scanning in advance should yield
relevant information. If it is not, then it won't. But you cannot say that
you cannot see and use it earlier.
The Rabin murderer's name was found afterwards. But it could have
been seen beforehand. Now, it's probably also true that there are a few
other names other than Amir encoded next to Rabin.
So this is my point, as an example: If there are so many, that it
is statistically irrelevant to point to one ahead of time, then there is
no meaning to the code. In such a case it is wrong to conclude relevancy
by finding the name Amir after the fact. If, on the other hand, there are
not that many, then dredging up the few should be useful.
Either it's one thing, or it's not. Not both ways.
da...@taic.net
In soc.culture.jewish Yaakov Menken <men...@torah.org> wrote:
: In codes research, we are dealing with a similar situation: 1) The
: credibility of serious codes research will be compromised by amateurs
: whose "discoveries" are scientifically meaningless 2) People will
: exploit the Torah to present all kinds of counterfeit proofs, by
: finding "hidden messages", that bolster their ideology.
: We have a very important and valuable phenomenon that has been
: discovered. It's a scientific discovery that can really help us get a
: better understanding of the nature of our existence. Rather than have
: it watered down with people's personal exploitation or
: misunderstanding, we should be investing more in serious research and
: understanding of the phenomenon.
Here is my proposition: The ability of a text to have predictive
value goes hand-in-hand with statistical relevancy. If I cannot look at a
text *before* an event, and find statistically meaningful and relevant
information with predictive value, then there can be no statistically
relevant "investigation" of such text after the fact to find hidden
meanings. Not with any degree of intellectual honesty.
For any given searched term, any search in text near that term
must have equal information and meaning both before and after the event.
If I search for "Yitzchak Rabin" and see "Assassin who will assassinate",
but I do not spot anything else relevant before the assassination, I
should *not* be able to look at the text after the event has happened, and
find "Amir" in there, equidistant or not.
On the other hand, if I see Rabin, and I see Assassin, and I then
say to myself : "Self, let's see if the name of the person is here". And
then I look. If I then find, say, 200 different Hebrew names, and conclude
that there are so many present that there's nothing useful (i.e. your
statement about "cannot predict") then THE EXACT SAME FORCE OF STATISTICS
prevents me from going and looking after Rabin is killed, and finding the
name "Amir" and saying "Hey, look, something relevant, but I couldn't
figure it out before". No way. If I can't figure it out before as
something statistically relevant, then I should not be able to honestly
"find" it afterwards.
If there's no predictive value, there is no statistically
meaningful "afer-the-fact" related information.
: I myself as the original researcher of the phenomenon of Torah codes,
: investigated thoroughly the question of predicting the future. I
: reached the conclusion that it is impossible. I saw this through
: experimentation and also as a simple point of logic. There are several
: reasons why it's impossible. I will give the most basic reason. In
: general, we always have difficulty understanding a text where we don't
: have any syntax or punctuation. In the plain Hebrew text of the Torah,
: without punctuation, I could easily read the ten commandments as
: telling me to steal and murder. There's a verse that describes Moses
: being commandment to bring incense. I could easily read it as a
: commandment to use drugs. All we have is a few isolated encoded words
: of a hidden text. Maybe we're missing some very critical words. It's
: literally impossible to learn a coherent story out of the
: juxtaposition of a few words that may be somehow related.
And if you are right, then that is *PRECISELY* why there would be
no meaningful code present. If you need events that have happened to
happen in order to construct (and the way you've just put it, the word
"construct" is the right word) a "relevant" text.
Think about this, and please respond meaningfully.
da...@taic.net
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
On the contrary. I suggest that there is a very close relationship
between finding statistically relevant information and being able to
predict the future.
Say the father of number 20 on the list of sages had had a
computer and searched for his son's name. And found the name, and the
city. What is your basis for saying that this is not significant? Or #21?
Or #22? Or #23?
ze...@magicnet.net
In article <1204.7096...@sky.bus.com>, Charlie Gibbs
<cgi...@sky.bus.com> wrote:
> In article <5n7n6u$dd...@sunshine.atl.com> pro...@solomons.temple.com (The
> Prophet) writes:
> Which translation was this based on? KJV? NIV? And would this
> be even valid? I'd think you'd have to go back to the original
> language. And, of course, any dependencies on ASCII, if they
> exist, would invalidate the results unless you got the same results
> working in, say, an EBCDIC version. By the same token, removing
> the spacing between words would destroy any significance that
> word lengths might have.
The Hebrew text was used. It is all explained in the book, that the Hebrew
text has not changed any, since around 1008 AD, the date of the Leningrad
Codex. The standard text that has been around for around 1,000 years was
used. A translation like the KJV or the NIV was not used. I am not
defending the book, but to just clear up the question raised, about what
translation was used, or that the original language should have been used.
David E. Goldman
Yashar Koach! The concept of predi...@taic.net wrote:
>
> In soc.culture.jewish Yaakov Menken <men...@torah.org> wrote:
>
> : credibility of serious codes research will be compromised by amateurs
> : whose "discoveries" are scientifically meaningless 2) People will
> : exploit the Torah to present all kinds of counterfeit proofs, by
> : finding "hidden messages", that bolster their ideology.
>
> : We have a very important and valuable phenomenon that has been
> : discovered. It's a scientific discovery that can really help us get a
> : better understanding of the nature of our existence. Rather than have
> : it watered down with people's personal exploitation or
> : misunderstanding, we should be investing more in serious research and
> : understanding of the phenomenon.
>
> value goes hand-in-hand with statistical relevancy. If I cannot look at a
> text *before* an event, and find statistically meaningful and relevant
> information with predictive value, then there can be no statistically
> relevant "investigation" of such text after the fact to find hidden
> meanings. Not with any degree of intellectual honesty.
>
> For any given searched term, any search in text near that term
> must have equal information and meaning both before and after the event.
> If I search for "Yitzchak Rabin" and see "Assassin who will assassinate",
> but I do not spot anything else relevant before the assassination, I
> should *not* be able to look at the text after the event has happened, and
> find "Amir" in there, equidistant or not.
>
> On the other hand, if I see Rabin, and I see Assassin, and I then
> say to myself : "Self, let's see if the name of the person is here". And
> then I look. If I then find, say, 200 different Hebrew names, and conclude
> that there are so many present that there's nothing useful (i.e. your
> statement about "cannot predict") then THE EXACT SAME FORCE OF STATISTICS
> prevents me from going and looking after Rabin is killed, and finding the
> name "Amir" and saying "Hey, look, something relevant, but I couldn't
> figure it out before". No way. If I can't figure it out before as
> something statistically relevant, then I should not be able to honestly
> "find" it afterwards.
>
> If there's no predictive value, there is no statistically
> meaningful "afer-the-fact" related information.
>
> : investigated thoroughly the question of predicting the future. I
> : reached the conclusion that it is impossible. I saw this through
> : experimentation and also as a simple point of logic. There are several
> : reasons why it's impossible. I will give the most basic reason. In
> : general, we always have difficulty understanding a text where we don't
> : have any syntax or punctuation. In the plain Hebrew text of the Torah,
> : without punctuation, I could easily read the ten commandments as
> : telling me to steal and murder. There's a verse that describes Moses
> : being commandment to bring incense. I could easily read it as a
> : commandment to use drugs. All we have is a few isolated encoded words
> : of a hidden text. Maybe we're missing some very critical words. It's
> : literally impossible to learn a coherent story out of the
> : juxtaposition of a few words that may be somehow related.
>
> no meaningful code present. If you need events that have happened to
> happen in order to construct (and the way you've just put it, the word
> "construct" is the right word) a "relevant" text.
>
got famous because of Rabin. But interpreting codes can lead to a
myriad different opinions. The Torah contains everything.. But the
objective scientifically-based discoveries of past events are much more
meaningful than these predictions. After all, maybe the murderer who
shall murder -- Yitzchak Rabin -- could be interpreted as saying he was
both headed for murder and was a murderer as part of the Zionist cabal
turning Judaism on its head. Hence interpretive predictions are a waste
of time...
Yaakov Menken
On 8 Jun 1997 03:44:33 GMT, da...@taic.net wrote:
> Here is my proposition: The ability of a text to have predictive
>value goes hand-in-hand with statistical relevancy. If I cannot look at a
>text *before* an event, and find statistically meaningful and relevant
>information with predictive value, then there can be no statistically
>relevant "investigation" of such text after the fact to find hidden
>meanings. Not with any degree of intellectual honesty.
No, you have entirely missed the point, I'm afraid. Let's say I find
"datataic" encoded near the word "Moshiach" (Messiah), and the date
9Sivan5757. Now, does that mean you are the Messiah, and will be
revealed in about 6 days? Does it mean that you will open Moshiach's
Bar and Grill in 6 days? Or is it not talking about you at all??
Answer: we don't know, and we can't know, and the words have no
predictive value. Please read those releases I posted more carefully,
and you will see this explained in detail. As Doron Witztum wrote, he
found something he _could_ have presented as a code predicting
Churchill's assassination!
But after the fact, it is certainly appropriate to go back and do
research as was done by Rips, Witztum and Rosenberg. What they
discovered was a pattern whose likelihood of chance appearance was
vanishingly small. This wasn't presented through hokus-pocus
blind-my-eyes presentations of codes without statistical value, but
through serious research presented in the statistics community. This
sort of research certainly does not depend upon the ability to predict
the future.
YM
mig
On 7 Jun 1997 22:09:40 GMT, eve...@infi.net (M. Scott or D. Everard)
wrote:
>You'll have to do better than that! Just because you say it's a scam
>doesn't make it one. Why should I trust you?
>Let's see your scientific work on the subject. THEN, maybe I'll trust you.
>Meanwhile... I think I'll continue to follow this fascinating story.
>Regards,
>M. Scott Everard
If you do a search on the CNN transcripts page you'll probably dig up
the story on the Hebrew version of this ancient routine I saw this
week. (At least the Hebrew variation can claim some history due to
age-old arguments about the spacing (lack thereof) in the original
texts.)
A mathematician pointed out that with a document as long and varied as
the Torah, for example, the chances of coming up with a given 8-word
sentence, especially without having to observe grammar rules ("Leader
killed mad man from same tribe." etc.) was a rather unimpressive 1 in
3. Basically, if you took the entire run of Batman comics and started
punching up sequences with computers looking for words you could do
the same thing.
Even sillier, the man who "discovered" the Rabin assassination
prediction said that "all possibilities are contained, but only some
of them will occur." Give me my trusty Magic Eight-Ball anytime.
("Future cloudy, try again.")
To further illustrate the point, if you take the second letter from
the fifth word in every sentence in my post, you'll find a secret
message.
saludos, mig "It's magic! Now give me some money."
-----
"It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead
end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths."
Greil Marcus
-----
Michael Greengard
mig@satlink[dot]com
da...@taic.net
: sort of research certainly does not depend upon the ability to predict
: the future.
I will modify my statements to a certain degree.
I will now admit that there *is* a certain category of information
which can demonstrate that there is something relevant there, even though
one cannot, beforehand, use it predictively. For example, the example you
gave.
Before I lived, the phrase "datatiac" would be totally meaningless
gibberish, if one did a search for the phrase "posteraboutbiblecodes".
Even if it cut right through that phrase, it would be deemed random noise.
Only after the fact, after I posted, would this be something significant.
I agree.
However, there are still a whole lot of categories of information
which seem "really really relevant" after the fact, but if they are not
spottable before the fact, are meaningless. Like the "Amir" situation. For
even though one finds the name "Amir" next to the Rabin assassination
phrases, if one also finds 200 other Hebrew names, then this find is
nothing. Not useful before or after. However, for example, if one finds
the phrase "Sus cachol" next to the Rabin Assassination phrasings, even
though this phrase is totally meaningless and useless to someone seeing it
(if he had a computer) 200 years ago, if it turns out that the assassin of
Rabin fired while traveling in a blue Chevrolet, then this is an example
of something highly significant and relevant after the fact, even though
useless and irrelevant before the fact (no predictive value).
