Mathematics bombshell: God 'confirmed in Bible'

ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE AGAINST THE SKEPTICS' NONSENSE AND IN FAVOR OF AUTHENTIC BIBLICAL CODES:

Comparing ELSs

There are seven ELSs in the Hanukah example. This compares with 1,406 ELSs, or 400 distinct terms, about Christ from Isaiah 53. In other words, for every Hanukah ELS, we have found 209 ELSs in Isaiah 53. Where the word appears more than once, we have indicated how many other times it occurs. The Isaiah 53 ELSs deal extensively with many aspects of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, which, in itself, is quite remarkable and totally unexpected. Here is a comparison of the ELSs in the two clusters:

PRAISE GOD FOR HIS TIMELESS MAJESTY!

Either you are very ignorant of up-to-date research as well as a solid expose of McKay et al or your biases are causing you to distort reality 100% out of whack.

Neither, actually. It's just that I know how to perform statistical calculations, and thus am able to see the horse manure in the claims about the "Bible codes".

Perhaps you shouldn't try playing "Billy Freud, Junior psychoanalyst" -- you're not very good at it, and in fact it just makes you look like a jerk.

ADDITIONAL DATA RE AUTHENTIC CODES:

The Scrabble Factor

The seven Hanukah ELSs appear within a 1,123 letter long section of text, which is somewhat smaller than the 1,584 letter long section that is crossed by all of the Isaiah 53 ELSs that are at least as significant as the Hanukah finds. So the two source texts are fairly comparable in size. In reality most of the Isaiah 53 cluster is concentrated in the last half of the 1,584 letter long section. For example, 57 of the 85 most improbable ELSs cross this latter section of text, which is only 700 letters long.

A comparison of the sheer number of ELSs is only part of the story, however. What also counts is how likely or unlikely each ELS is to cross a section of text. The longer an ELS is, the more unlikely it is to appear by chance. And the shorter the skips between its letters, the more unlikely it is to show up coincidentally. Finally, whether the letters of the ELS are fairly common or uncommon also affects the chances it could just appear.

Just as in Scrabble, where it is hard to compose a word with a Q or an X, so there are little used letters in Hebrew. And, as in Scrabble, where it is much harder to use all seven letters when composing a word, so seven-letter ELSs are much less common than three or four-letter ELSs. We have taken all these factors precisely into account in determining what the odds are that each ELS in both clusters could cross a randomly selected section of text that is exactly 1,000 letters long. They are presented below, with the most improbable ELSs shown first.

As you can see, there are dozens of ELSs from the Isaiah 53 cluster that are each less likely to appear by chance than the most likely Hanukah ELS. What is immediately evident is that none of the Hanukah ELSs are all that unusual. On the other hand, there are four Isaiah 53 ELSs that each have odds less than 1 in 1 million of crossing a randomly selected 1,000-letter long text. None of the Hanukah ELSs are anywhere near as unusual as the top ranked Isaiah 53 ELSs. The most unlikely Hanukah ELS has odds of 1 in 453 of appearing by chance.

By way of comparison, for the original "Yeshua is my name" ELS that Rambsel found with a skip of 40 or less, the odds that it will cross any randomly selected 1,000 letter long section from the Tanach, are 1 in 1,060. This makes it somewhat more improbable than the most improbable ELS in the Hanukah cluster.

Excess Occurrences of the Mary ELS

There are two unusual code entries in the above table. One entry in the purple section of the table states, "Mary ELS Appears 16 Times (Vs. 4.76 Expected By Chance)." We had looked for occurrences of the Hebrew word for Mary (Miriam) within Isaiah 52:12-54:3. While this short ELS was expected to show up 4.76 times within the text with skips of 1-50, it actually appeared 16 times. The odds of this occurring were less than 1 in 25,368, as shown in the above chart.

To check this startling result, we scrambled the letters of Miriam and looked for each of these possible rearrangements as an ELS. None of the alternative "words" appear an unusual number of times. There really is no comparison. All of these other results fell well within the bell-shaped curve describing the number of times we would expect that the ELS would show up. On the other hand, the number of Mary ELSs was way off the charts, far to the right of the bell-shaped curve.

Excess Occurrences of Prophecy/Guilt Offering ELS Crosses

An ELS Cross occurs when the ELS appears with a short skip (such as 5 or less), and its middle letter coincides with the middle letter of another ELS of the same word with a longer skip (e.g., up to 100). What follows is an example using the Hebrew word, A-Shem, OZA, or Alef-Sheen-Mem.

