Mathematics bombshell: God 'confirmed in Bible'

World Net Daily ^ | December 12, 2004

[The Loan Arranger]

For a lot of people, the Bible and mathematics are dry subjects, but not for Edwin Sherman – he believes he's found how the two fit together.

Sherman, founder of the Isaac Newton Bible Code Research Society and a professional mathematician, is convinced that the Hebrew Bible contains coded messages that are evidence of God's authorship of the Bible. His book, "Bible Code Bombshell: Compelling Scientific Evidence that God Authored the Bible," describes numerous examples of encoded phrases and sentences that are both lengthy and relevant to the text where they were found.

[Quix]

BTW, paragraphs with a microrest providing white space between are much better for all eyes, and especially aging eyes.

[Quix]

It was my hope that you possessed enough character to agree to withdraw once shown your opinion is of negligible value. Unfortunately, I was wrong. You will no doubt continue to cavil and jump tracks as it is demonstrated the substance of your argument is nothing but tangential anecdotes and scoffing.

Well said. But, sadly, it's not true to type for such to leave gracefully after such mental contortionist gymnastics.

[Quix]

VERY WELL AND ADMIRABLY SAID.

THANKS.

[mugs99]

Secret codes and ancient quotes...Leads one to suspect God must be dead.

[discipler]

Believing in a hidden code is very subjective. My point is valid. The same thing could be done with any document; especially one the size of the Bible. It's not a valid method of studying Scripture. The Bible is clear enough without resorting to such things.

[Quix]

THEN YOU, TOO,

have clearly not done sufficient homework by studying thoroughly enough fair-mindedly enough the latest research comparing HEBREW WAR AND PEACE with the Scriptures. And, there were follow-on studies to that massive study FURTHER demonstrating that there's

NO rational, reasonable COMPARISON between authentic Codes in Scripture and pseudocodes found in ANY other text. The length and qualitative differences are starkly off the charts.

You could at least admit your lack of study when you pontificate so stridently.

[agrace]

The word of God is both plain and also full of secrets. Man is only beginning to comprehend the secrets of God.

Absolutely. A wise friend said to me just this morning that

"His Truth is like an onion with almost infinite layers. All are the onion, all point to the Lord, yet we have to peel away the outer layers to get to the inner ones. Just like you said. Every bit of creation speaks of, teaches us, proclaims WHO God is, but it is He who opens our eyes."

[MissAmericanPie]

I think that refers to scholars that bear such a close resemblance to the justices that strain at the simple meaning of the Constitution, and distort it, these scholars also strain at gnats and swallow camels.

I don't make any judgments until all the evidence is in. But this is God we are talking about here, Who knew about the computer long before we did, and says that Daniel and John have kept things from us only to be revealed in the end times when man's knowledge is greatly increased.

God created me as a character with a deep appreciation of truth, like an archaeologist has a deep appreciation for a rap-tor bone, when I come across truth in a desert of lies I am a little practiced in recognizing it. So I can't from an opinion regarding it's value or authenticity until its run through all the filters.

[Quix]

Wonderfully reasoned and stated. And much above average informed.

I do believe that Satinover has been largely left in the dust by the research over the last 12-16 months or so. And, there have been follow-on studies to the massive comparison between HEBREW WAR AND PEACE and Scripture. Some of the research has been accepted for juried professional publication in professional mathematical types of journals.

[Quix]

Certainly the surface text is the point.

This sentence of yours:

The same thing could be done with any document; especially one the size of the Bible.

Has BEEN CONCLUSIVELY AND PERSISTENTLY PROVEN TO BE SIMPLY AND GROSSLY UNTRUE.

[Commie Basher]

Has anyone ever tried to find anti-Biblical statements in this "Bible Code"? Statements like: "Jesus a liar" or "Hitler is the Messiah" or "God does not exist" or "Satan stronger than God"?

For that matter, has anyone sought "Bible Codes" in other thick books, such as in Atlas Shrugged or War and Peace?

If either of the above was successfully done, it'd prove that "Bible Codes" are false. If they can't be done, it'd imply that the "Bible Code" has some validity.