Yaakov Menken
On 8 Jun 1997 17:27:58 GMT, da...@taic.net wrote:
> However, there are still a whole lot of categories of information
>which seem "really really relevant" after the fact, but if they are not
>spottable before the fact, are meaningless. Like the "Amir" situation. For
>even though one finds the name "Amir" next to the Rabin assassination
>phrases, if one also finds 200 other Hebrew names, then this find is
>nothing. Not useful before or after. However, for example, if one finds
>the phrase "Sus cachol" next to the Rabin Assassination phrasings, even
>though this phrase is totally meaningless and useless to someone seeing it
>(if he had a computer) 200 years ago, if it turns out that the assassin of
>Rabin fired while traveling in a blue Chevrolet, then this is an example
>of something highly significant and relevant after the fact, even though
>useless and irrelevant before the fact (no predictive value).
Now here, I think you'll find yourself in complete agreement with the
statisticians whose words I posted. _None_ of them believe that
references to Amir or murderer around Rabin have any demonstrable
relevance.
The actual stastical study, otoh, carefully laid out a hypothesis in
advance, and tested against a null hypothesis, and came up with
(honestly) phenomenal results. These _were_ demonstrated to be
statistically relevant, even though the whole business remains without
predictive value for the future.
YM
BlackJack
In article <5ncm74$atf$1...@nw001.infi.net>, eve...@infi.net says...
> In article <5nce8p$h...@nntp02.primenet.com>, boo...@primenet.com (Joe Myers) says:
> >
> >att...@ix.netcom.com(Libertarius) wrote:
> >>===>Of course. It is a serious manifestation of human ingenuity
> >> and ability to hack away series of Hebrew letters of the
> >> alphabet until something pops.
> >
> >> It is easier with space-free Hebrew script, because it lacks
> >> any vowels, so it can be sliced many different ways and a
> >> WRDCNMNLTSFTHNGS (word can mean lots of things).
> >
> >And it reminds me of the "Number Man" who used to call up Larry King's
> >overnight show with numerological explanations for all sorts of
> >just-happened news events. Usually they were on the order of "Waco
> >has four letters, and the type of truck Tim McVeigh drove to the
> >federal building in OKC was a 'Ford,' __ALSO__ FOUR LETTERS!!!!"
> >
> >I've heard discussions about the Biblical code on Christian radio
> >programs . . . .they all claim that no other piece of literature
> >reveals the kind of information of the code of the Torrah. They
> >ignore all the supposed correlations found in Shakespeare, the
> >Gettysburg Address, and (for all I know) this post.
> >
> >It's a scam. Trust me.
> >
>
> doesn't make it one. Why should I trust you?
> Let's see your scientific work on the subject. THEN, maybe I'll trust you.
> Meanwhile... I think I'll continue to follow this fascinating story.
> Regards,
> M. Scott Everard
>
The article in Newsweek about the book illustrated that, if you try hard
enough, you can find apparently meaningful phrases using the skip-code
technique in almost any body of text. For example, they describe how a
mathematician in Australia did a skip code search on the Law of the Sea
treaty and found the phrases "hear the law of the sea" and "safe UN ocean
convention to enclose tuna". He also found 59 words related to Chanukah
in the Hebrew translation of "War and Peace", the odds against which were
calculated to be more than a quadrillion to one (that's
1,000,000,000,000,000 to 1). Are we therefore supposed to infer that the
writers of the Law of the Sea treaty and Tolstoy both were divinely
inspired to code messages in their works? Hardly. It's the same
phenomenon that causes people to see images of Jesus in their living
room's wood paneling or in the condensation on the side of a building:
the human brain's hardwired instinct to look for meaningful patterns even
in random data, and the wishful thinking of the people doing the looking.
BlackJack
David Ullrich
da...@taic.net wrote:
> [...]
Or to put it another way,consider the following text:
: In codes research, we are dealing with a similar situation: 1) The
: credibility of serious codes research will be compromised by amateurs
: whose "discoveries" are scientifically meaningless 2) People will
: exploit the Torah to present all kinds of counterfeit proofs, by
: finding "hidden messages", that bolster their ideology.
: We have a very important and valuable phenomenon that has been
: discovered. It's a scientific discovery that can really help us get a
: better understanding of the nature of our existence. Rather than have
: it watered down with people's personal exploitation or
: misunderstanding, we should be investing more in serious research and
: understanding of the phenomenon.
I find the code "bll" here, uniformly spaced. Choose a vowel and insert
it where appropriate.
(To be explicit, characters number 116, 116+65, and 116+65+65
spell "bll". Here of course since it's contemporary text I'm including
the spaces between words, and I'm using CRLF as a line terminator in
counting the characters, because that's the way Bill Gates does it.
I guess the vowel I had in mind was "i". I'm not afraid to make
predictions: I predict on the basis of the message I find encoded
here that Bill Gates is going to take over the world some time in
the next 65 + 65 + 65 days. We'll see.)
--
David Ullrich
?his ?s ?avid ?llrich's ?ig ?ile
(Someone undeleted it for me...)
Alex
zoner <zo...@mail.goodnet.com> wrote in article <5nak1h$6kc$2...@news.goodnet.com>...
> Jason Stokes (j.st...@bogus-addres.anu.edu.au) wrote:
Heh, heh, zoner with his ongoing failure to understand burden of proof.
Pretty poor show, zoner.
Alex # 616
Alex
zoner <zo...@mail.goodnet.com> wrote in article <5najt4$6kc$1...@news.goodnet.com>...
> Wow, you act as though you have actually studied the codes, you act as
> though it is so easy to prove them false. Sorry, many secular scientists
> who are much smarter than you have tried, and failed.
zoner, don't forget burden of proof, there's a good boy / girl.
Alex # 616
Ken Van De Zande
>
>Be skeptical, but don't just stop there, study it and try and prove that
>it doesn't exist. Many have tried and failed, maybe you could make a name
>for yourself. You might want to start with the August, 1994 issue of
>Statistical Science.
>
>:
Hello!
There are a few crucial questions that I have not seen answered. Maybe
you can point me in the right direction.
Any good book on Biblical exegesis of either Hebrew or Greek {Winegreen
comes to mind..} will point out that there are copyist errors and
variations in both the OT and NT. {I John 5:7 is not in any Greek text
before roughly 1600 AD, for example.} {Also, copyists of the Torah did
not dare mark corrections in the body of the text itself, but rather as
margin notes.}
Given that the original texts are not extant, and we can not work from
them, and given that the texts we have contain small errors in copy, how
can accurate codebreaking be done? It would seem that such attempts at
codebreaking would be in error, or unintelligible.
The second question I have is, what is the propriety of having the
Canon serve as a "ouija board"? Is it not enough that the text would
speak for itself? In other words, what is the point of even doing this?
God bless
Ken
Mrs June Gill
In article <5nak1h$6kc$2...@news.goodnet.com>, zoner
<zo...@mail.goodnet.com> writes
>Jason Stokes (j.st...@bogus-addres.anu.edu.au) wrote:
>: On 06 Jun 97 14:41:55 -0800, Charlie Gibbs <cgi...@sky.bus.com> wrote:
>:
>: >>predicting the future by codes embeded in text but supposedly agrees
>: >>that there is a poorly understood code buried in the Hebrew Scriptures.
>: >>He also states the Bible has predicted future events. In fact it was
>: >>Rips who found the code by running a computer analysis on the sequence
>: >>of 304,805 letters after removing the spacing between words.
>: >Which translation was this based on? KJV? NIV? And would this
>: >be even valid? I'd think you'd have to go back to the original
>: >language. And, of course, any dependencies on ASCII, if they
>: >exist, would invalidate the results unless you got the same results
>: >working in, say, an EBCDIC version. By the same token, removing
>: >the spacing between words would destroy any significance that
>: >word lengths might have.
>: >You could probably find an algorithm that would "prove" anything
>: >you wanted - especially if you had your choice of translation
>: >of the original text, whether you add the Apocrypha, etc.
>:
>: unless he has a background in cryptography his results have to be taken with
>: a grain of salt.
>:
>: Torah so I could accept the notion of the names of the prophets being coded
>: in the text. But it seems the technique the Hebrew scriptures is supposed
>: to use in this article is a little too "steganographic" for a civilisation
>: writing a thousand years BCE. I'm inclined to be skeptical.
>
>Jason,
>
>it doesn't exist. Many have tried and failed, maybe you could make a name
>for yourself. You might want to start with the August, 1994 issue of
>Statistical Science.
>
Science. Couldn't you post the relevant passages for all those who
can't get it? What do you think it proves anyway?
>:
--
June G
# 364
zoner
Alex (dynasup...@powerup.com.au) wrote:
:
:
: zoner <zo...@mail.goodnet.com> wrote in article <5nak1h$6kc$2...@news.goodnet.com>...
: > Jason Stokes (j.st...@bogus-addres.anu.edu.au) wrote:
:
: > : Torah so I could accept the notion of the names of the prophets being coded
: > : in the text. But it seems the technique the Hebrew scriptures is supposed
: > : to use in this article is a little too "steganographic" for a civilisation
: > : writing a thousand years BCE. I'm inclined to be skeptical.
: >
: > Jason,
: >
: > Be skeptical, but don't just stop there, study it and try and prove that
: > it doesn't exist. Many have tried and failed, maybe you could make a name
: > for yourself. You might want to start with the August, 1994 issue of
: > Statistical Science.
: Heh, heh, zoner with his ongoing failure to understand burden of proof.
Heh, heh, alex with his ongoing failure to understand anything.
:
: Pretty poor show, zoner.
This was a GOOD show for you, Alex.
:
: Alex # 616
Alex won't even look at a secular science magazine for evidence, I sense
some bias here Alex.
zoner
Alex (dynasup...@powerup.com.au) wrote:
:
:
: zoner <zo...@mail.goodnet.com> wrote in article <5najt4$6kc$1...@news.goodnet.com>...
Alex,
THE PROOF IS IN THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE, CARE TO TAKE A LOOK?
DOWN BOY.
:
: Alex # 616
Chris Grace
Joe Myers (boo...@primenet.com) wrote:
: I've heard discussions about the Biblical code on Christian radio
: programs . . . .they all claim that no other piece of literature
: reveals the kind of information of the code of the Torrah. They
: ignore all the supposed correlations found in Shakespeare, the
: Gettysburg Address, and (for all I know) this post.
There are a number of books that claim there are codes in the Dead Sea
Scrolls, but they are not the sort of codes you are writing about. The
authors claim that there is a large amount of *jargon* in the dead sea
scrolls, so that when read by the uninitiated they seem to mean one thing,
but a different meaning is revealed to the initiates. Thus it is claimed
that references to 'Galilee','Jerusalem', etc do not relate to the actual
places of those names, but rather to specific locations in the Essene's
settlement, so when the scrolls say 'Jesus went down to Galilee' they
really mean 'Jesus walked to the left hand corner of the compound, next to
the karzi'. I believe this way of interpreting the scrolls is called
'Peshers' but I've lost significant quantities of brain cells lately so
might be wrong. However, both the books I have read claim that the
existence of this jargon encryption system is well known to scholars of
early Jewish religious literature.
--
Chris 'fufas' Grace Somewhere south of the equator and north of antarctica
Avital Pilpel
Alex wrote:
>
> zoner <zo...@mail.goodnet.com> wrote in article <5najt4$6kc$1...@news.goodnet.com>...
>
> > Wow, you act as though you have actually studied the codes, you act as
> > though it is so easy to prove them false. Sorry, many secular scientists
> > who are much smarter than you have tried, and failed.
>
> zoner, don't forget burden of proof, there's a good boy / girl.
>
What zoner fails to understand is that the problem is not that the codes
are not "there", but that the problem is that almost _every_ possible
comibnation or message is "there" if you look hard enough and try enough
combinations. the bible, as a "code", fails not becasue there are no
'hidden' messages of this sort - but becasue there is an incredibaly
large amount of 'hidden' messages, often "saying" the opposite of one
another. There is no uniqueness of translation, and therefore all the
"discoveries" are after the fact. If it was a _real_ code, we should be
able to tell _now_ who the president of th US in 100 years will be. We
cannot, becasue the "predictions" are there only in are mind, the same
way that a cloud has a shape, in a sense, only in our mind.
--
Avital Pilpel.
=====================================
The majority is never right.