In this example the horizontal beam of the cross is made up of an appearance of the ELS with a skip of +1, while the vertical beam is made up of another ELS of the same word, with a skip of, say 48.

In Isaiah 52:11-53:12, we would expect 3.6 of these visual crosses to appear by chance. Instead, there are 21 of them. The odds of this just happening are 1 in 3.2 billion. This extraordinary excess of visual crosses is not due to one or more words or phrases appearing in the literal passage several times (and that contains the ELS within it). What makes it unusually pertinent are the meanings of the word. A-Shem means "guilt" in contemporary and Biblical Hebrew, but it also is a short form for "guilt offering" in various passages in the Hebrew Bible. Spelled backwards, the same ELS means "prophecy" or "burden." What is Isaiah 53 about? It is a prophecy of a guilt offering. What could be a more succinct and appropriate summary of the literal passage than this little three-letter word. And to have it cross itself 21 times in forming visual crosses would seem to be a form of intentional repetition that stresses the importance of the theme of the passage.

There is much more, however. We have devoted an entire section of this report to detailing the manner in which these crosses appear, often lying right on top of one another, and often appearing very close to many of the most significant codes in the passage. These facets underscore the only reasonable explanation for this phenomena: intentional placement. Click here for more detailed information on this unique phenomenon.

Dealing With "Wiggle Room"

As shown above, the odds of finding a cluster similar to the Hanukah example are less than 1 in 5, indicating quite clearly that it could be very easily due to chance. On the other hand, the odds of finding a cluster similar to the Isaiah 53 example are so astronomically remote as to completely rule out chance as a rational explanation.

The Isaiah 53 odds are so small that skeptics will immediately suspect that they have not been adjusted for "wiggle room." Nothing could be further from the truth. We have factored in the effects of "wiggle room" far beyond what is in any way reasonable, so there can be no doubt left that the Isaiah 53 cluster is real.

The above odds against a cluster similar to the Isaiah 53 one appearing by chance reflect the possibility that either the above cluster, or any one of 437,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 similar clusters, could appear by chance. Before we reflected this, the unadjusted probability of the exact cluster described above of appearing by chance was so remote that the Excel spreadsheet program could not calculate it. The adjusted probability is 2.3 followed by 212 zeroes.

Now any method of estimating the odds of these configurations happening by chance is bound to be very complicated, and that makes it easy for an opposing expert to claim that we should have done our calculations at least a bit differently than we have. After all, how is the average man on the street going to decide which expert is right? So, rather than getting bogged down in math, we would point out that the simple dictates of common sense also lead to the same conclusion -- the Isaiah 53 cluster is far too dense and extensive to be explained by chance.

It only makes sense that you could find a few shorter terms about many subjects in the text of any book. What makes no sense whatsoever is that you could find such an overwhelming collection of topically related ELSs congregating within a few pages of text. While the chance re-acquaintance of two long lost friends may be a coincidence we all know happens, when dozens of long lost friends all happen to bump into one another at the same place on the same day, common sense tells us that the reunion was planned. When too many coincidences congregate together, we know it could not be a coincidence.

Going Above and Beyond

Even though we have carefully catalogued about 100 ELSs about Christ as the only ones that we looked for and did not find in Isaiah 53, we should state we started by including the ELSs that Rambsel and Jeffrey located. We do not know how many different ELSs they looked for and did not find.

Furthermore, distrust is high among skeptics. So we went far beyond what is reasonable in adjusting our calculations. In calculating the above odds, we assumed that for every word we did find as an ELS that we (or Rambsel/Jeffrey) actually had to look for 25 different comparable ELSs before we found the one we documented. That means that our probability calculation reflects the effects of looking for 10,000 different words about Christ in order to find the 400 distinct words we did locate as ELSs. The point is that there aren't that many different Hebrew words about the topic of Jesus of Nazareth. That is why we can conclude the odds of chance appearance are LESS THAN the 1 in 225,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 quoted in the above chart, and that the Isaiah 53 cluster was intentionally embedded in the text.

And while we assumed that there were at most 10,000 different words that could be considered to be relevant to the topic of Jesus Christ in adjusting for the maximum effects of "wiggle room" in the Isaiah 53 odds calculation, we only assumed there were at most 1,000 different words that could be considered to be relevant to the topic of Hanukah. If we had made the same assumption for Hanukah as we did for Isaiah 53, the odds of chance occurrence of the Hanukah example would rise to be "less than 100%."