[Quix]

ABSOLUTELY.

And I'm not about to tell GOD that HE

couldn't/shouldn't

have done it that way! LOL.

[Quix]

AMEN!

[puppetz]

I find this misuse and subversion of the Bible by looking for "codes" and clues to the future to be as offensive as holding up a picture of Jesus Christ crucified to the light and looking for the logo of the next superbowl winner in code shined on the wall. The Bible isn't a toy and its offensive to make trivial "predictions" and scurrilous pronouncements from inane arcana and attribute it as "God's message". This is probably a handy tool for the people doing this to claim to give their own message in place of God's.

[puppetz]

No, but pretenders and false prophets will quote scripture for their own nefarious reasons, and the devil himself will quote scripture to try to subvert it. This is a subversion of scripture.

[puppetz]

This is research done by highly respected mathmeticians and statisticians. They tore the "Bible Codes" claim to shreds, exposed the weak methodology, found the same codes in many books, as well as finding nonsensical codes throughout the Bible ("The code is false" and many others.) and in short, completely debunked the theory. Not only that they proved it to be just what it was: an exercise in finding a result you want to be there. If you want to base your religious beliefs on lies and fake results from con men I guess that's up to you. I fail to see where "Bible Codes" can be found to be more edifying than the normal text people have been using for centuries, and used by people more knowlegable and pious than you or I.

[puppetz]

Yes they have:
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/StatSci/

they found the sentence "The code is fake" "There is no secret code" "The Bible Code is a hoax", and in fact, they report they are able to find just about ANY SENTENCE THEY CHOOSE IN ANY LARGE GROUP OF TEXT THEY CHOOSE simply by adjusting the formula until they get the desired effect. These guys aren't crooks out to sell books and fleece gullible and credulous Christians with small intellect. These are internationally respected mathematicians and statisticians, and the scorn they heap on the "Bible Codes" theory is about as damning as the bloggers exposing Dan Rather. Its not even debatable, they tore the "Code theory" apart so difinitively that only someone in total denial can still pretend they are in any way relavent or even real. Hello Dan Rather?

[Quix]

The negative stuff some supposedly found have been proven to be

FAR BELOW THE CRITERIA FOR AUTHENTIC CODES. They are artifacts of chance alone. Easily proven.

HELLO GROUP--THERE HAS BEEN A MASSIVE STUDY COMPARING

SO CALLED CODES FOUND IN HEBREW WAR AND PEACE

WITH

AUTHENTIC CODES FOUND IN SCRIPTURE.

THERE IS NO RATIONAL COMPARISON, THE DIFFERENCES ARE SO GREAT in length as well as in several qualitative factors.

Here's a professional juried article:

BTW, I have permission to post BCD docs on FR--AND BOLD RED AND BLUE EMPHASES ARE MY OWN UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED.

This one from:

CLICK HERE: http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/186

----------------------------

Non-Random Equidistant Letter
Sequence Extensions in Ezekiel
By R. Edwin Sherman, FCAS, MAAA1, and Nathan Jacobi, Ph.D.

Abstract

A set of 100 equidistant letter sequences (ELSs) were drawn, equally from the Hebrew text of the book of Ezekiel and a control text (a Hebrew translation of Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace). Each of these initial ELSs (that was the name of an Islamic nation) was reviewed for possible extensions by a Hebrew expert who was blind regarding the source text of each letter string. The number of extensions discovered in Ezekiel was more than 50% higher. A Markov chain model based on the indicated extension discovery rate from the control text (19.4%) was used to determine the expected range in the number of ELSs consisting of three or more extensions that would be discovered from the search for possible extensions around 295 initial ELSs in Ezekiel 37. Although only 5.95 ELSs consisting of three or more extensions were expected, 33 were actually discovered. The greatest number of ELSs with three or more extensions produced from 1 million trials of the Markov chain model simulation was 21. It is evident that the null hypothesis that the Ezekiel 37 findings were due to chance should be rejected.

A similar comparison was made assuming the much higher discovery rate (27.0%) indicated from the Ezekiel text of the Islamic Nations experiment. The null hypothesis was still rejected at the 0.001 level.