-Lazarus Long
=====================================
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on Mon, 9 Jun 1997 03:04:24 GMT
ch...@transdata.co.nz (Chris Grace) posted:
>There are a number of books that claim there are codes in the Dead Sea
>Scrolls, but they are not the sort of codes you are writing about. The
>authors claim that there is a large amount of *jargon* in the dead sea
>scrolls, so that when read by the uninitiated they seem to mean one thing,
>but a different meaning is revealed to the initiates. Thus it is claimed
>that references to 'Galilee','Jerusalem', etc do not relate to the actual
>places of those names, but rather to specific locations in the Essene's
>settlement, so when the scrolls say 'Jesus went down to Galilee' they
>really mean 'Jesus walked to the left hand corner of the compound, next to
>the karzi'. I believe this way of interpreting the scrolls is called
>'Peshers' but I've lost significant quantities of brain cells lately so
>might be wrong. However, both the books I have read claim that the
>existence of this jargon encryption system is well known to scholars of
>early Jewish religious literature.
>--
As I recall, there are NO references to Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
I miss many posts so please e-mail
if you want me to see your answer.
B'tsedek tishpot amitecho
You shall judge your neighbor
favorably. Lev 19:15
Shez
| >
| >In his newly published book, _The Bible Code_, author Michael Drosnin
| >reveals astounding predictions of, among other things, the Holocaust,
| >the assasination of Rabin, and a yet to be cataclysmic earthquake in
| >Los Angeles (well that's a no brainer -Ed). The quake is predicted in
| >the year 2010 but by then Drosnin will have already pocketed his profit.
| >
| >predicting the future by codes embeded in text but supposedly agrees
| >that there is a poorly understood code buried in the Hebrew Scriptures.
I have found that if you take every 2,317th letter of the
alt.folklore.computers newsfeed, starting at a point which for obvious
reasons I cannot disclose, you get the message "AND GOD SAID, LET THERE
BE SPAM". This is followed by several startling revelations about the
bloodline connecting Bill Gates with Alan Turing and ultimately Jesus,
provided you modulate the cypher with the prime factors of the clock
speed of the original IBM 360 expressed in cycles per microfortnight.
-Shez.
____________________________________________________
If replying by email delete Don't_Spam. from address
Helge Moulding
mig wrote:
> On 7 Jun 1997 22
> >Let's see your scientific work
> >Meanwhile... I think I'll continue
> the fifth word in every sentence in my post, you'll find a secret
> message.
"2etooooeahhhao"
What's so secret about that?
--
Helge "Doesn't even spell etaoin shrdlu." Moulding
mailto:h...@slc.unisys.com Just another guy
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/1401 with a weird name
Alex Greenbank
Helge Moulding (h...@slc.unisys.com) wrote:
: mig wrote:
: > On 7 Jun 1997 22
: > >You'll have to do better
: > >Just because you say it's
: > >Why should I trust you?
: > >Let's see your scientific work
: > >THEN, maybe I'll trust you.
: > >Meanwhile... I think I'll continue
: > If you do a search
: > (At least the Hebrew variation
: > A mathematician pointed out that
: > Basically, if you took the
: > Even sillier, the man who
: > Give me my trusty Magic
: > To further illustrate the point, if you take the second letter from
: > the fifth word in every sentence in my post, you'll find a secret
: > message.
: "2etooooeahhhao"
: What's so secret about that?
Don't you see? Isn't it obvious....some people are BLIND.
blaspheme% cat bible.code | rot13 | gzip -dc - | rot13
To whom it may concern,
Beware! Beware! Beware the trolls of Usenet. For on this day (7th Jun 1997)
a plague of trolls shall be cast onto usenet provoking much anger and fear.
Your only course for survival, mere mortal, is to not read too deeply into
things that were not meant to be.
Remember the sixth commandment: VI, Thou shalt not use Emacs.
God shall give you a signal to prove this is true and corr
gzip: Recieved fatal signal (11) Core dumped.
blaspheme% logout
Finally, using crags kindly offered for footholds.....
-Alex (u4...@dcs.shef.ac.uk)
JohnAcadInt
da...@taic.net wrote:
> In soc.culture.jewish Yaakov Menken <men...@torah.org> wrote:
> : Statement from Harold Gans, Mathematician, N.S.A.
<snip>
> : 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.
> On the contrary. I suggest that there is a very close relationship
> between finding statistically relevant information and being able to
> predict the future.
So, which horse is going to win at Kempton Park in the 3.15 tomorrow?
Tell me and I'll cut you in!
> Say the father of number 20 on the list of sages had had a
> computer and searched for his son's name. And found the name, and the
> city. What is your basis for saying that this is not significant? Or #21?
> Or #22? Or #23?
There is no way of demonstrating to the credulous or the true believer
that this or that correlation is not significant. As Russell put it,
"Every shopgirl complains that it rains on her day off." [Well, he was a
Victorian. Ed.] When rainmakers fail to make rain, we sack them at the
next election. But if you appoint enough rainmakers of the right calibre
and insight and with the requisite training, you will in the end make rain.
It all depends on having a sound selection process, doesn't it?
An odd consequence of our dependence on data is that our gathering of it
and the conclusions we base upon it are inevitably parochial and dependent
on our place in time. It is quite possible that the puzzle we inhabit has a
solution beyond our imagining; yet, down here, we are still stuck with
innumerable investment decisions. All we can do is do our best, and we
cannot "unsphere the stars with oaths".
For years, a friend followed the number mysticism of the kabalah.
Everything had an inner or hidden meaning, yet when they threw him
off his property, he at once got hold of a really mean lawyer, who
threw them off it and then threw him back onto it! The "real" world!
Yrs evr,
JohnM
& The Trollenberg Terror
Ray Depew
Helge Moulding (h...@slc.unisys.com) wrote:
: mig wrote:
[...]
: > To further illustrate the point, if you take the second letter from
: > the fifth word in every sentence in my post, you'll find a secret
: > message.
: "2etooooeahhhao"
:
: What's so secret about that?
This is just a guess, but I think that "2etooooeahhhao" is ancient Hebrew
for "troll."
best R
R
Simcha Streltsov
BlackJack (no_...@nowhere.com) wrote:
: In article <5ncm74$atf$1...@nw001.infi.net>, eve...@infi.net says...
: The article in Newsweek about the book illustrated that, if you try hard
: enough, you can find apparently meaningful phrases using the skip-code
: technique in almost any body of text. For example, they describe how a
: mathematician in Australia did a skip code search on the Law of the Sea
: treaty and found the phrases "hear the law of the sea" and "safe UN ocean
the question of validity of the patterns you find in the data is
hotly debated not only in Torah-codes, but also in a more general contest.
obviously, if you have a model with parameters and some training data,
if your model is powerful enough (i.e. lets you build complex
geometrical figures, not just, say, planes) - the more parameters
you have, the better you can "fit" the model to the limited data
you have.
theoretically, if you know how the power of your model increases
with the increase of parameter space - you can find a trade-off
between good fit and the size of your model. Unfortunately,
for most complex models [ such as, say, neural network classifiers,
pattern searches], nobody knows how to estimate this "model power".
[ for the positive results see book by V Vapnik, 1995, or any other
book that explains "V-C dimension" - a theoreitical measure of
such power, or seqrch web for ATT Labs "Support Vector machines"
classifiers].
in practice, using testing sets is a very accepted idea -
thus, one should try proposed codes on many, not just War and Peace,
code - and see qualities of the same class of predictions.
I dont see why it can not be done - I would even say, such
research is required from the authors of the original research -
and not left for others to "disproof"
Simcha Streltsov, _Former_ Adar Rabbi of S.C.Soviet
-------------------------
please, only Kosher lePesach homentashen
all others will be returned unopened.
p.s. This sig expired, but nobody have sent me real
homentashen anyway
Paul/Sheila MacDonald
zoner wrote:
>
> Alex (dynasup...@powerup.com.au) wrote:
> :
> :
> : zoner <zo...@mail.goodnet.com> wrote in article <5najt4$6kc$1...@news.goodnet.com>...
> :
> : > Wow, you act as though you have actually studied the codes, you act as
> : > though it is so easy to prove them false. Sorry, many secular scientists
> : > who are much smarter than you have tried, and failed.
> :
> : zoner, don't forget burden of proof, there's a good boy / girl.
>
>
> THE PROOF IS IN THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE, CARE TO TAKE A LOOK?
>
> DOWN BOY.
>
> :
> : Alex # 616
Apparently, you failed logic 101 as well as law 90.
Burden of Proof example: OJ Simpson & Timothy McVeigh. The onus was not
on the defense to prove them innocent, but the prosecution to prove them
guilty. God does not exist, I have no proof. God does exist, you have
no proof. On whom does the burden lie? Either in law or in logic the
burden is on YOU!
Paul MacDonald
Mike Pelletier
In article <5nce8p$h...@nntp02.primenet.com>,
Joe Myers <boo...@primenet.com> wrote:
>I've heard discussions about the Biblical code on Christian radio
>programs . . . .they all claim that no other piece of literature
>reveals the kind of information of the code of the Torrah. They
>ignore all the supposed correlations found in Shakespeare, the
>Gettysburg Address, and (for all I know) this post.
>
Could you point us to references on the kinds of correlations found
in Shakespeare and the Gettysburg address? It sounds like an
interesting read. Thanks!
-Mike Pelletier.
Helge Moulding
I wouldn't know, since I never do that.
--
Helge "What's ancient Hebrew for 'mudpuppy'?" Moulding
JoAnne Schmitz
On Sun, 08 Jun 1997 10:08:21 GMT, m...@satlink.comSBLOCK (mig) wrote:
>A mathematician pointed out that with a document as long and varied as
>the Torah, for example, the chances of coming up with a given 8-word
>sentence, especially without having to observe grammar rules ("Leader
>killed mad man from same tribe." etc.) was a rather unimpressive 1 in
>3. Basically, if you took the entire run of Batman comics and started
>punching up sequences with computers looking for words you could do
>the same thing.
It seems that there are two things that are being argued. One is the
predictive quality of this technique, which is seriously doubtful.
The other is the "encoding of great Jewish sages' names and dates
of birth and death in the Hebrew text of the book of Genesis" foretold
in find-a-word fashion in the Bible Code.
I remember seeing a television show (yeah, I know, leaky brain won't
tell me exactly which one but somewhere in the last year, probably on
Discovery or the Learning Channel) about the Torah and Torah scrolls,
which are copied meticulously character by character. It was claimed
that the dimensions are considered very important and that grids like
those in the Bible Code book result. Indeed, the scrolls they showed
were rectangularly aligned and seem to have forsaken word spacing
entirely.
So, imagine that you are a studious and gematria-minded Jew whose son
will be groomed for great things. He is born on a particular day of a
particular month that you already know is in your Bible Code, and a
name also appears in that same section of the grid. Would you dare
_not_ to name him that name?
Now, date of death, I don't know how you'd fit that in there. How
many of those were there, I wonder? If you include lots of potential
"match" dates -- birth date, death date, marriage, becoming a rabbi,
discovering or writing or saying or teaching something for the first
time -- then you're going to find a coincidence much more easily.
And how many great Jewish sages names do not appear in the Bible Code?
Does that make them non-sages?
JoAnne "coincidence means you're not paying attention to the other
half of what's happening" Schmitz
M. Scott or D. Everard
-- snip --
>I'm interested in this topic, but I don't have access to Statistical
>Science. Couldn't you post the relevant passages for all those who
>can't get it? What do you think it proves anyway?
>>:
>--
>June G
># 364
>
Here you go:
Regards,
M. Scott Everard
Statistical Science
1994, Vol. 9, No. 3, 429-438
Equidistant Letter Sequences in the
Book of Genesis
Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg
Abstract. It has been noted that when the Book of Genesis is written
as two-dimensional arrays, equidistant letter sequences spelling
words with related meanings often appear in close proximity.
Quantitative tools for measuring this phenomenon are developed.
Randomization analysis shows that the effect is significant at the
level of 0.00002.
Key words and phrases: Genesis, equidistant letter sequences,
cylindrical representations, statistical analysis.
1. INTRODUCTION
The phenomenon discussed in this paper was first discovered several
decades ago by Rabbi Weissmandel [7]. He found some interesting patterns in
the Hebrew Pentateuch (the Five Books of Moses), consisting of words or
phrases expressed in the form of equidistant letter sequences (ELS's)--that
is, by selecting sequences of equally spaced letters in the text.