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PRAISE GOD FOR HIS TIMELESS MAJESTY!

I suspected that the truth and the facts were of no interest or weight to you.

Biases make terrible gods eventually.

Your name calling is so sweet.

I don't have to play Jr analyst. My PhD in clinical psych is quite sufficient for my satisfaction.

Evidently your arrogance leads you to convince yourself that your statistical skills and knowledge are greater than the many internationally known experts invovled with the BCD site and related sites here and in Israel.

Actually, I'm exceedingly underwhelmed by your logic and by your skills.

Now your biases--those appear to be Olympic class.

I suspected that the truth and the facts were of no interest or weight to you.

You can suspect any false thing you choose, and apparently you do when they help you cling to your prejudices.

Biases make terrible gods eventually.

As your childish behavior when confronted with disagreement makes quite clear.

truth and reason are not an enemy of Faith.

YET ADDITIONAL PROOF:

The Incredible Compactness of the Isaiah 53 Cluster

When we calculated the odds of a cluster similar to that of Isaiah 53 occurring by chance, we ignored a critical factor—how tightly packed many of the most improbable codes are around the longest code. If we were to reflect this in our calculation of the odds, the chances of it being a coincidence would be far more unlikely. Reflecting this is quite complicated, and the odds are already extremely small, so we will just display in the following table the minimum distance (in letters) between the letters of the most improbable ELSs and any of the letters of the 22-letter "Gushing from above…" code.

From the above chart we can see that 47 of the 75 most improbable ELSs either share a common letter with the focal code or are less than ten letters away from it. This focal code is located in the last third of the 1,584 letter long text that is crossed by each of the more improbable ELSs.

The closeness of ELSs that are tightly related thematically is common in Isaiah 53. The following table provides an example drawn from only four consecutive letters from Isaiah 53:12 where the literal text reads, "He poured out to death his soul":

Mary (skip of 3) and Mother of God (skip of 33) also exactly overlap at Isaiah 53:3:10:2. The intersection of these two ELSs is at the center of another thematically arranged collection of dozens of ELSs that intersect a very short set of consecutive letters.

What Does It All Mean?

Given that it has been demonstrated that a large number of codes about Jesus of Nazareth were intentionally embedded within the Hebrew text of Isaiah 52-53, what does this mean?

First, the Dead Sea Scrolls include virtually complete copies of the book of Isaiah that date back at least a century before Jesus lived. Thus, this cluster evidence shows that the author of Isaiah 52-53 had prior knowledge of the life of Christ at least 100 years before he was born. According to tradition, and to the literal text, the book of Isaiah was written by that prophet about 700 years before the birth of Jesus. If that is true, the prior knowledge of its author should be viewed as being even more far-reaching. In either case, what we have here is proof that the Bible code is real.

Second, the literal text of Isaiah 52-53 describes a suffering servant who would be humiliated and executed as a "guilt offering" for the wrongdoings of others. The intentional placement of dozens, if not hundreds, of codes about Jesus of Nazareth in the heart of this text is compelling evidence that he was the one prophesied in the literal text. Whether the suffering servant described in Isaiah 53 was or was not the Messiah is a matter Jewish and Christian scholars have hotly debated for centuries. We leave that question to the reader to decide. But the encoded evidence is so extensive that the conclusion that Jesus is the person the passage is describing is inescapable.

Third, this cluster is compelling evidence that significant encoded material exists in the Hebrew Scriptures outside the Torah.

These are dramatic and controversial findings, but the evidence is exceptionally extensive and compelling.

At the outset of this report we commented that the mere appearance of the ELS "true messiah" in this cluster is not, per se, proof of that belief but is only a phrase relevant to the topic of Jesus—because it is well known that some people hold to that belief. As noted in the chart above, the odds are 1 in 12 that the "true messiah" ELS could appear in the Isaiah 53 cluster simply by chance.

One aspect of the "true messiah" ELS that makes it more intriguing is that it is only two letters away from the "My Name is Yeshua" portion of the 22-letter focal code. In contrast, no "false messiah" ELSs with skips of any size (including those up to a maximum skip of 199,486) appear anywhere in the vicinity of Isaiah 52-53. Nevertheless, these pieces of evidence, by themselves, are not significant enough statistically to serve as "proof" of a particular belief. This illustrates why Bible code research should emphasize the gathering of as much evidence as possible regarding any particular topic. The jury is still out on such questions and a verdict may never come in.

