Here’s a list of names, fluid in number and spelling and we will search for a formula that will spell out of some them in this Hebrew text, which itself is fluid.
Why weren’t the researchers looking to spell out the roster of the 1934 Yankees? Obvious. They weren’t looking for a code, they were looking for results.
The primary problem I have with that article is that the methodology is not accurately reported. They do NOT rearrange the letters or the columns, and I have no idea where you got that from. It is possible that some amateurs have done that, but the books I have read from the people who developed the methodologies themselves say no such thing.
The arrangement of the letters must be consistent for the concept to work at all. It is the only way that it means anything, and the only way to make it work according to the actual methodology. I have a book at home, written in Hebrew, I forget by which professor. (It is called “Hamaymad Hanosaf,” which means “The added Dimension.”)
They do not rearrange the lettering. What has confused your course is that the text is displayed in such a way (see below) that the reader can discern the CONSISTENT equadistant spacings of the letters. In other words, the letters are kept in the same order, and neither the distance, nor the arrangement, nor the order, of the letters are changed. If the distance being used in a particular code is, let’s say, 17, then the letters are displayed so the reader can see what every naturally-occurring 17th letter is in the Torah. The display allows you to see the sequence in a vertical column.
Let me illustrate by example (thisis oversimplified, by the way, and not eact):
I can write this sentence any number of ways.
I can write this sentence
any number of ways.
I can write
this sentence
any number of ways.
Now, I can do intentional distancing, and start a new column every six spaces.
I can
write
this s
entenc
e any
number
of wa
ys.
Or I can break the column every eight spaces, if I so choose.
I can wr
ite this
sentenc
e any nu
mber of
ways.
Now it is easier for the reader to see each eighth space. (In the Torah, they remove the spaces for this operation, I don’t know why. And the columns are full-adjusted, and the letters are fixed-width, but that’s just cosmetics.)
There is NO rearranging of the letters. There is no changing of the distance in the search.
(It’s more complicated than this, but I’m trying to keep it simple because I do not have the book with me at the office.)
Now, this may occasionally come up with interesting results, though they can hardly be called intentional as far as the original conception of the sentence. That is, even if we find that by equadistant spacing we come across specific words or sentences, or messages, we can rest assured that the original author did not intend those messages. They are just a fluke.
Unless we find them on EVERY page of the book, in statistically impossible frequencies.
Incidentally, numerous “real mathematicians” as someone here put the term, examined the methodology and approved of it. They just don’t get that much press around here, that’s all, seemingly because their results have already been summarily rejected offhand.
But to return to the point. Iwill give a brief non-mathematical explanation of the concept that is used for the codes. Bear in mind that I myself am not an aficionado of the codes. I once had some mild interest in the subject.
If you look in a telephone book, you will find sequences that are meaningless, and you will find sequences that actually have meaning. For example, you may find a phone number with two 8’s in it. Meaningless. In fact, you’ll find lots of such numbers. It is meaningless. With all the variations that exist, some HAVE to have repeating numbers.
If you find a phone number with even four 8’s in it, it may still be meaningless.
If you find an entire page of phone numbers, and every single one of them has repeating digits in the last group of four numbers, you will wonder why.
Well, guess what. There IS a page like that in the phone book. And all the repeating numbers are INTENTIONAL. It’s in the Yellow Pages under “car services.”
Okay, so they are intentional. But what does that mean? Is it significant? No, it isn’t, actually. Not really. It means that car service companies want their phone numbers to be easily remembered, so they choose (if they can) easy-to-remember phone numbers. Repeating digits is one method that often helps for a memorable number. So this is intentional, but not really significant.
So what this means is that there is a level of frequency that is meaningless, and a level of frequency that is significant. Significant of WHAT is another question.
Now, let’s look at at a page of the Hebrew Torah. I am working from memory here, but I’ll do the best I can.