As impressive as these seemed, there was no rigorous way of
determining if these occurrences were not merely due to the enormous quantity
of combinations of words and expressions that can be constructed by searching
out arithmetic progressions in the text. The purpose of the research reported
here is to study the phenomenon systematically. The goal is to clarify
whether the phenomenon in question is a real one, that is, whether it can or
cannot be explained purely on the basis of fortuitous combinations.
The approach we have taken in this research can be illustrated by the
following example. Suppose we have a text written in a foreign language that
we do not understand. We are asked whether the text is meaningful (in that
foreign language) or meaningless. Of course, it is very difficult to decide
between these possibilities, since we do not understand the language. Suppose
now that we are equipped with a very partial dictionary, which enables us to
recognise a small portion of the words in the text: "hammer" here and "chair"
there, and maybe even "umbrella" elsewhere. Can we now decide between the two
possibilities?
Not yet. But suppose now that, aided with the partial dictionary, we
can recognise in the text a pair of conceptually related words, like "hammer"
and "anvil." We check if there is a tendency of their appearances in the text
to be in "close proximity." If the text is meaningless, we do not expect to
see such a tendency, since there is no reason for it to occur. Next, we widen
our check; we may identify some other pairs of conceptually related words:
like "chair" and "table," or "rain" and "umbrella." Thus we have a sample of
such pairs, and we check the tendency of each pair to appear in close
proximity in the text. If the text is meaningless, there is no reason to
expect such a tendency. However, a strong tendency of such pairs to appear
in close proximity indicates that the text might be meaningful.
Note that even in an absolutely meaningful text we do not expect that,
deterministically, every such pair will show such tendency. Note also, that
we did not decode the foreign language of the text yet: we do not recognise
its syntax and we cannot read the text.
This is our approach in the research described in the paper. To test
whether the ELS's in a given text may contain "hidden information," we write
the text in the form of two-dimensional arrays, and define the distance
between ELS's according to the ordinary two-dimensional Euclidean metric.
Then we check whether ELS's representing conceptually related words tend to
appear in "close proximity."
Suppose we are given a text, such as Genesis (G). Define an
equidistant letter sequence (ELS) as a sequence of letters in the text whose
positions, not counting spaces, form an arithmetic progression; that is, the
letters are found at the positions
n, n+d, n+2d, ... , n+(k-1)d.
We call d the skip, n the start and k the length of the ELS. These three
parameters uniquely identify the ELS, which is denoted (n,d,k).
Let us write the text as a two-dimensional array--that is, on a single
large page--with rows of equal length, except perhaps for the last row.
Usually, then, an ELS appears as a set of points on a straight line. The
exceptional cases are those where the ELS "crosses" one of the vertical edges
of the array and reappears on the opposite edge. To include these cases in
our framework, we may think of the two vertical edges of the array as pasted
together, with the end of the first line pasted to the beginning of the second
, the end of the second to the beginning of the third and so on. We thus get
a cylinder on which the text spirals down in one long line.
It has been noted that when Genesis is written in this way, ELS's
spelling out words with related meanings often appear in close proximity. In
Figure 1 we see the example of 'patish' (hammer) and 'sadan' (anvil); in
Figure 2, 'Zidkiyahu' (Zedekia) and 'Matanya' (Matanya), which was the
original name of King Zedekia (Kings II, 24:17). In Figure 3 we see yet
another example of 'hachanuka' (the Chanuka) and 'chashmonaee' (Hasmonean),
recalling that the Hasmoneans were the priestly family that led the revolt
against the Syrians whose successful conclusion the Chanuka feast celebrates.
Indeed, ELS's for short words, like those for 'patish' (hammer) and
'sadan' (anvil), may be expected on general probability grounds to appear
close to each other quite often, in any text. In Genesis, though, the
phenomenon persists when one confines attention to the more "noteworthy"
ELS's, that is, those in which the skip |d| is _minimal_ over the whole text
or over large parts of it. Thus for 'patish' (hammer), there is no ELS with
a smaller skip than that of Figure 1 in all of Genesis; for 'sadan' (anvil),
there is none in a section of text comprising 71% of G; the other four words
are minimal over the whole text of G. On the face of it, it is not clear
whether or not this can be attributed to chance. Here we develop a method
for testing the significance of the phenomenon according to accepted
statistical principles. After making certain choices of words to compare and
ways to measure proximity, we perform a randomization test and obtain a very
small p-value, that is, we find the results highly statistically significant.
2. OUTLINE OF THE PROCEDURE
In this section we describe the test in outline. In the Appendix,
sufficient details are provided to enable the reader to repeat the
computations precisely, and so to verify their correctness. The authors will
provide, upon request, at cost, diskettes containing the program used and the
texts G, I, R, T, U, V and W (see Section 3).
We test the significance of the phenomenon on samples of pairs of
related words (such as hammer-anvil and Zedekia-Matanya). To do this we must
do the following:
(i) define the notion of "distance" between any two words, so as to lend
meaning to the idea of words in "close proximity";
(ii) define statistics that express how close, "on the whole," the words
making up the sample pairs are to each other (some kind of average over the
whole sample);
(iii) choose a sample of pairs of related words on which to run the test;
(iv) determine whether the statistics defined in (ii) are "unusually small"
for the chosen sample.
Task (i) has several components. First, we must define the notion
of "distance" between two given ELS's in a given array; for this we use a
convenient variant of the ordinary Euclidean distance. Second, there are
many ways of writing a text as a two-dimensional array, depending on the row
length; we must select one or more of these arrays and somehow amalgamate
the results (of course, the selection and/or amalgamation must be carried out
according to clearly stated, systematic rules). Third, a given word may occur
many times as an ELS in a text; here again, a selection and amalgamtion
process is called for. Fourth, we must correct for factors such as word
length and composition. All this is done in detail in Sections A.1 and A.2
of the Appendix.
We stress that our defintion of distance is not unique. Although
there are certain general principles (like minimizing the skip d) some of the
details can be carried out in other ways. We feel that varying these details
is unlikely to affect the results substantially. Be that as it may, we chose
one particular defintion, and have, throughout, used _only_ it, that is, the
function c(w,w') described in Section A.2 of the Appendix had been defined
before any sample was chosen, and it underwent no changes. [Similar remarks
apply to choices made in carrying out task (ii).]
Next, we have task (ii), measuring the overall proximity of pairs of
words in the sample as a whole. For this, we used two different statistics
p and p , which are defined and motivated in the Appendix (Section A.5).
1 2
Intuitively, each measures overall proximity in a different way. In each
case, a small value of p i indicates that the words in the sample pairs are,
on the whole, close to each other. No other statistics were _ever_ calculated
for the first, second or indeed any sample.
In task (iii), identifying an appropriate sample of word pairs, we
strove for uniformity and objectivity with regard to the choice of pairs and
to the relation between their elements. Accordingly, our sample was built
from a list of personalities (p) and the dates (Hebrew day and month) (p')
of their death or birth. The personalities were taken from the _Encyclopedia
of Great Men in Israel_ [5].
At first, the criterion for inclusion of a personality in the sample
was simply that his entry contain at least three columns of text and that a
date of birth or death be specified. This yielded 34 personalities (the
first list--Table 1). In order to avoid any conceivable appearance of having
fitted the tests to the data, it was later decided to use a fresh sample,
without changing anything else. This was done by considering all
personalities whose entries contain between 1.5 and 3 columns of text in the
Encyclopedia; it yielded 32 personalities (the second list--Table 2). The
significance test was carried out on the second sample only.
Note that personality-date pairs (p,p') are not word pairs. The
personalities each have several appellations, there are variations in spelling
and there are different ways of designating dates. Thus each personality-
date pair (p,p') corresponds to several word pairs (w,w'). The precise
method used to generate a sample of word pairs from a list of personalities
is explained in the Appendix (Section A.3).
The measures of proximity of word pairs (w,w') result in statistics
p and p . As explained in the Appendix (Section A.5), we also used a variant
1 2
of this method, which generates a smaller sample of word pairs from the same
list of personalities. We denote the statistics p and p , when applied to
1 2
this smaller sample, by p and p .
3 4
Finally, we come to task (iv), the significance test itself. It is
so simple and straightfoward that we describe it in full immediately.
The second list contains of 32 personalities. For each of the 32!
(pi)
permutations (pi) of these personalities, we define the statistic p
1
obtained by permuting the personalities in accordance with (pi), so that
Personality i is matched with the dates of Personality (pi)(i). The 32!
(pi)
numbers p are ordered, with possible ties, according to the usual order
1
of the real numbers. If the phenomenon under study were due to chance, it
would be just as likely that p occupies any one of the 32! places in this
1
order as any other. Similarly for p, p and p. This is our null hypothesis.
2 3 4
To calculate significance levels, we chose 999,999 random permutations
(pi) of the 32 personalities; the precise way in which this was done is
explained in the Appendix (Section A.6). Each of these permutations (pi)
(pi)
determines a statistic p; together with p, we have thus 1,000,000
1 1
numbers. Define the rank order of p among these 1,000,000 numbers as the
1
(pi) (pi)
number of p not exceeding p; if p is tied with other p, half of
1 1 1 1
these others are considered to "exceed" p. Let rho be the rank order of p,
1 1 1
divided by 1,000,000; under the null hypothesis, rho is the probability
1
that p would rank as low as it does. Define rho, rho and rho similarly
1 2 3 4
(using the same 999,999 permutations in each case).
After calculating the probabilities rho through rho, we must make
1 4
an overall decision to accept or reject the research hypothesis. In doing
this, we should avoid selecting favorable evidence only. For example,
suppose that rho = 0.01, the other rho being higher. There is then the
3 i
temptation to consider rho only, and so to reject the null hypothesis at
3
the level of 0.01. But this would be a mistake; with enough sufficiently
diverse statistics, it is quite likely that just by chance, some one of them
will be low. The correct question is, "Under the null hypothesis, what is
the probability that at least one of the four rho would be less than or
i
equal to 0.01?" Thus denoting the event "rho <= 0.01" by E, we must find
i i
the probability not of E, but of "E or E or E or E." If the E were
3 1 2 3 4 i
mutually exclusive, this probability would be 0.04; overlaps only decrease
the total probability, so that it is in any case less than or equal to 0.04.
Thus we can reject the null hypothesis at the level of 0.04, but not 0.01.
More generally, for any given delta, the probability that at least
one of the four numbers rho is less than or equal to delta is at most 4delta.
i
This is known as the Bonferroni inequality. Thus the overall significance
level (or p-value), using all four statistics, is rho := 4 min rho.
0 i
3. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS
In Table 3, we list the rank order of each of the four p among the
(pi) i
1,000,000 corresponding p. Thus the entry 4 for p means that for
i 4
precisely 3 out of the 999,999 random permutations (pi), the statistic
(pi)
p was smaller than p (none was equal). It follows that min rho =
4 4 i
0.000004 so rho = 4 min rho = 0.000016. The same calculations, using the
0 i
same 999,999 random permutations, were performed for control texts. Our
first control text, R, was obtained by permuting the letters of G randomly
(for details, see Section A.6 of the Appendix). After an earlier version
of this paper was distributed, one of the readers, a prominent scientist,
suggested to use as a control text Tolstoy's _War and Peace_. So we used
text T consisting of the initial segment of the Hebrew translation of
Tolstoy's _War and Peace_ [6]--of the same length of G. Then we were asked
by a referee to perform a control experiment on some early Hebrew text. He
also suggested to use randomization on words in two forms: on the whole text
and within each verse. In accordance, we checked texts I, U and W: text I
is the Book of Isaiah [2]; W was obtained by permuting the words of G
randomly; U was obtained from G by permuting randomly words within each verse.
In addition, we produced also text V by permuting the verses of G randomly.
(For details, see Section A.6 of the Appendix.) Table 3 gives the results of
these calculations, too. In the case of I, min rho is approximately 0.900;
i
in the case of R it is 0.365; in the case of T it is 0.277; in the case of U
it is 0.276; in the case of V it is 0.212; and in the case of W it is 0.516.
So in five cases rho = 4 min rho exceeds 1, and in the remaining case
0 i
rho = 0.847; that is, the result is totally nonsignificant, as one would
0
expect for control texts.