It is possible that subsequent discovery and mathematical analysis could provide an example that is so improbable that it could be regarded as both intentional and unambiguous in its message. Such an example could include a definitive doctrinal statement. For example, some day someone may find an incredibly long ELS that would read, "Let there be no doubt, such and such is absolutely true- no ifs, ands or buts." It would be hard to dismiss such an extremely improbable code as mere coincidence.

PRAISE GOD FOR HIS TIMELESS MAJESTY!

fine, show me where this has been refuted:
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/StatSci/StatSci.pdf

your "new" article in no way refutes McKay and the other scientists, mathimeticians and statisticians who authored this: it only make MORE outrageous claims. This debate is useless because you are determined to follow the same type of tinfoilhat brigade that reads Alien Encounter into every item in antiquity. Its just as deluded and obsessive and there is no way to talk someone out of an obesession, and you are clearly deeply invested in this for some reason, to the point of SCREAMING DOWN OTHER PEOPLE WITH CAPS and responding to every single post by every single member who responds. Are you someway financially rewarded for your zealotry or are you just wack?

Also, you could respond to me in one post instead of 5
I only use more than one post to respond to more than one member.

next, I also aver that the they ARE using the Bible Codes to push unChristian and unGodly propaganda. By definition, anything fraudulent must be unGodly.

Your name calling is so sweet.

You started it, son. My original post stuck to the topic. You were the one who first threw the personal insults. All I did was point out that this makes you look bad. I stand by that assessment.

I don't have to play Jr analyst. My PhD in clinical psych is quite sufficient for my satisfaction.

Then how sad that you're so bad at it. Your "analysis" of me is laughably wrong, and so large a leap from anything I've actually written here that it bespeaks of an enormous unprofessionalism, and an ability to "see" things where they do not exist.

Evidently your arrogance leads you to convince yourself that your statistical skills and knowledge are greater than the many internationally known experts invovled with the BCD site and related sites here and in Israel.

Evidently you're unaware that "argument from authority" is a well-known logical fallacy.

I have no arrogance on this subject, simply an honest awareness of my math skills, sufficient to follow the arguments that the BCD fans put forth, and therefore to identify when they are engaging in "dazzle 'em with numbers" instead of actual analysis.

Actually, I'm exceedingly underwhelmed by your logic and by your skills.

...based merely on the fact that I disagree with your conclusion. Which makes your following bit of childishness a better description of your own behavior in this thread than mine:

Now your biases--those appear to be Olympic class.

Physician, heal thyself.

From your posts to me and to others on this thread, it is entirely obvious that the only way you can deal emotionally with people who arrive at different conclusions than yourself is to mentally pigeonhole them as either ignorant or biased (because they couldn't *possibly* disagree with you for legitimate reasons, eh?)

Now *that's* bias and arrogance...

You need to back away from the television and put the remote control down.

Try reading the Bible and having faith, instead of listening to scientists trying to disprove with statistical analysis, that which can only be accepted on faith.

Or read the Book of Enoch.

Chariot wheels were found under water at the point historians always assumed was where the parting of the Red Sea ocurred.

I'm sure that such claims will help Jeffreys sell more of his books. Speaking of which, he wrote a book on the "Bible codes

What? Your saying your "former literal creationist's" career prospects didn't improve immeasurably once he begged and obtained the party's forgiveness?

"Isaiah 53 proved to be a rich cluster of hidden messages, containing 42 encoded statements relating to Jesus' death, resurrection and ascension, far more than his baseline predicted.
Note the number 42. 42 months in Jesus' ministry, 42 sojourns in the desert, (Numbers 33), 42 children eaten by the bears when they told Elisha to "go up!" Great stuff!"

Ah yes, 42, the Answer to the "Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything."

Unfortunately, as we later discover, the Question is:

"WHAT DO YOU GET IF YOU MULTIPLY SIX BY NINE".
"Six by nine. Forty-two."
"That's it. That's all there is."

(Viz, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.")

The proof of the pudding: Find a reference to something that hasn't happened yet.

What? Your saying your "former literal creationist's" career prospects didn't improve immeasurably once he begged and obtained the party's forgiveness?

Um, no, that's not what I'm saying. Nor do I see how anyone could have gotten anything like that from anything I've written here. And what is this "party" you're going on about?