Introduction

In 1994 the paper, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis," was published in the journal Statistical Science. In it three Israeli mathematicians, Dr. Eliyahu Rips of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dr. Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg of the Jerusalem College of Technology, described the results of an experiment in which the proximity of such sequences (ELSs) for related topics tended to be in closer proximity in the book of Genesis than in randomized re-orderings of that text. The ELSs studied were the names of 66 of the most famous rabbis in Jewish history and their dates of death or birth. ELSs are formed by eliminating the spaces between words in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and then by selecting every n-th letter from the compacted text, where n is the skip of the ELS. For example, within the letter string n e w j e r s e y, "wes" is an ELS with a skip of +2 and "sewn" is an ELS with a skip of –2.

Once an initial ELS such as "wes" has been found at a given skip, an extended ELS can be sought by continuing to extract letters from the literal text at the given skip of the initial ELS. From the sentence, "People say New Jersey was wonderful," the following search string around the "wes" ELS is extracted:

epeanwesyawnefl

The word "yawn" appears after "wes" in the string, but this is rejected as a valid extension since it doesn’t form a proper phrase in English. If the second to the last letter in this string had been a "d" instead of an "f," "yawned" would have been a valid extension of the "wes" ELS.

In 1997 Michael Drosnin authored the book, The Bible Code, which topped the New York Times best seller list for many weeks. An atheistic Jew, Drosnin claimed that the Bible was filled with ELS codes about numerous current events and that this was proof that some super-human intelligence who knew the future, had written the Old Testament.

Numerous mathematicians have argued heatedly that the Witztum Rosenberg Rips paper was flawed while others have staunchly defended it. Drosnin’s book was repudiated by Dr. Rips, and dozens of mathematicians, since it presents dozens of trivial examples that are so simple that comparable examples could be extracted from any Hebrew book or random sequence of Hebrew letters.

Four years ago Mr. Sherman began examining this phenomenon, strongly suspecting that there was nothing to it. After developing formulae to estimate the probability of chance occurrence of different purported Bible code phenomena, he concluded that virtually all examples from published books were not at all improbable. A few published examples were borderline in terms of improbability, so the help of a Hebrew expert, Dr. Nathan Jacobi2, was sought to enable the search for more extensive ELSs in the same vicinity as the published examples of Hitler codes from Genesis 8 (from Drosnin) and Jesus codes from Isaiah 53 (from Christian author Grant Jeffrey). Dr. Jacobi discovered numerous lengthy ELSs in the Isaiah 53 cluster. Mr. Sherman was forced to reverse his negative position on Bible codes, which he had been presenting on a website, and he changed the site to biblecodedigest.com. During April 2003 this website received 1.3 million hits as the result of interest generated by the war in Iraq and the posting of hundreds of ELSs regarding current events on that site.

In the past two years our research team has located over 120 lengthy ELSs by starting with short initial ELSs of key words about current events, centering on the terrorist attacks and related developments, that are all located in the 37th chapter of Ezekiel. The initial formulae were too simple to gauge the probability of chance occurrence of a code cluster as extensive as the one in Ezekiel 37, so another estimation approach was developed and applied. It is presented in this paper.

The Islamic Nations ELS Extension Experiment

To directly address the question of the purported validity of Bible codes, there has been a clear need for an impartial comparison of a collection of Bible codes with a parallel set of codes from an admittedly ordinary book. This paper presents the results of this experiment. Dr. Jacobi was given 100 pre-defined initial ELSs, equally drawn from the Hebrew text of Ezekiel and from a Hebrew translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Dr. Jacobi searched for extended ELSs around each initial ELS—absent any knowledge of the source of each letter string. The two collections of extended ELSs were then compared and analyzed. This is the first such experiment of this type we have conducted.

Using the Hebrew spellings of a group of Islamic nations3, INBCRS researchers4 located ELSs (with the five shortest skips) of these names of nations in a 78,064-letter portion of War and Peace and the 74,500-letter book of Ezekiel5 provided with Codefinder software6.