We conclude that the proximity of ELS's with related meanings in the
Book of Genesis is not due to chance.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Table 3 (pi)
Rank order of p among one million p
i i
---------------------------------------------------------------
p p p p
1 2 3 4
----------------------------------------------------------------
G 453 5 570 4
R 619,140 681,451 364,859 573,861
T 748,183 363,481 580,307 277,103
I 899,830 932,868 929,840 946,261
W 883,770 516,098 900,642 630,269
U 321,071 275,741 488,949 491,116
V 211,777 519,115 410,746 591,503
----------------------------------------------------------------
Libertarius
In <339af917...@news.idt.net> men...@torah.org (Yaakov Menken)
writes:
How do youknow that the supposed "code" refers to RABIN and not
RUBEN or something else? How do you no that "AMIR" is not MIRA
or MARY or EMIR or AMORY or something else?
Since there are no vowels in the Hebrew text, what is your
probability of coming up with a two, three, or four-consonant word?
LBRTRVS
Arne Langsetmo
Dear sirs:
After years of careful study, I have conclusively determined that
the Torah contains hidden codes of immense importance to mankind.
By taking the letters at intervals of 10 letters apart, I have
found the following absolutely astounding sequence:
I A M S A M S A M I A M I D O N O T L
I K E G R E E N E G G S A N D H A M
I am still trying to determine the significance of the letters.
If any other astute readers (including those that are fluent in
other languages) can discern the meaning of this message, I
would appreciate an e-mail on this.
I have conclusively shown that the odds of this particular
sequence appearing randomly in ordinary Hebrew text is less
that one in 10 to the 15th, and as others have demonstrated,
this probability is so low that it is absoutely impossible
for this sequence to have occured _at all_ in the known
universe. The implications of this fact are still being
investigated, but in the meantime, I intend to promulgate
this amazing find on CNN, USA Today, and the Weekly Reader.
Anyone that knows of sufficiently credulous audiences that
will be willing to pay travel and honoraria fees for lecture
appearances for me to expound on this topic should forward
this information to me, and I will glady cut them in on
a piece of the action.
Thanks for your attention. More universal truths to come.
Cheers,
-- Arne Langsetmo
Daniel J Adams
In article <5nj857$3...@dfw-ixnews9.ix.netcom.com>, Arne Langsetmo
<zu...@ix.netcom.com> writes
>Dear sirs:
>
>After years of careful study, I have conclusively determined that
>the Torah contains hidden codes of immense importance to mankind.
>By taking the letters at intervals of 10 letters apart, I have
>found the following absolutely astounding sequence:
>
> I A M S A M S A M I A M I D O N O T L
> I K E G R E E N E G G S A N D H A M
Is this guy serious?
--------------------------------------------- ------------------
| Daniel J Adams | |
| | Atheist |
| http://www.kerbcrawler.demon.co.uk | #603 |
| kerbc...@earthling.net | |
--------------------------------------------- -----------------
paul_daniels
Daniel J Adams wrote:
>
> In article <5nj857$3...@dfw-ixnews9.ix.netcom.com>, Arne Langsetmo
> <zu...@ix.netcom.com> writes
> >Dear sirs:
> >
> >After years of careful study, I have conclusively determined that
> >the Torah contains hidden codes of immense importance to mankind.
> >By taking the letters at intervals of 10 letters apart, I have
> >found the following absolutely astounding sequence:
> >
> > I A M S A M S A M I A M I D O N O T L
> > I K E G R E E N E G G S A N D H A M
>
> Is this guy serious?
>
Damn, yes. I was amazed. You see, if you take A=1, b=2 etc theory and
apply it to the strange string of letters that was discovered, add the
numbers together and divide by the total number of letters present, then
take your birthday add the numbers and again divide by the number of
figures in your birthdate (inc the 19 of 1971 - or whatever). Simply
subtract the smaller from the larger, invert the answer, subtract 9 and
you *always* get the answer 6. If you repeat this procedure twice you
get 666. Shit.
John
> Is this guy serious?
No.
--
J.E.M. / "All things come to
mye...@gactr.uga.edu / he who waits."
alt.immortal / I have time. Q
Daniel J Adams
Alex
> : zoner <zo...@mail.goodnet.com> wrote in article <5najt4$6kc$1...@news.goodnet.com>...
> :
> : > Wow, you act as though you have actually studied the codes, you act as
> : > though it is so easy to prove them false. Sorry, many secular scientists
> : > who are much smarter than you have tried, and failed.
> :
> : zoner, don't forget burden of proof, there's a good boy / girl.
>
Don't try to give your fairy tale the veneer of respectability by quoting science.
Let's make an example here. I write a book of fiction in which one the stories
talks about gravity. Dropping an apple as evidence of gravity in that part
of the book does not in any way prove the book of fiction.
Can you see this ?
Alex # 616
Robert Billing
> As I recall, there are NO references to Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Since, IIRC, they were written about 100 years before JC was born,
this is not surprising, in the same way that it is not surprising that
Babbage did not write Java.
--
I am Robert Billing, Christian, inventor, traveller, cook and animal
lover, I live near 0:46W 51:22N. http://www.tnglwood.demon.co.uk/
"If ladies wish to change compartments during the journey, the staff
must enable them to do so." LNER rule book, rule 161, 1933 edition.
Bill Marcum
In message <NgKdyaA2...@demon.co.uk>,
dan...@NOSPAM.earthling.net (Daniel J Adams) wrote:
>In article <5nj857$3...@dfw-ixnews9.ix.netcom.com>, Arne Langsetmo
><zu...@ix.netcom.com> writes
>>Dear sirs:
>>
>>After years of careful study, I have conclusively determined that
>>the Torah contains hidden codes of immense importance to mankind.
>>By taking the letters at intervals of 10 letters apart, I have
>>found the following absolutely astounding sequence:
>>
>> I A M S A M S A M I A M I D O N O T L
>> I K E G R E E N E G G S A N D H A M
>
>Is this guy serious?
I would hope not, since that would directly contradict the message of the
Revised Standard Dr. Seuss.
--
Bill Marcum bmarcum at iglou dot com
"The tough coughs as he ploughs the dough"
Daniel J Adams
In article <339D1F...@cdsnet.net>, "Mr. Ed" <dgtl...@cdsnet.net>
writes
>Daniel J Adams wrote:
>
>> In article <5nj857$3...@dfw-ixnews9.ix.netcom.com>, Arne Langsetmo
>> <zu...@ix.netcom.com> writes
>> >Dear sirs:
>
>> >After years of careful study, I have conclusively determined that
>> >the Torah contains hidden codes of immense importance to mankind.
>> >By taking the letters at intervals of 10 letters apart, I have
>> >found the following absolutely astounding sequence:
>
>> > I A M S A M S A M I A M I D O N O T L
>> > I K E G R E E N E G G S A N D H A M
>
>> Is this guy serious?
>
>
>
>y'better learn the meaning of it!
>
>
I post from alt.atheism. Its a scary place and our fundies regularly
claim this sort of thing quite seriously. Stay in alt.atheism too long
and your mind starts to go.......
Mr. Ed
Daniel J Adams wrote:
> In article <5nj857$3...@dfw-ixnews9.ix.netcom.com>, Arne Langsetmo
> <zu...@ix.netcom.com> writes
> >Dear sirs:
> >After years of careful study, I have conclusively determined that
> >the Torah contains hidden codes of immense importance to mankind.
> >By taking the letters at intervals of 10 letters apart, I have
> >found the following absolutely astounding sequence:
> > I A M S A M S A M I A M I D O N O T L
> > I K E G R E E N E G G S A N D H A M
> Is this guy serious?
Of course not, y'twit! It's called SATIRE, and if y'want t'post in Afab,
y'better learn the meaning of it!
Mr. tse-Ed
Kama Master, Kolon Master and Semi-Kolon Master
Keeper of the Afab Koan
"If a tree falls in the forest...what is the sound of one hand
laughing?"
"Ramayana will come manana if you bring me a banana"
Bryan Cowan
In article <5nj857$3...@dfw-ixnews9.ix.netcom.com>, zu...@ix.netcom.com(Arne
Langsetmo) wrote:
> Dear sirs:
>
> After years of careful study, I have conclusively determined that
> the Torah contains hidden codes of immense importance to mankind.
> By taking the letters at intervals of 10 letters apart, I have
> found the following absolutely astounding sequence:
>
> I A M S A M S A M I A M I D O N O T L
> I K E G R E E N E G G S A N D H A M
>
> I am still trying to determine the significance of the letters.
> If any other astute readers (including those that are fluent in
> other languages) can discern the meaning of this message, I
> would appreciate an e-mail on this.
Oh my! This is conclusive proof that Dr. Seuss is God, and that Sam is the
Messiah! Remember the book Green Eggs and Ham? In that book, Sam, the
messiah of Dr. Seuss, tells us that the only way to achieve salvation is
to eat green eggs and ham. Now the holy book of the Jews has proven Sam
right! You must all eat green eggs and ham as soon as possible, in order
to avoid eternal damnation to the world of the Lorax. Green eggs and ham
is the holy food of Dr. Seuss, who has commanded us to eat them on a
train, in a plane, in a box, with a fox, etc.
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on Tue, 10 Jun 97 10:19:02 GMT Robert Billing
<uncl...@tnglwood.demon.co.uk> posted:
>In article <5ngbgh$o...@winter.erols.com> mei...@erols.com writes:
>> As I recall, there are NO references to Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
> Since, IIRC, they were written about 100 years before JC was born,
>this is not surprising, in the same way that it is not surprising that
>Babbage did not write Java.
I know you weren't intending to make me look silly. I only posted
what I did in answer to another who implied otherwise.
She wrote: "so when the [dead sea] scrolls say 'Jesus went down to
Galilee' they really mean 'Jesus walked to the...'" Somewhere she got
the idea that this statement was in the DSScrolls. I appreciate your
confirming that Jesus of Nazereth is not mentioned there.
P & M
Glen Quarnstrom
Daniel J Adams <dan...@fuck.off.spammers> wrote:
>In article <339D1F...@cdsnet.net>, "Mr. Ed" <dgtl...@cdsnet.net>
>writes
>>Daniel J Adams wrote:
>>
>>> In article <5nj857$3...@dfw-ixnews9.ix.netcom.com>, Arne Langsetmo
>>> <zu...@ix.netcom.com> writes
>>> >Dear sirs:
>>
>>> >After years of careful study, I have conclusively determined that
>>> >the Torah contains hidden codes of immense importance to mankind.
>>> >By taking the letters at intervals of 10 letters apart, I have
>>> >found the following absolutely astounding sequence:
>>
>>> > I A M S A M S A M I A M I D O N O T L
>>> > I K E G R E E N E G G S A N D H A M
>>
>>> Is this guy serious?
>>
>>
>>
>>Of course not, y'twit! It's called SATIRE, and if y'want t'post in Afab,
>>y'better learn the meaning of it!
>>
>>
>I post from alt.atheism. Its a scary place and our fundies regularly
>claim this sort of thing quite seriously. Stay in alt.atheism too long
>and your mind starts to go.......
Oh. After that happens, you're eminently qualified to post here in
afa-b, then. We'll be waiting for you, MWAHAhahahahahahahahaha!
--
gl...@cyberhighway.net
"afa-b's leading curmudgeon"
Ray Karczewski is a liar.
Wayne Delia
In <5nj857$3...@dfw-ixnews9.ix.netcom.com>, zu...@ix.netcom.com(Arne Langsetmo) writes:
>Dear sirs:
>
>After years of careful study, I have conclusively determined that
>the Torah contains hidden codes of immense importance to mankind.
>By taking the letters at intervals of 10 letters apart, I have
>found the following absolutely astounding sequence:
>
> I A M S A M S A M I A M I D O N O T L
> I K E G R E E N E G G S A N D H A M
>
>If any other astute readers (including those that are fluent in
>other languages) can discern the meaning of this message, I
>would appreciate an e-mail on this.
It appears to be a hidden Bible prohibition on eating pork and
dairy products, particularly aged dairy products that have
become moldy. The risk of trichinosis from eating pork was
higher in those times, so the warning would be obviously
useful to any ancient Hebrews with access to a sufficiently
powerful computer.
>I have conclusively shown that the odds of this particular
>sequence appearing randomly in ordinary Hebrew text is less
>that one in 10 to the 15th, and as others have demonstrated,
>this probability is so low that it is absoutely impossible
>for this sequence to have occured _at all_ in the known
>universe.
That's what I thought about the probability that I would get
a nine high in a game of five card stud, but, look what
happened! And my bluff fooled nobody, since I was nowhere
near close to a straight or flush.