But since you seem to be curious about it, yes, Mr. Morton's professional career as an oilfield geologist did advance, though increasing competence, after he learned that most of what he had been taught in a creationist university wasn't actually true, as measured against the reality:

In order to get closer to the data and know it better, with the hope of finding a solution, I changed subdivisions of my work in 1980. I left seismic processing and went into seismic interpretation where I would have to deal with more geologic data. My horror at what I was seeing only increased. There was a major problem; the data I was seeing at work, was not agreeing with what I had been taught as a Christian. Doubts about what I was writing and teaching began to grow. Unfortunately, my fellow young earth creationists were not willing to listen to the problems. No one could give me a model which allowed me to unite into one cloth what I believed on Sunday and what I was forced to believe by the data Monday through Friday.
[...]
Nothing that young-earth creationists had taught me about geology turned out to be true. I took a poll of my ICR graduate friends who have worked in the oil industry. I asked them one question.
"From your oil industry experience, did any fact that you were taught at ICR, which challenged current geological thinking, turn out in the long run to be true? ,"
That is a very simple question. One man, Steve Robertson, who worked for Shell grew real silent on the phone, sighed and softly said 'No!' A very close friend that I had hired at Arco, after hearing the question, exclaimed, "Wait a minute. There has to be one!" But he could not name one. I can not name one. No one else could either. One man I could not reach, to ask that question, had a crisis of faith about two years after coming into the oil industry. I do not know what his spiritual state is now but he was in bad shape the last time I talked to him.

From http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/StatSci/:

Statistical Science publishes Bible Codes Refutation
The only paper published in a refereed scientific journal that claims to find evidence for the reality of the Bible Codes is the paper Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis, by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg (WRR), Statistical Science, Vol. 9 (1994) 429-438.
We are now happy to announce that, after review by four senior statisticians chosen by the journal, Statistical Science has published a thorough rebuttal: Vol. 14 (1999) 150-173.
The new paper is Solving the Bible Code Puzzle, by Brendan McKay, Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, and Gil Kalai. Here is the abstract:
A paper of Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg in this journal in 1994 made the extraordinary claim that the Hebrew text of the Book of Genesis encodes events which did not occur until millennia after the text was written. In reply, we argue that Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg's case is fatally defective, indeed that their result merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it. We present extensive evidence in support of that conclusion. We also report on many new experiments of our own, all of which failed to detect the alleged phenomenon.

This page presents the paper and some auxiliary resources.

The new paper
It can be downloaded in PDF format or Postscript format. If the link from Australia is slow, you can try Canada: PDF or Postscript.
[Copyright (1999), The Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Limited copying for personal use permitted.]
To read the PDF version, you need the Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Press Release
The publication of the paper was accompanied by a press release from the journal's parent society, the Institute for Mathematical Statistics. It includes the introduction to the paper written by the Executive Editor of Statistical Science at the time the paper of Witztum et al. was published, Robert Kass. Read it here.
About the authors
A brief biography of the authors is here.
Data
Due to space limitations, the paper refers to several experiments without presenting the data for them. That data is presented here.
Citations
Due to the volatile nature of the web, pages and links tend to change or disappear. Thus, we preserve here many of the web documents referred to by the paper, in the form they were in at the time of acceptance of the paper. We also provide scans of a few less accessible documents.
Errata
A few typos have been found.
Discussion
In this place we will reference serious critiques of our paper, and sometimes comment on them. Readers should be aware that our paper is not an opening gambit, but a summary of years of investigation that included extensive debates with Witztum and Rips. We do not feel obliged to reply to every recycled quibble, especially to those already answered in our paper.