They compared a page of the Hebrew Torah as held by Jews all over the world, to the same page as held by the Samaritans. There is one significant difference on this page. In several places the Samaritans have changed the singular verb to the plural verb. (Apparently, they wish to indicate that all priests could do this specific service, so they changed the singular verb – denoting the High Priest – to the plural verb, to denote all priests. But I’m just guessng here.)
The professors who authored the book I have ran a check for hidden occurrences of the name “Aaron” throughout that page.
Bear in mind that there are several means of variation that could be used, and all were used. That is, we check for a distance from 2 until some some high number, let’s say (just for argument’s sake) 100. That means they have to check 99 times for that sequence. Then they have to run all those checks starting from EACH of the first 100 letters on that page. (They obviously don’t do a distance check of one, because all naturally occurring words have a distance of one! That’s the DEFINITION of a word!)
Then they ran the same checks all over again, with all 24 variant arrangements of the Hebrew name “Aaron.” (It has four letters, so that makes 24 arrangements.)
They did this for the Samaritan version, and the Jewish version.
The Samaritan version arrived with some 10 occurrences of the name Aaron, by honest, equadistant checking.
This is not considered significant. This much can be found in ANY work, including War and Peace.
The Jewish version encountered dozens of occurrences. Again, I don’t have the book in front of me, so I hesitate to make precise claims from memory. However, the numbers found were staggering, and mathematically significant. Such ocurrences cannot be said to have happened by accident. Such occurrences have not been found in War and Peace, or any other work in any other language.
As far as Mcay, his primary objection seems to be that he doesn’t like the names and appellations used to indicate the various Rabbis. That’s HIS problem. The names appear as they do, not the way he wants them. Just because he feels those names aren’t the names HE would have used, doesn’t prove the sequences are insignificant.
But mostly, I agree with Izzy that it is highly unfair to completely dismiss arguments on the basis of the opposition alone. ou say that science is not a court of law. In fact, that is sometimes its major problem. Truth, however, IS a court, and if it’s truth you wish to arrive at, sneering at something on the basis of what its opponents say is hardly a way at finding out the truth.
<< They do NOT rearrange the letters or the columns, and I have no idea where you got that from. >>
The word “rearrange” was used in the sense of “put into rows and columns” just as you did with your sentence. The Staff Report did not mean to imply that the word “Aaron” was “rearranged” to read as “Noara.” I am certainly sorry if it gave that impression.
The point is that they had to choose how many columns to take – every 17, every 39, every 26, or whatever. And, amazingly, every choice (which I would call a “rearrangement” since it’s a matrix with a different number of columns, although the letter order remains the same) produced different “astounding” predictions.
Bah.
You can get the same results with WAR AND PEACE or a dictionary or encyclopedia or an other long-enough collection of letters. You can probably get more from the Torah for the two reasons given in the Staff Report:
The claims that a word-find game on a random array of letters produces a few coincidences is not surprising.
It’s especially not surprising since they find things like “Lincoln” and “shot” together. If they found a whole sentence: “Abe Lincoln will be shot in a theatre in Washington DC in April 1865”, that might have some cause for pondering. But just to find words, names and dates randomly “close” to each other is meaningless, haphazard, and coincidental.
Sorry, I meant to also note that finding “four-letter” arrangements in such a long document is not surprising. Much harder to find “assassinated” in MOBY DICK-matrixed than to find “AHRN” (Aaron) in the Torah-matrix.
And for every learned mathematicians that says the Bible Code produced “highly unexpected statistical results” I can find two who will say that the results were well within the range of statistical coincidence.
Could any of our resident Hebrew scholars tell how one constructs plurals in Hebrew? If the singular form contains one of the letters in “Aaron”, and the plural form does not, then that would account for “Aaron” being more common in the Jewish version than in the Samaritan. By the same token, though, one would expect other words to be more common in the Samaritan text. Unless there’s some a priori reason to regard “Aaron” as significantly more important than any other word, one can’t say that the Jewish version is any more “special”.