>The implications of this fact are still being
>investigated, but in the meantime, I intend to promulgate
>this amazing find on CNN, USA Today, and the Weekly Reader.
Do they still publish that four-page pulp rag? I used to collect
them in second grade back in about (cough, mumble) the early
1960's.
>Anyone that knows of sufficiently credulous audiences that
>will be willing to pay travel and honoraria fees for lecture
>appearances for me to expound on this topic should forward
>this information to me, and I will glady cut them in on
>a piece of the action.
If your speaking tour brings you anywhere near the Mid-Hudson
Valley in New York, let me know!
Wayne Delia, red...@ibm.net, Atheist #61, MSTie #37634
"Conspiracy? We couldn't even agree on *lunch*!" - Abbie Hoffman
Matthew White
m...@NOSPAM.midtown.net writes:
> In article <5nj857$3...@dfw-ixnews9.ix.netcom.com>, zu...@ix.netcom.com(Arne
> Langsetmo) wrote:
>
> >
> > After years of careful study, I have conclusively determined that
> > the Torah contains hidden codes of immense importance to mankind.
> > By taking the letters at intervals of 10 letters apart, I have
> > found the following absolutely astounding sequence:
> >
> > I A M S A M S A M I A M I D O N O T L
> > I K E G R E E N E G G S A N D H A M
> >
> > I am still trying to determine the significance of the letters.
> > If any other astute readers (including those that are fluent in
> > other languages) can discern the meaning of this message, I
> > would appreciate an e-mail on this.
>
> Messiah! Remember the book Green Eggs and Ham? In that book, Sam, the
> messiah of Dr. Seuss, tells us that the only way to achieve salvation is
> to eat green eggs and ham. Now the holy book of the Jews has proven Sam
> right! You must all eat green eggs and ham as soon as possible, in order
> to avoid eternal damnation to the world of the Lorax. Green eggs and ham
> is the holy food of Dr. Seuss, who has commanded us to eat them on a
> train, in a plane, in a box, with a fox, etc.
Heretic! The Hatted Cat is the one true Messiah. He arrives
uninvited when we are in the grips of despair on a rainy day,
and yet, despite the objections of the Fish (read
sceptics) he teaches us, entertains us and still cleans up
behind us before mom gets home. And he has promised to return
one day, as is written in the "Cat in the Hat Comes Back".
Hugh Young
In <339C8D...@cableregina.com> Paul/Sheila MacDonald
<smacd...@cableregina.com> wrote:
>zoner wrote:
>>
>> Alex (dynasup...@powerup.com.au) wrote:
>> :
>> :
>> : zoner <zo...@mail.goodnet.com> wrote in article
<5najt4$6kc$1...@news.goodnet.com>...
>> :
>> : > Wow, you act as though you have actually studied the codes, you act as
>> : > though it is so easy to prove them false. Sorry, many secular
scientists
>> : > who are much smarter than you have tried, and failed.
Appeal to authority.
>> :
>> : zoner, don't forget burden of proof, there's a good boy / girl.
>>
>> Alex,
>>
>> THE PROOF IS IN THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE, CARE TO TAKE A LOOK?
Present it. The scientific evidence may or may not be good, but just
appealing to its authority cuts no ice at all.
BTW, since ancient Hebrew does not mark vowels, what's to say that a given
set of consonants stands for "Saddam Hussein" and not "Soda doom hessian" or
"Sad dame hoses Ian" or ... ?
--
Hugh Young, Pukerua Bay, Nuclear-free Aotearoa / NEW ZEALAND
T...@lantis.nit
>Daniel J Adams wrote:
>>
>> In article <5nj857$3...@dfw-ixnews9.ix.netcom.com>, Arne Langsetmo
>> <zu...@ix.netcom.com> writes
>> >
>> >After years of careful study, I have conclusively determined that
>> >the Torah contains hidden codes of immense importance to mankind.
>> >By taking the letters at intervals of 10 letters apart, I have
>> >found the following absolutely astounding sequence:
>> >
>> > I A M S A M S A M I A M I D O N O T L
>> > I K E G R E E N E G G S A N D H A M
>>
>>
>
>Damn, yes. I was amazed. You see, if you take A=1, b=2 etc theory and
>apply it to the strange string of letters that was discovered, add the
>numbers together and divide by the total number of letters present, then
>take your birthday add the numbers and again divide by the number of
>figures in your birthdate (inc the 19 of 1971 - or whatever). Simply
>subtract the smaller from the larger, invert the answer, subtract 9 and
>you *always* get the answer 6. If you repeat this procedure twice you
>get 666. Shit.
Are you "the" Paul Daniels, "the one and only" Paul Daniels? If so, why don't
you make the green eggs and ham dissappear?
On second thoughts, you can take away the green eggs (they sound revolting!)
and leave the ham. ;-)
T...@lantis.nit
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on Wed, 11 Jun 1997 06:07:57 GMT
ch...@transdata.co.nz (Chris Grace) posted:
>mei...@erols.com wrote:
>: In soc.culture.jewish on Tue, 10 Jun 97 10:19:02 GMT Robert Billing
>: <uncl...@tnglwood.demon.co.uk> posted:
>: >In article <5ngbgh$o...@winter.erols.com> mei...@erols.com writes:
>: >> As I recall, there are NO references to Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
>: > Since, IIRC, they were written about 100 years before JC was born,
>: >this is not surprising, in the same way that it is not surprising that
>: >Babbage did not write Java.
>: I know you weren't intending to make me look silly. I only posted
>: what I did in answer to another who implied otherwise.
>: She wrote: "so when the [dead sea] scrolls say 'Jesus went down to
> ^^^ not
Sorry Chris. My only good friend named Chris is a woman.
>: Galilee' they really mean 'Jesus walked to the...'" Somewhere she got
>: the idea that this statement was in the DSScrolls. I appreciate your
>: confirming that Jesus of Nazereth is not mentioned there.
>Actually I was using a (very bad) example, which I did not express very
>well, and you have managed to nitpick on that score and miss the main
>point of my post, which was:
>Many ancient Jewish documents include a jargon-like code which allows them
>to convey a different message to the non-initiated than to the initiated.
>Is that better?
Yes, much. I don't know anything about what you say here, but the
thing I wrote about was not a nit from my point of view.
No harm done. Everything is cool now, I hope.
>If I had read the headers to the posting I responded to from
>alt.folklore.urban and realised the erudite company who were contributing
>to this thread, I would probably have kept my childish musings to myself
>in any event.
If you mix erudite musings and childish musings I think you get a salt
and water, or something like that, or maybe blue smoke. Whatever,
the water is warm, plunge in.
>Chris 'fufas' Grace Somewhere south of the equator and north of antarctica
New Zealand. Cool. I just read in the daily paper that the Maoris
are taking up tattooing again. E-mail me if this is worth noting.
Aron
The future would be predictable using the Torah if you knew what you were
looking for, and ofcourse, thats all about guesswork and typing in and
searching for anything relevant you can find
Eugene Rabinovich
Libertarius (att...@ix.netcom.com) wrote:
: How do youknow that the supposed "code" refers to RABIN and not
: RUBEN or something else? How do you no that "AMIR" is not MIRA
: or MARY or EMIR or AMORY or something else?
I am not defending Drosnin's book, but consonants are routinely used in
Hebrew to portray vowels. For example, Rabin is spelled
"resh-bet-yud-nun," while Ruben would be spelled "resh-vav-bet-nun." Also,
Amir would definitely be spelled differently than Mira or Mary or Amory,
but could be spelled the same as Emir.
: Since there are no vowels in the Hebrew text, what is
your
: probability of coming up with a two, three, or four-consonant word?
--
Eugene Rabinovich
y-rabi...@uchicago.edu
http://student-www.uchicago.edu/users/yrabinov (Under Construction)
JoAnne Schmitz
>Libertarius (att...@ix.netcom.com) wrote:
>
>: How do youknow that the supposed "code" refers to RABIN and not
>: RUBEN or something else? How do you no that "AMIR" is not MIRA
>: or MARY or EMIR or AMORY or something else?
>
>I am not defending Drosnin's book, but consonants are routinely used in
>Hebrew to portray vowels. For example, Rabin is spelled
>"resh-bet-yud-nun," while Ruben would be spelled "resh-vav-bet-nun." Also,
>Amir would definitely be spelled differently than Mira or Mary or Amory,
>but could be spelled the same as Emir.
Would someone kindly explain what aleph is? I thought it was a Hebrew
letter which is the equivalent of "A."
JoAnne "frankly confused" Schmitz
Micha S. Berger
On Mon, 16 Jun 1997 16:59:43 GMT, in newsgroup soc.culture.jewish, article <33a55484....@news2.qis.net>, JoAnne Schmitz <jsch...@qis.net.deleteme!> wrote:
: Would someone kindly explain what aleph is? I thought it was a Hebrew
: letter which is the equivalent of "A."
It is supposed to be an "unvoiced glottal stop" (whatever that is), and is
silent in all modern accents that I know of. In the laws of gittin (writs
of divorce) when one writes a non-Hebrew name, one must insert a semi-vowel
or gutteral to represent the vowels. (Hebrew has vowel marks above or below
the letters, which represent only consanents.) Alef is used to represent
the vowels patach (a as in far) and kamatz (u as in fun, for Ashkenazic
pronounciation, a as in far in Sepharadic).
From there, Yiddish uses the aleph similarly.
Historically, aleph is akin to the Phoneician letter that later became
the Gree alpha (not the similarity of name), and via Latin, became the
letter "A".
--
Micha Berger 201 916-0287 Help free Ron Arad, held by Syria 3828 days!
mi...@aishdas.org (16-Oct-86 - 16-Jun-97)
For a mitzvah is a candle, and the Torah its light.
http://aishdas.org -- Orthodox Judaism: Torah, Avodah, Chessed
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on Mon, 16 Jun 1997 16:59:43 GMT
jsch...@qis.net.deleteme! (JoAnne Schmitz) posted:
>On Sun, 15 Jun 1997 07:07:19 GMT, yrab...@midway.uchicago.edu (Eugene
>Rabinovich) wrote:
>>Libertarius (att...@ix.netcom.com) wrote:
>>
>>: How do youknow that the supposed "code" refers to RABIN and not
>>: RUBEN or something else? How do you no that "AMIR" is not MIRA
>>: or MARY or EMIR or AMORY or something else?
>>
>>I am not defending Drosnin's book, but consonants are routinely used in
>>Hebrew to portray vowels. For example, Rabin is spelled
>>"resh-bet-yud-nun," while Ruben would be spelled "resh-vav-bet-nun." Also,
>>Amir would definitely be spelled differently than Mira or Mary or Amory,
>>but could be spelled the same as Emir.
>Would someone kindly explain what aleph is? I thought it was a Hebrew
>letter which is the equivalent of "A."
Close. It's the first letter of the aleph-bet (alphabet) like A is but
it is pretty much silent in Hebrew. (In Yiddish it is pronounced
like a short a.) Back to Hebrew, since most vowels sounds are not
written as letters, any word that starts with a vowel sound would have
a silent letter as a first letter, aleph or ayin, which is also pretty
much silent. (glottal stops, guttural this and that not included).
Hope that was clear. <g>
>JoAnne "frankly confused" Schmitz
P&M
I miss many posts so please e-mail
if you want me to see your answer.
B'tsedek tishpot amitecho
You shall judge your neighbor
justly and favorably. Lev 19:15
C Lamb
Chris Grace (ch...@transdata.co.nz) wrote:
: Debbie Gaunt (debbie...@dial.pipex.com) wrote:
: : So that's what the Sheffield University dept of computer studies is using
: : taxpayers' money for these days...
: Naah. They're all on the piss down at the Raven.
I think you'll find it is either the Red Deer or the 197 club.
just my 2p
Chris
: Chris '1966' Grace
: --
: Chris 'fufas' Grace Somewhere south of the equator and north of antarctica
G & G
A friend of my recently told me that the bible code process was so
unscientific to be laughable. Apparently the author preselected some
words or phrases and then set the computer to work to set up these
grids searching for the word the author selected. I would guess that
given the power of a computer and the program's ability to alter the
grid parameters, nearly any word or phrase could be found. If that
is true, this is just another example of how incredibly gullible folk
are and why absolutely crazy stuff is blindly accepted as truth by
an unthinking mass of humanity.