Dr. Jacobi was sent five occurrences with the shortest skips from Ezekiel (and five occurrences from War and Peace) of the name of each of the Islamic nations as an ELS. He was asked to document whether letters before and after the terms created longer terms. Throughout the experiment, and up until June 2003, Dr. Jacobi has not known which of the initial ELSs and surrounding letter strings were from which source text.

The experiment was conducted from August 2002 through January 2003 by intermittently including portions of both sets of letter strings. Dr. Jacobi never knew when we started doing so and when we finished. We continued to submit to him our regular supply of letter strings from other parts of the Bible on other topics as part of a number of research projects. His task was always the same—to indicate whether letters before and/or after the terms created longer terms. During that period approximately one-third of letter strings he examined were part of the experiment.

All ELS extensions found around 50 initial ELSs in Ezekiel and 50 initial ELSs in War and Peace were examined and recorded. An extension is a phrase or brief sentence that appears entirely on one side of an existing ELS. The extension must represent a grammatically reasonable continuation of the existing ELS. As such, it could either incorporate part of the existing ELS or be a stand alone phrase or sentence that could reasonably precede or follow the existing ELS. The average extension found in this experiment consisted of two Hebrew words that totaled seven letters. It is of course possible to find several extensions around an initial ELS to form one lengthy final ELS. For example, the following 53-letter-long ELS from Ezekiel 37 was formed by eight extensions found around the initial ELS of the Hebrew word for "combat": 1) The island was restful, elevated 2) and it happened. 3) Where is Libya? 4) And you have disrupted the nation. 5) She changed a word. 6) He answered them with combat. 7) Why the navy 8) and the smell of the bottom of the sea?

Table 1 provides a comparison of the search results on three different bases.

Appendix A provides a listing of all ELS extensions found in both search texts.

A key statistic estimated in this experiment is the ELS extension discovery rate. It is defined as the ratio of the actual number of extensions found to the number of opportunities available for finding an extension. At the beginning of each search of a new letter string, there are two opportunities to find an extension—one before the initial ELS and one after. If an extension is found, one new opportunity to find yet another extension is created. That opportunity will consist of the new letters that are now next to the extension that had just been discovered. There is no new opportunity on the other side of the ELS where an extension wasn’t found, since that opportunity has already been counted.

The discovery rate in the control text was 19.4% (=24/124). In Ezekiel, it was 27.0% (=37/137), which is 39.2% higher7. A standard statistical test of the null hypothesis that there is no difference in the underlying discovery rates (proportions) indicated that there was a 12.35% probability that the indicated difference could be due to chance. Therefore, the null hypothesis held up at the 0.10 significance level.

It has been our observation in the last four years of investigation that, if anything, the difference in the discovery rates is generally greater than the 8.1 %-age points indicated in this experiment, and appears to be in the range of 10% to 15%. If the 8.1 %-age differential were to hold up under a larger sample of initial ELSs, then the probability of chance occurrence of a differential as large as 8.1 % would drop below standard thresholds. For example, if the names of 82 (rather than 50) Islamic nations were included in the experiment, the differential were to remain at 8.1%, then p would drop below the 0.05 significance level. If the names of 140 Islamic nations were included, p would drop below the 0.01 significance level. This possibility suggests the potential value of expanding the sample size in an enlarged version of this experiment. Of course, it is possible that the addition of more initial ELSs might result in a diminution of the differential.

The possibility that differences in letter frequencies between the two texts might account for some of the difference in discovery rates was considered. A visual comparison of the individual letter frequencies indicated a very strong similarity between the two texts. The correlation between the two sets of frequencies was quite high (0.964827).

The services of another Hebrew expert, Moshe Shak, a Canadian engineer, were retained to investigate the degree to which the indications might be affected by differences in translations between Hebrew experts. The results are displayed in Table 2.

The discovery rate from Shak’s War and Peace extensions (18.7%) was very close to, but somewhat lower than, that from Dr. Jacobi’s extensions (19.4%).