Witztum's "refuted refutation" concerns the appellations we found that perform strongly in War and Peace. It is thoroughly refuted here (PDF).
In Dec 2000, Witztum published what he again called a "complete refutation", but few of our points are even mentioned let alone refuted. As a postscript to this sorry episode, we make a few final remarks that include proof that Witztum's own expert Shlomo Havlin does not himself adhere to the "rules" that Witztum claims his data to be based on. (August 2001)
Doron Witztum has challenged our account of the history of the permutation test used in WRR's paper. In reply, we provide a detailed analysis, including scans of the primary source documents. (September 1999)
Another paper of Witztum alleges that our experiment with Dr. Simcha Emanuel was improperly conducted and the result in fact supports codes! In our reply, we catch Witztum with his fingers in the till. (July 2001)
Witztum has further claimed to refute our observations about his choices of ways to write dates in Hebrew. Our reply shows that his case is nonexistent, as it is based on false procedures or incorrect data. (July 2001)
Witztum has replied to our analysis of variations, arguing that it is either invalid or proves something different from what we claim. Our reply shows where his errors are while nevertheless questioning one of our own previous conclusions. (Note: both Witztum's and our papers on this subject require deep knowledge of the background and some mathematical expertise.) (March 2002)
Witztum has written some comments on the issue of changes to the text of the Torah. He appears to have abandoned his earlier approach, which was to claim that the Koren text "can be relied on", in favour of alternative ad hoc arguments. We are not going to reply to them. However, for people who are interested in this topic, we present some relevant articles by scholars. (March 2002)
Witztum found quite a few errors in Barry Simon's replication of the experiment of Gans, but fixing them still leaves a completely negative result. More seriously, two careful replications attempted by a committee of supporters and skeptics, using data compiled by independent experts, could not find the slightest trace of codes. We have a preliminary report available. (September 2002).
Apart from Witztum's efforts, the major reply to our work was the "primer" of Harold Gans. In reply we will make a few comments. (January 2003).

Back to the Torah Codes page
Back to the Mathematical Miracles page

ADDITIONAL PROOF:

Hebrew Spellings of the Isaiah 53 and Hanukah Codes

Seeing the Hebrew spellings of the codes found in the two clusters dramatically illustrates the differences between them. The longer the term and the shorter the skip between the letters, the more significant it is. Finding a code that is 22 letters long with a skip of 20 between letters is more than a trillion times a trillion more difficult to find than one that is seven letters long with a skip of 48.

More Unusual Features of the Isaiah 53 Cluster

Compelling Evidence of the Intentional Embedding of Numerous Visual Crosses Formed By the ELSs of a Single Word

Occasionally two different ELSs of the same word cross one another, forming a "visual cross." The ELS with the shortest skip forms the horizontal beam of the cross, while the ELS with the longer skip forms the vertical beam, when the crossword array has the same skip between rows as the longer ELS does. When that happens we get something that looks like this:

The above cross is an actual example from Isaiah 53. The horizontal beam of the cross is made up by an ELS of the Hebrew word,

Alef-Sheen-Mem, with a skip of +1, while the vertical beam is made up of another ELS of the same word, with a skip of -48.

Visual crosses are most vivid and natural when the center of the cross is the middle letter of the ELS, the horizontal ELS has a skip of 5 or less, and the vertical ELS has a relatively short skip, such as 100 or less. Unless otherwise noted, all of the visual crosses described in this section satisfy these constraints.

The number of visual crosses within Isaiah 52-53 like the one illustrated above (that are formed by ELSs of

is so far in excess of what one would expect by chance that coincidence is not a reasonable explanation. The following diagram accurately portrays the dramatic difference between the kind of random occurrence one would expect if these visual crosses were due to chance and the actual number and pattern of these visual crosses that appears in Isaiah 52:11-53:12.

Pattern Expected By Chance Actual Pattern That Appears

While 3.64 visual crosses formed by this word are expected by chance, 21 actually appear in the passage.

As if the sheer number of these visual crosses weren't convincing enough evidence of intentional embedding, the manner in which many of these visual crosses lie right on top of one another also provides compelling evidence of intentional placement. The middle letter of the ELS (Sheen) appears 42 times within Isaiah 52:11-53:12. One would expect that if the 21 visual crosses formed by occurrences of this ELS were randomly placed, most of them would be stand alone crosses, with a few instances where two of the crosses would share the same center letter and perhaps one instance where three of the crosses would lie right on top of one another. Instead, what we find is:

One instance where five of the 21 visual crosses are stacked right on top of one another. (Denoted by C in the above illustration).

An instance where three crosses are stacked right on top of one another ( D ). while another two crosses are stacked up on another center letter that is only five letters away.

An instance where two crosses are stacked, while another cross is only 6 letters away ( B ).

An instance where the vertical cross consists of two ELSs with the same skip that are linked together, that are encompassed by two crosses that are stacked on top of one another ( E ).

Two more instances where two crosses are stacked on top of one another ( F and G ).

Because of this extremely unusual and unexpected bunching of the 21 crosses into only seven groupings, only 1 of the 21 visual crosses is a simple, stand alone cross ( A ). This dramatically contrasts with what one would expect from random placement (where about 13 of the crosses should be stand alones).