Mike Pelletier
These aren't the only codes present. There are codes that are
not just random collections of characters that happen to spell words,
but that have numerical and contextual correlations in the text.
For example, there is a section in Deuteronomy that talks about
a person being a "wonder of the generation," and nearby is the
ELS "RaMBaM", the Hebrew nickname for Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonedes,
an prodigal 11th century scholar whose works are widely recognized
as masterpieces of Jewish study, some of which were completed
when he was in his 20s.
Also nearby is the phrase "MiShNaH TORaH", one of Rambam's works
that codified and categorized the 613 commandments, or "mitzvot"
inferred from the Torah. The letters of each word are separated
from each other by 7 (or is it 49, I don't quite recall, and I
can't find my notes) characters (significant in the sense that
the number seven is the holy, sanctified day of the Sabbath)
and the corresponding letters of each word are separated from
each other by 613 letters:
Mem - 613 - Tav
| |
7 7
| |
Shin - 613 - Vav
| |
7 7
| |
Nun - 613 - Resh
| |
7 7
| |
Hay - 613 - Hay
Just as in the actual Mishnah Torah, the Mishnah Torah in this
pattern of letters "contains" 613.
Now, is this empirically significant? Probably not. But it's
certainly an aesthetically pleasing little tidbit, and doesn't
fall under the auspices of your criticism.
-Mike Pelletier.
da...@taic.net
The only thing more ridiculous than some of the claims for the bible code,
is this message indicating the swallowing whole of "what a friend told
me", which is about 95% inaccurate and incomplete.
Wayne Dyer
Newsgroups trimmed at least a little bit. Not enough for some, probably.
G & G wrote:
> A friend of my recently told me that the bible code process was so
> unscientific to be laughable. Apparently the author preselected some
> words or phrases and then set the computer to work to set up these
> grids searching for the word the author selected. I would guess that
[...]
Actually, the process is very scientific. The interpretation of the
results is what's laughable. I found my birthdate embedded in the
digits of pi. I haven't looked for my SSN yet, but I'm sure it's there.
I also found out that if I rearrange the letters I find in any common
newspaper, I can make a dandy ransom note. Spoooooky.
--
Wayne Dyer :: dwd...@eskimo.com :: http://www.eskimo.com/~dwdyer/
Releasing the plunger with the tip still in the introduction
hole may suck out some sample.
Ariel Brosh
JoAnne Schmitz (jsch...@qis.net.deleteme!) wrote:
: On Sun, 15 Jun 1997 07:07:19 GMT, yrab...@midway.uchicago.edu (Eugene
: Rabinovich) wrote:
:
:
: Would someone kindly explain what aleph is? I thought it was a Hebrew
: letter which is the equivalent of "A."
No.
There are no letters for vowels in Hebrew. Hebrew and other shemist
languages use diacritics for vowels, and this is often omitted.
Aleph has basically no consonant sound - it sounds just like the vowel it
carries. For example, if I want to write OR, I would write aleph-vav-reysh
while vav is the vowel carried by the Aleph. (Sometimes there are vowel
letters, not always. Vav can be either V, U or O)
Rabin is spelled: Reysh-Beth-Yod-Nun
Amir is spelled: Ayin (doesn't exist in European languages)-Mem-Yod-Reysh
Just a note to code searchers-
It is enough religion killed Rabin. You don't have to abuse his grave with
Gimmatries and code searches.
--
Ariel Brosh, WebMaster and Modular Programmer.
http://www.atheist.org.il
http://www.nuts.co.il
http://www.yam-adonay.org
Jonathan J. Baker
In <> G & G <gri...@gte.net> writes:
>A friend of my recently told me that the bible code process was so
>unscientific to be laughable. Apparently the author preselected some
>words or phrases and then set the computer to work to set up these
>grids searching for the word the author selected. I would guess that
This is not the method used by the original Torah-Codes people.
Certainly one can find any phrase one wants, and put any interpretation
one wants on it, with a simple letter-skip-search program; I've
done it myself, finding hints that Lewis Carroll was an American
Lubavitcher, in Through the Looking Glass.
What Rips/Witztum claim is that for a given set of rabbis whose
biographies in a certain biographical dictionary covered more than
3 columns (indicating a high level of fame), the minimum distance
between the skip-sequence of their names and the skip-sequence of
their death years is smaller than one would expect from random
combinations of letters. This indicates something more than
coincidence; it is left to others to say that the "something
more" is Divine authorship.
Drosnin seems to have just used the simple search methods to make
exaggerated claims - in other words, he abused the methods and
claimed the authority of the real methods for his distortions.
>given the power of a computer and the program's ability to alter the
>grid parameters, nearly any word or phrase could be found. If that
>is true, this is just another example of how incredibly gullible folk
>are and why absolutely crazy stuff is blindly accepted as truth by
>an unthinking mass of humanity.
Indeed. And Drosnin is "laughing all the way to the bank" about
these gullible humans.
Jonathan Baker
jjb...@panix.com
Jim Meritt
In article <5oe6k9$ga1$2...@news2.gte.net>, gri...@gte.net says...
;A friend of my recently told me that the bible code process was so
;unscientific to be laughable. Apparently the author preselected some
;words or phrases and then set the computer to work to set up these
;grids searching for the word the author selected. I would guess that
;grid parameters, nearly any word or phrase could be found.
What is the "success" ratio (or however it was measured) of incorrect
historical "predictions", and how did the value compare when run against
text prepared off the same semantic structure but pseudo-randomly?
--
James W. Meritt
The opinions expressed above are my own. The fact simply
are and belong to none.
Emmirsen Lakenpahlmer
>What is the "success" ratio (or however it was measured) of incorrect
>historical "predictions", and how did the value compare when run against
>text prepared off the same semantic structure but pseudo-randomly?
I started to buy the book today, but began thumbing through it. I saw
a bunch of technical stuff that made MEGO. I began looking for future
predictions, because -- as with that one guy whose name has slipped my
mind -- hindsight predictions are easy once you can fit the facts into
the hypothesis. I would like to see some predictions that would
happen in a year or two.
Eric Boyd
> What is the "success" ratio (or however it was measured) of incorrect
> historical "predictions", and how did the value compare when run against
> text prepared off the same semantic structure but pseudo-randomly?
> --
> James W. Meritt
Marilyn Schwartz, a syndicated collumnist based in Dallas, was inspired to
fool around with the letters on her ketchup bottle. She found the phrase
"Tim did it". I guess there's no doubt about the McVeigh verdict. Would
Heinz lie?
-seric
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on 23 Jun 1997 21:07:12 GMT mer...@wangfed.com
(Jim Meritt) posted:
>In article <5oe6k9$ga1$2...@news2.gte.net>, gri...@gte.net says...
>;A friend of my recently told me that the bible code process was so
>;unscientific to be laughable.
There is the code process used by Drosnin, that is referred to here.
There was earlier the code process used by Rips, Gans and one other
guy, and reviewed by Statistical Science, which involved only one or
two large codes. It is important to keep the two separate. Here the
poster is describing the Drosnin one.
> Apparently the author preselected some
>;words or phrases and then set the computer to work to set up these
>;grids searching for the word the author selected. I would guess that
>;given the power of a computer and the program's ability to alter the
>;grid parameters, nearly any word or phrase could be found.
>What is the "success" ratio (or however it was measured) of incorrect
>historical "predictions", and how did the value compare when run against
>text prepared off the same semantic structure but pseudo-randomly?
>--
>James W. Meritt
>The opinions expressed above are my own. The fact simply
>are and belong to none.
I miss many posts so please e-mail
if you want me to see your answer.
B'tsedek tishpot amitecho
Lev 19:15 via Mishna Avos
You shall judge your neighbor
favorably.
Pharaoh Chromium 93
.doc files (e-text) available upon request. merely send me an e-mail
and I will get them to you. working on Vol. 3 right now. Vol.'s 4 and
5 to follow.
James Follett
Put the whole thing down to probability with a simple experiment:
Take a pack/deck of cards and think of any two card combinations
i.e. a two and king; a four and an ace. Deal the cards. Your two
cards will, in about 90 percent of cases, be together.
Now start playing the same tricks with a bible, and the sky's the
limit. It shouldn't be too difficult to find a prediction for the
return of Hitler. But if you want to find real nonsense in the bible,
just read it.
--
James Follett -- novelist
Helge Moulding
Please trim your "Newsgroups:" header when responding to this thread.
Note also that religious flame-bait is unwelcome in most newsgroups.
--
Helge "Thank you." Moulding
mailto:h...@slc.unisys.com Just another guy
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/1401 with a weird name
jwl
if you want to show the Bible Code as a false probability then tell me why
the original paper by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg was
reviewed for six years by mathematicians published in 1994 and nobody has
yet published a serious mathematical rebuttal to their findings?
James Follett <ja...@marage.demon.co.uk> wrote in article
<867256...@marage.demon.co.uk>...
Robert Billing
In article <867256...@marage.demon.co.uk>
ja...@marage.demon.co.uk "James Follett" writes:
> return of Hitler. But if you want to find real nonsense in the bible,
> just read it.
This suggests an interesting game. We all make a similar comment about
the scriptures of a different religion, and the last one who's not been
shot is the winner. :*)
--
I am Robert Billing, Christian, inventor, traveller, cook and animal
lover, I live near 0:46W 51:22N. http://www.tnglwood.demon.co.uk/
"If ladies wish to change compartments during the journey, the staff
must enable them to do so." LNER rule book, rule 161, 1933 edition.
Jacob Love
In article <01bc81ee$2f009c60$e292...@rog.vip.best.com>,
jwl <j...@best.com> wrote:
> if you want to show the Bible Code as a false probability then tell me why
>the original paper by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg was
>reviewed for six years by mathematicians published in 1994 and nobody has
>yet published a serious mathematical rebuttal to their findings?
There are several good reasons for this:
1) What they published is a set of mathematical curiosities which
may turn out to mean something, but may not.
2) On the critical question of prediction, they freely admit (as I
understand things) that they can make none. (Drosnin is a differe
story.) Therefore, until Drosnin appeared, most people had bettrent
things to do with their time. Brendan McKay (apologies if mispelled)
is attempting to so, but such rebuttals can take a great deal of
time to prepare, and even longer to make their way through the
system. In the meantime, there are plenty of folks who are sufficiently
expert in the general area who have produced objections aplenty to
the methodology and its conclusions.
3) Publication in a peer-reviewed journal does not make the science
or logic *right*, it just means that the argumentation fits the form
required by the editors and meets certain minimal standards. Many
papers are published and subsequently refuted--in many cases (and
I believe this is one of them) papers are published as an invitation
to refutation.
4) Even among the community most impressed by this elaborate number
game, there is much doubt as to its importance. As I posted several
years ante-Drosnin, all it will take is some whacko to claim that
the halakhah must be according to his analysis of the Torah
gematria to find every Rav (except perhaps someone over at Ais
Hatorah) denouncing the research. In other words, if it looks like
it might refute those dastardly supporters of multiple authorship
of the Torah, great. But if you try to use it as halakhic tool,
forget about it.
--
-----------------------
Jack F. Love
Opinions expressed are mine alone, unless you happen to agree
Charles Robinson
jwl (j...@best.com) wrote:
: if you want to show the Bible Code as a false probability then tell me why
: the original paper by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg was
: reviewed for six years by mathematicians published in 1994 and nobody has
: yet published a serious mathematical rebuttal to their findings?
Maybe nobody can take it seriously long enough to support/publish such a
rebuttal? Y'know, it's great that these guys found it worth the time and
effort to come up with this "code" - but does that mean other people
should waste/spend (depends on your perspective) at least as much time
trying to disprove it? BTW, how long did these three gentlemen take to
come up with this "code"?
--
+-----------------------------------------+-------------------------------+
| Charles Robinson Mpls, Minnesota | "You can't have everything... |
| email: char...@visi.com | where would you put it?" |
| http://www.visi.com/~charlesr | |
+-----------------------------------------+-------------------------------+
Hugh Young
> if you want to show the Bible Code as a false probability then tell me why
>the original paper by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg was
>reviewed for six years by mathematicians published in 1994 and nobody has
>yet published a serious mathematical rebuttal to their findings?
1. It'll take another four years
or
2. Nobody can be bothered
A local theologian said plenty of other dates could be found crossing with
the rabbis' names Rips et al. found.