1 R. Edwin Sherman is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries. He received a B.A. and M.A. in Mathematics from the University of California at San Diego, and passed three Ph.D. qualifying exams. He has 30 years of experience as a consulting actuary in serving numerous Fortune 500 corporations, major public entities, law firms and insurance companies in applying probability, statistics and econometric forecasting to risk management problems. He was a Principal with Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the world’s largest accounting and consulting firm, for seven years. He has authored five professional papers in actuarial journals and over 70 articles in trade publications. He directs the biblecodedigest.com website.

2Dr. Nathan Jacobi was educated in Biblical and contemporary Hebrew in Israel. He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics and an M.Sc. in Physics from Bar-Ilan University. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from the Weizman Institute of Science. He has over 20 years of experience in research, development and scientific computing in applied physics, aerospace and geophysics. He currently teaches an intermediate Hebrew class in Ashland, Oregon.

3Algeria, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Dubai, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Major islamic nations (Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia) were excluded because they had already been the subject of ELS extension searches in the book of Ezekiel. Originally only 10 nations were selected. However, for two of them less than five total ELSs were found, so Somalia was added to bring the total number of ELSs examined up to 50 for each text.

4Isaac Newton Bible Code Research Society. Researchers included Mr. Sherman, Dr. Jacobi and Mr. David Swaney.

5The final search text used extended from Jeremiah 51:52 through Ezekiel to Hosea 1:9. The last chapter from Jeremiah and the first chapter of Hosea were first added to expand the search text, and then as many final verses from the second to last chapter of Jeremiah were added as were needed in order for the Ezekiel Plus search text to have the same size (approximately) as the War and Peace search text.

6www.research-systems.com.

7The 39.2% differential for the discovery rates is lower than the 54.2% differential in the total number of extensions. This occurs because the denominators of the two discovery rates are not the same. Each new extension opens up a new opportunity to find yet another extension. Hence, there were many more opportunities to find new extensions in Ezekiel because more extensions were initially found in Ezekiel.

[Quix]

Non-Random Equidistant Letter
Sequence Extensions in Ezekiel
Continued
By R. Edwin Sherman, FCAS, MAAA, and Nathan Jacobi, Ph.D.

Estimating the Probability of Chance Occurrence of a Collection of Extended ELSs as Extensive as the Ezekiel 37 Terrorist Code Cluster

In Appendix B a formula is derived for the total number of final ELSs consisting of k extensions expected to emerge from a search around n initial ELSs, given a discovery rate of d:

(1)

n ( k + 1 )dk(1 – d ) ² .

This formula was used to determine the expected number of lengthy ELSs for several length categories from the examination of 295 initial ELSs in Ezekiel 37 about contemporary events. Within a few days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks we selected a group of words to search for as ELSs with the shortest skips in the Tanach: Bin Laden, al Qaida, Saddam Hussein, Hussein, New York, Airliner, Tower, Terror and Suicide. We reviewed these findings in search of short sections of text where the greatest concentration of these ELSs appeared. Ezekiel 37 immediately emerged as the leading candidate. Our objective was merely to locate a solid example of potential encoding rather than to find an exasmple that optimized the improbability of chance occurrences.

The entire list of initial ELSs examined was based on key words relating to the September 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent events in the war on terror. This list evolved over time as events unfolded to target key words about current events. No initial ELSs were removed from the list for any reason.

A 19.4% discovery rate was assumed8, and the average number of Hebrew letters to be found in extensions was assumed to be 7.0 (the actual average was 7.09 in War & Peace and 6.30 in Ezekiel). Table 3 provides a comparison of the actual (vs. expected) number of lengthy ELSs in the Ezekiel 37 code cluster.

The actual number of extended ELSs of different lengths in Ezekiel 37 was reasonably close to expected for only two categories—those with zero and two extensions. For all other categories (shaded in green), there were statistically significant differences between actual and expected.

If the frequency of extended ELSs in Ezekiel 37 had conformed to that from War & Peace, we would expect to find 5.95 ELSs consisting of three or more extensions (and having 25 or more total letters). That is a significant number of long ELSs—an indication of the fact that the terseness of Hebrew and the absence of vowels can result in the “discovery” of some longer ELSs—even in Tolstoy’s writings.