Hebrew masculine words are pluralized by adding “y-m” at the end; feminine words by “v-t.” The “v” is actually an “o” sound. None of these appear in the name Aaron in Hebrew (A-H-R-N).
However, the addition of two letters at several random places in the text would undoubtedly cause several very different results from the word-find game.
You’ve still completely failed to understand the method.
(sigh)
If perhaps, just for a while, you would suspend your predispostion to reject the entire concept, you might be able to follow what I am saying.
The creation of the columns was for DISPLAY purposes only. It in no way affected the outcome.
Let’s try again.
If they told the program to search for spaces of 16, then they DISPLAYED THE RESULTS in columns of 16 spaces wide, so that the READER can see the results.
One thing that could affect the results would be to move a letter’s or letters’ position(s) in respect to other letters, or to change a letter or letters to some other letter(s).
That was never done.
The ONLY other thing that could change the outcome is to direct the computer regarding the distance to skip for checking. They told the program to check every 16th letter, for example, and to remain consistent throughout the entire Torah, checking every 16th letter.
Then they told the program to check every 17th letter.
All results were recorded.
Yes, of course this will change the results. That’s the whole point.
And no, you cannot get the same results with War and Peace. They may have found one or two words that way, but nothing on the magnitude found in the Torah.
As far as Aharon being only four letters long, I wish you people would actually attempt to understand. But I suppose that would threaten your own beliefs.
No one said that the occurrence of Aharon proved anything. It IS beyond statistical probibility, and no other printed work in the universe has been found to have that many occurrences of the same four-letter word in so many patterns in such a small passage, but that wasn’t the point anyway. It merely illustrated the method.
And the reason that the name is significant there is because it indicates that the passage refers to Aharon the High Priest, and therefore the singular is used. When the singular is changed to the plural, the occurrences of Aharon in equadistant spacing falls down to a statistically probable frequency. Most books could not show even that, but it is not enough to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are there intentionally.
I am sure you can find mathematicians to say anything. So do you, as long as you can maintain what you have already decided is true.
I want to see passages in which such hidden words are found that many times, using the precise same method used with the Torah Codes done by the original experts.
<< The creation of the columns was for DISPLAY purposes only. It in no way affected the outcome. >>
The use of the word “matrix” compared to “display” is quibbling. But you are dead wrong here, Motcha. The “display” number DID affect the outcome. They got different results when they used a matrix column-width (“display”) of 17 compared to 29.
And they did NOT simply look for appearances of a word in 17-letter spaces. They rearranged the Torah text in matrix form based on their number-skip and then played the word-find game; any horizontal, verticle, or diagonal arrangement of letters was considered an “appearance.”
They also included the normal reading of the text as an “appearance.” Thus, Aaron appears dozens (hundreds?) of times in the straight reading of the text, and all these would count as “appearances” (unless the 17-column division point broke the word).
<< And no, you cannot get the same results with War and Peace. They may have found one or two words that way, but nothing on the magnitude found in the Torah. >>
Sorry, you’re dead wrong here, too. Go to some of the sites that are referenced, and you will find they get comparable results to the Torah-game… which is actually more amazing, since (as mentioned in the Staff Report) Hebrew has no vowels.
<< No one said that the occurrence of Aharon proved anything. It IS beyond statistical probibility, and no other printed work in the universe has been found to have that many occurrences of the same four-letter word in so many patterns in such a small passage, >>
Again, sorry, that’s just NOT TRUE. The early claims of the writers of THE BIBLE CODE was that they had tried their methodology in other texts, and did not find results as significant as the Torah gave. But once they published their results, and independent statisticians applied it to other works, they found very similar results – well within the range of statisticial coincidence.
In short, THE BIBLE CODE does not turn up anything different from the statistical expectations for a text of that size. This is not a matter of “belief” but a matter of (complicated) statistics and experimental verification.