Have large numbers of statisticians converted to Judaism as a result of
reading the paper?
Jews find rabbis' names and dates in Torah, Roman Catholics see apparitions
of the Virgin Mary. Why not the other way round?
--
Hugh Young, Pukerua Bay, Nuclear-free Aotearoa / NEW ZEALAND
Herman Rubin
In article <5ou8i1$gnn$1...@darla.visi.com>,
Charles Robinson <char...@visi.com> wrote:
>jwl (j...@best.com) wrote:
>: if you want to show the Bible Code as a false probability then tell me why
>: the original paper by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg was
>: reviewed for six years by mathematicians published in 1994 and nobody has
>: yet published a serious mathematical rebuttal to their findings?
>Maybe nobody can take it seriously long enough to support/publish such a
>rebuttal? Y'know, it's great that these guys found it worth the time and
>effort to come up with this "code" - but does that mean other people
>should waste/spend (depends on your perspective) at least as much time
>trying to disprove it? BTW, how long did these three gentlemen take to
>come up with this "code"?
Knowing something about what they have done, I am still highly suspicious.
As far as I know, they have not made their entire algorithm public.
Furthermore, I doubt if any of the reviewers knew enough Hebrew or
Torah to make a critical rebuttal. On the information I have seen,
my Hebrew would not be strong enough, and I can see some problems
with the testing.
About all we can say is that those who reviewed it could not find
anything which they could tell was wrong. In general, a review of
a paper for a mathematics or statistics journal does not require
much time and effort; the reviewer is NOT obligated to ensure that
errors have not occurred, but just that none were detected.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
hru...@stat.purdue.edu Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
Wayne Dyer
jwl wrote:
> if you want to show the Bible Code as a false probability then tell me why
> the original paper by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg was
> reviewed for six years by mathematicians published in 1994 and nobody has
> yet published a serious mathematical rebuttal to their findings?
Because there's nothing wrong with the METHOD. It the interpretation of the
RESULTS that is suspect. If you're interested, there are lots of folks
currently working to prove that ANY text can be manipulated in a similar
fashion to produce astonishing "predictions" of past events.
--
Wayne Dyer :: dwd...@eskimo.com :: http://www.eskimo.com/~dwdyer/
Recontextualizing the male myth since 1963
Micha S. Berger
On 26 Jun 1997 13:49:29 -0500, in newsgroup soc.culture.jewish, article <5oudjp$1a...@b.stat.purdue.edu>, Herman Rubin <hru...@b.stat.purdue.edu> wrote:
: Knowing something about what they have done, I am still highly suspicious.
: As far as I know, they have not made their entire algorithm public.
The URL for a copy of the software and text they used was posted on this
or a related thread already. I'd be curious to see a skeptical statistician
give a more than out-of-hand dismissal. Let me know if you're going to
try.
-mi
--
Micha Berger 201 916-0287 Help free Ron Arad, held by Syria 3838 days!
mi...@aishdas.org (16-Oct-86 - 27-Jun-97)
Huse, George V., Jr.
Tanstaafl@*geocities.com wrote:
>
> I still say that Heinlein was right.
>
> The number of the beast is 6^6^6, and we can travel the universe in a
> car with a computer called DORA.
Maybe. The number of the Beast is "...six hundred threescore and six".
Rev 13:18, King James Version Bible. Which could mean 666 or
6002020206.
Anybody know what the original language of Revelations was? It would be
nice to see if there are other transalions pssible.
--
Buzz Huse E-Mail: mailto:buzz...@flash.net
Euless, Texas, USA Homepage: http://www.flash.net/~buzzhuse/
"These opinions/comments are entirely my own and no one else's."
Ian or Katts
Huse, George V., Jr. wrote:
>
> Tanstaafl@*geocities.com wrote:
> >
> > I still say that Heinlein was right.
> >
> > The number of the beast is 6^6^6, and we can travel the universe in a
> > car with a computer called DORA.
>
> Maybe. The number of the Beast is "...six hundred threescore and six".
> Rev 13:18, King James Version Bible. Which could mean 666 or
> 6002020206.
>
> Anybody know what the original language of Revelations was? It would be
Greek terms and their possible translations. For the number 666 it says:
5516 chi xi stigma {khee xee stig'-ma}
the 22nd, 14th and an obsolete letter (4742 as a cross) of the
Greek alphabet (intermediate between the 5th and 6th), used as
numbers;; number representation
AV-six hundred threescore and six 1; 1
1) six hundred and sixty six, the meaning of which is the basis
of much vain speculation
Okay, now 5516 is the Strong's reference number for this term. Chi xi
Stigma is the actual term. Those, as nearly as I understand, are letters
number 22, 14, and 5.5 of the greek alphabet. I have no idea what 4742
as a cross means because when I looked that number up, I only got Old
Testament (ie. Hebrew, not Greek) refernces 04742 is the word for corner
of bend. I have no clue how number representation works in Greek, the
two most obvious possibilities to my mind yield a number that has no
resemblence to 666. Simple addition yields 41.5, if I assume that it's
hundreds, tens, units, I get 2345.5, this one looks like a possibility
for something a person might attach meaning to as it is a series of
consecutive numbers. AV in the third portion of the quote is 1769 King
james Bible Authorised Version, they are telling us how it was
interpretted.
Katts
Robert Billing
In article <33B42D...@flash.net>
buzz...@flash.net "Huse, George V., Jr." writes:
> Anybody know what the original language of Revelations was? It would be
> nice to see if there are other transalions pssible.
Koine Greek, Rev 13:18. The Marshall literal translation reads
something like this (it's a little difficult to render in ASCII, so
I've taken a few liberties with the transliteration, and rendered the `
breathing sign as letter h, which is about right, so `ex comes out as
hex)
kai ho artithmos autou hexakosioi hexekonta hex
and the number of it [is] six hundred sixty six
The BFBS critical apparatus gives a few variant readings, allowing the
number to be 616 instead of 666.
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on Sat, 28 Jun 97 08:16:58 GMT Robert Billing
<uncl...@tnglwood.demon.co.uk> posted:
>In article <33B42D...@flash.net>
> buzz...@flash.net "Huse, George V., Jr." writes:
>> Anybody know what the original language of Revelations was? It would be
>> nice to see if there are other transalions pssible.
> Koine Greek,
How many kinds of Greek were there, what were some names, and how did
they relate to each other. I understand there are several
pronunciations of Chinese but in written form they all look alike.
That is obviously not the situation here. Since the written language
must have followed the spoken language, how did this arise?
P&M
mei...@erols.com
In soc.culture.jewish on Sat, 28 Jun 1997 17:56:16 -0700 Ian or Katts
<ia...@zed.com.au> posted:
>>
>> Maybe. The number of the Beast is "...six hundred threescore and six".
>> Rev 13:18, King James Version Bible. Which could mean 666 or
>> 6002020206.
I have never seen ancient numbers written like your second example.
>> Anybody know what the original language of Revelations was? It would be
>> nice to see if there are other transalions pssible.The original scrolls were in Greek. Strong's Bible Concordance lists the
>Greek terms and their possible translations. For the number 666 it says:
> 5516 chi xi stigma {khee xee stig'-ma}
> the 22nd, 14th and an obsolete letter (4742 as a cross) of the
> Greek alphabet (intermediate between the 5th and 6th), used as
> numbers;; number representation
> AV-six hundred threescore and six 1; 1
> 1) six hundred and sixty six, the meaning of which is the basis
> of much vain speculation
>Okay, now 5516 is the Strong's reference number for this term. Chi xi
>Stigma is the actual term. Those, as nearly as I understand, are letters
>number 22, 14, and 5.5 of the greek alphabet. I have no idea what 4742
>as a cross means because when I looked that number up, I only got Old
>Testament (ie. Hebrew, not Greek) refernces 04742 is the word for corner
>of bend. I have no clue how number representation works in Greek, the
>two most obvious possibilities to my mind yield a number that has no
>resemblence to 666. Simple addition yields 41.5, if I assume that it's
>hundreds, tens, units, I get 2345.5, this one looks like a possibility
>for something a person might attach meaning to as it is a series of
>consecutive numbers. AV in the third portion of the quote is 1769 King
>james Bible Authorised Version, they are telling us how it was
>interpretted.
>Katts
Talk about the blind talking to the blind. *I* know nothing about
greek number representation, but I am still willing to give this a
shot.
I have never heard of stigma but when it was obsolete, it would not
have been used in writing (by definition), and when it was not
obsolete it would not have been assigned a value of 5.5 or anything
other than a whole, a natural number. Since it follows 5, it would
have been 6.
That bumps up the numbers of the other letters to 23 and 15
Now if Greek is anything like Hebrew, the first 9 numbers are 1 to 9
by 1's, the next 9 are 10 to 90 by 10's, and the rest are 100 to 400
by 100's, so the 15th letter would be 60. And the 23rd number would
be 400. This would yield 466. I am going to make a wild guess that
there was a valid reason that chi was the 25th letter or that they
incremented by 200's. Voila.
(this grouping seems to imply a base 9 number system, but this is
semantics. "Base" only relates to number systems that use columns to
indicate magnitude, Since there is no need for 0 as a place holder, I
am not sure what would call it but numbers normally grouped by 10's
are grouped by 9's)
So if this makes sense I would respectfully suggest that one not get
too upset until he sees a beast that resembles the ones described:
from the sea, ten horns, seven heads, etc
like a leopard with feet of a bear and mouth of a lion which could .
. talk
two horns like a lamb but speaking like a dragon.
I haven't seen any of these yet.
D. Peschel
>I have never heard of stigma but when it was obsolete, it would not
>have been used in writing (by definition), and when it was not
>obsolete it would not have been assigned a value of 5.5 or anything
>other than a whole, a natural number. Since it follows 5, it would
>have been 6.
That part sounds reasonable to me. I think calling it the five-and-a-halfth
letter is silly.
>That bumps up the numbers of the other letters to 23 and 15
>Now if Greek is anything like Hebrew, the first 9 numbers are 1 to 9
>by 1's, the next 9 are 10 to 90 by 10's, and the rest are 100 to 400
>by 100's, so the 15th letter would be 60. And the 23rd number would
>be 400. This would yield 466. I am going to make a wild guess that
>there was a valid reason that chi was the 25th letter or that they
>incremented by 200's. Voila.
There are 24 letters in the current Greek alphabet. Stigma is an obsolete
letter, as you know, and it turns out that there are three more obsolete
letters. They are:
_
digamma looks like a capital gamma on top of another |_
capital gamma |
koppa (qoppa?) looks like a circle with a vertical O
line protruding from the bottom -- a form of Q |
sampi looks like a lowercase pi tilted 45 degrees \
(I think -- not exactly sure) //\
So adding these in the right places (which I'm too lazy to look up now)
would make the number system more regular. With stigma, the total number
of letters comes to 28 (it bothers me that it's not 27, but oh well).
Greeks may have continued to use these letters as numbers even after the
language stopped using them.
>So if this makes sense I would respectfully suggest that one not get
>too upset until he sees a beast that resembles the ones described:
>
>from the sea, ten horns, seven heads, etc
>like a leopard with feet of a bear and mouth of a lion which could .
>. talk
>two horns like a lamb but speaking like a dragon.
>
>I haven't seen any of these yet.
See _The Number of the Beast_ by Robert Heinlein for an amusing slant
on this whole topic.
-- Derek
JohnAcadInt
Wayne Dyer wrote:
.>
.> jwl wrote:
.> > if you want to show the Bible Code as a false probability then tell me why
.> > the original paper by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg was
.> > reviewed for six years by mathematicians published in 1994 and nobody has
.> > yet published a serious mathematical rebuttal to their findings?
.>
.> Because there's nothing wrong with the METHOD. It the interpretation of the
.> RESULTS that is suspect. If you're interested, there are lots of folks
.> currently working to prove that ANY text can be manipulated in a similar
.> fashion to produce astonishing "predictions" of past events.
I am still awaiting the predictions for the 2.30 at Kempton Park on June
22nd. 'Short-sighted' came in at 7-1. This stuff can't even do records,
apparently.
.> --
.> Wayne Dyer :: dwd...@eskimo.com :: http://www.eskimo.com/~dwdyer/
.> Recontextualizing the male myth since 1963
JohnM
& The Trolleberg Terror