In actuality, Dr. Jacobi found 33 ELSs in Ezekiel 37 that consisted of 25 or more letters (Appendix C)—approximately 454% more than the 5.95 expected by chance. These differences, as displayed in Table 2, are extremely significant statistically—no matter how one estimates the probability of its occurrence by chance.

Independence of the Discovery Rate to the Number of Extensions Previously Discovered

More complex models could be constructed by assuming some relationship between d and the number of extensions that have already been discovered. The primary consideration that would need to be reflected in doing so is that the longer an ELS becomes, the more difficult it is to have the entire ELS remain coherent and continue to represent acceptable Hebrew. The previously discovered words and phrases create a context with which subsequently discovered, potentially intelligible phrases in Hebrew, need to be compatible. This effect may be somewhat offset by the possibility that when a Hebrew expert finds one extension, he may try harder to find a second extension, and so forth—since his assignment is to find longer ELSs. This concern is mitigated, at least in part, by the fact that each expert was blind as to the source text of any given letter string, and, in the case of Dr. Jacobi, was also unaware that the experiment was even taking place.

Dr. Jacobi is of the opinion that he has tended to be motivated to try harder to find yet another extension when the quality of the Hebrew in the existing extended ELS was particularly good. This was more motivating to him than the mere fact of the actual length of the extended ELS. Given that the quality of the Hebrew of an ELS tends to deteriorate as the ELS becomes longer, this would suggest that he would generally become less motivated to search for yet another extension as the existing extended ELS became longer. All of these considerations, taken together, indicate that the simple assumption of the independence of d may tend to overstate the expected number of long ELSs of different lengths from a non-encoded text.

Key Findings

Key findings from the above analysis are:

1. Longer ELSs can be “discovered,” even in ordinary texts, with a fair degree of frequency. This affirms the claim of code skeptics that “codes” can be found in any book.

2. The extension model provides a benchmark for testing purported claims of the discovery of real Bible codes. All examples in currently published books on Bible codes fail to significantly exceed this benchmark.

3. The actual number of long ELSs in Ezekiel 37 far exceeds that explainable by chance, supporting the claim that some real Bible codes do exist. The chi square p-value indicated from Table 2 is .

4. If one multiplies the actual number of initial ELSs investigated in Ezekiel 37 (295) by the ratio of actual to expected ELSs in the longer categories, estimates can be obtained of the expected number of initial ELSs to have been investigated from War & Peace to find as many long ELSs as was the case with Ezekiel 37. For example, that expected number was 16,499 for ELSs of 46-52 letters, 18,605 for ELSs of 53-59 letters and 66,918 for ELSs with 60+ letters.

5. The discovery rate for the first extension in Ezekiel 37 was only 14.8%. However, once at least one extension had been found, thereafter the discovery rate rose to 49.7%. Arguably, such a high discovery rate is not attainable without the presence of intentional encoding.

6. One million trials were run of a simulation of the total number of ELSs with three or more extensions, given 295 initial ELSs and a discovery rate of 19.4%. The number of trials with various numbers of ELSs with 3+ extensions is shown in Table 4. The exceptionally large gap between the simulated results and the actual number of 33 ELSs in Ezekiel 37 with 3+ extensions (see graph in abstract) illustrates how infinitesimal is the probability of chance occurrence of a cluster as extensive as Ezekiel 37.

The number of trials with various numbers of ELSs with 4+ extensions is shown in Table 5 below. The exceptionally large gap between the simulated results and the actual number of 17 ELSs in Ezekiel 37 again indicates the infinitesimal probability of chance occurrence of a cluster as extensive as Ezekiel 37.

The number of trials with various numbers of ELSs with 5+ extensions is shown in Table 6 below. Again, there is a very large gap between the simulated results and the actual number of 11 ELSs in Ezekiel 37.

⁸ The discovery rate corresponding to Dr. Jacobi’s searches was used—since all of the Ezekiel 37 cluster searches were performed by him.

[Quix]

I can't find out how to ref a web table in html code and am ignorant of how to do it. Can anyone help me out? Sorry the two tables didn't post right.

PLEASE FREEPMAIL ME AS WELL AS POST HERE.