How can you have five visual crosses stacked right on top of one another? For each of these crosses, the horizontal beam is the same. It is the ELS with a skip of one. For the first cross, the vertical beam is the ELS with a skip of 20. For the second, it is the same ELS with a skip of 70. For the third, 78; the fourth, 90; and the fifth, 98. The odds against five or more crosses being stacked on top of one another within the given text are 1 in 415.

Finally, the case for these crosses being real codes is further strengthened by the fact that the Hebrew word that forms these crosses is probably the most appropriate summary of the literal content of Isaiah 52-53 that one could imagine. Intriguingly, means "guilt offering" while it also means "prophecy" when spelled backwards. In fact, the prophet Isaiah used it 10 times to introduce specific prophecies concerning different nations or places. Now what is Isaiah 53 about? It is a prophecy about a future guilt offering. How much more succinct a summary could we find of Isaiah 52:11-53:12? The word appears literally in Isaiah 53:10, which reads, "Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering…"

No, this discovery wasn't the result of a scientific experiment, just as the unearthing of the first skeletal remains of a Tyrannosaurus Rex wasn't. Nevertheless, the latter was a scientific event of great importance. In the same manner, scientists should be open to considering this type of evidence-because it goes far beyond skimpy anecdotes and reveals an extensiveness and complexity of design that defies chance as an explanation.

An occasional visual cross should be expected to appear in any text for any short word composed of three common Hebrew letters. On the other hand, finding 21 within a span of only 906 letters is obviously quite unexpected. To check our intuition, we calculated how many such visual crosses would be expected to appear by chance. We got 3.64. The odds of something appearing 21 times that is only expected to occur by chance 3.64 times are 1 in 3,206,600,000.

Bible code critics are quick to cite "variations in the short range order of letters" within different segments of text as a possible explanation of some code phenomenon. Could this be at work here? The literal word does appear once as a literal word in the passage. Were there any phrases or word sequences that appeared frequently in the passage that contained the ELS-so that it would naturally show up more often than expected? We checked all of the phrases where the ELS appeared (with a skip of 5 or less) and there was only one that was repeated once ("with the wicked" in Isaiah 53:9 and 53:12). Now suppose we exclude the crosses associated with the literal appearance of the word and the repeat appearance of the phrase "with the wicked" which contained the prophecy/guilt offering ELS with a skip of 3. Then we are still left with 17 visual crosses when we only expect 3.64. The odds against that are still 1 in 3,919,000. We are looking at direct evidence of intentional embedding of many of these visual crosses.

As a reasonableness test of how unusual this large number of visual crosses was, we completed similar searches in two other passages known to have a significant cluster of ELSs about Jesus Christ. We searched Proverbs 14-18 and only found one visual cross meeting the above definition. We searched Psalm 21-23 and did not find any visual crosses. This further suggested that the 21 visual crosses in Isaiah 52-53 were highly unusual.

As we examined these visual crosses further, additional evidence of intentional embedding surfaced. Let's look first at the F grouping of crosses. As noted above, appears literally in Isaiah 53:10. This literal appearance turned out to be the horizontal beam of two visual crosses (with skips of -48 and -85 as the vertical beams) that each look like the following in a typical code display:

What ELSs were close to the center letter of the above overlapping crosses? ELSs for Prince, Glorify, Mary and Miracle were one letter away. ELSs for His Signature (Image), Martyr, Afflicted and Remorse were 2 letters away, and so forth. We have summarized this information in the following table and included additional ELSs that were also quite close.

We also looked for other evidence of intentional placement of some of these visual crosses. The center of the E grouping of crosses exactly coincides with a central letter of the 22-letter long ELS that is the most improbable code in the Isaiah 53 cluster.

The vertical column of the above cross is formed by two occurrences of the ELS with a skip of 9. One progresses down the page, while the other progresses up the page, where they both share a common ending letter( ). The cross bar is formed by the guilt offering ELS with a skip of 3. The center of this cross is the letter . This is the same letter that is the first letter of the Hebrew word for "is my name" in the "Yeshua is my name" ELS that is part of the 22 letter long ELS, "Gushing from above…" - the focal code. In other words, this cross is located right at the very center of the entire Isaiah 53 cluster.

What else is close to this center letter of the above cross? This letter coincides with an ELS for servant with a skip of -1. A letter of "The Evil Roman City" ELS is only one letter away. This ELS is the third most improbable one in the entire cluster. A letter of the Dreadful Day for Mary ELS is also one letter away. A letter of each of the following ELSs is only two letters away: True Messiah, Prince and Counselor. And so forth. The following table discloses how many pertinent ELSs come so close to the center of this visual cross.

The above list of ELSs that are within 14 letters of the center of the above cross is truly remarkable-in large part because many of these ELSs are among the most improbable in the whole cluster.

The above visual cross has been inverted. It has been generally accepted that Bible codes can appear either in a forward or backward direction relative to the surface text. We show it above from the perspective of a backward direction of the literal text.

There is another visual cross that overlays the above one, sharing the same central letter. This guilt offering ELS has a horizontal beam formed by the ELS with a skip of 9, while the vertical beam is formed by another ELS with a skip of 51.

There are two more visual crosses that are centered in the same verse as the above crosses. The first one has a horizontal beam formed by an ELS with a skip of 5 and a vertical beam formed by another ELS with a skip of 55. It is overlaid by another visual cross centered on the same letter and has a vertical beam formed by an ELS with a skip of 84.

The next cluster of visual crosses (the C grouping) appears early in the Isaiah 52-53 passage.

What is extremely unusual about this visual cross is that its center is also the center of four additional visual crosses-with skips of 70, 78, 90 and 98. In other words, five of the 20 visual crosses in Isaiah 52-53 share the same common central letter.

The next chart shows which ELSs are close to the center of this highly improbable intersection of five crosses.

The next set of visual crosses (the G grouping) appears near the end of Isaiah 53. The center of this cross is only 5 letters away from the last letter of the 22-letter focal code of the entire cluster.

Other ELSs that are close to the center of this cross are:

The center letter of the above cross is also the center letter of another visual cross with the same horizontal beam and a vertical beam formed by an ELS with a skip of 60. The next set of visual crosses (the D grouping) consists of two crosses that share a common letter ( ). The cross on the left is formed by prophecy/guilt offering ELSs with skips of 3 and 24. The cross on the right is formed by prophecy/guilt offering ELSs with skips of 2 and 22.

What is close to the center of the cross on the left?

The center of this first cross is also the center of another one where the vertical beam is an ELS with a skip of 55.

The center of the cross on the right is close to the following ELSs.

The center of the second cross above is also the center of two additional crosses-where the vertical beams are ELSs with skips of 92 and 98. Taken all together the above diagram shows the center of a total of five visual crosses.

Let's now look at the two clusters of crosses that form the B grouping. The first cluster consists of four more visual crosses that lie right on top of one another. The cross shown in red below is of the same type as all the previously described ones, and is formed by ELSs with skips of 4 and 14. Another type has a horizontal beam consisting of the green letters as an ELS with a skip of 4. The vertical beam consists of the red letters of the first cross and two additional letters , that mean "rejoice." Together these form a cross on its side that includes the blue and red vertical letters and the horizontal green letters.

You will note that the central letter of the red cross is boxed and the type is in black. This is to note that it is the same as the boxed, black letter in the next diagram.

The red cross in the above diagram is different than the red cross in the previous diagram, although it shares a common central letter. The red cross in the previous diagram had a skip of 14 between the rows while the red cross in the diagram immediately above has a skip of 61. Right next to this red cross is another cross with a vertical ELS with a skip of 61. Unlike the red cross, where the shorter ELS has a skip of 4, for the blue cross, the shorter ELS has a skip of 3.

What is close to the center letter of the cross on the right?

Finally, we are left with only one visual cross that is truly ordinary (the A grouping). It is formed by a horizontal beam consisting of an ELS with a skip of 3 and a vertical beam made up of an ELS with a skip of 84.

What is close to the center of this cross?

Our review of all seven groupings of crosses, the manner in which many of them stack up on top of one another or are very close to one another, and the relevant ELSs that are very close to the center of each grouping again confronts us with extensive evidence that there is no way all of this could just be happenstance. Judas Sub-Cluster Making the findings in Isaiah 52-53 even more unusual and compelling is the existence of tightly organized webs of ELSs that focus on various sub-plots in the life of Jesus. The Judas cluster is a prime example. Included in this very tight cluster are ELSs for "Judas," "zealot," "thirty (pieces of)," "silver," "shekels," "field of blood", "money" (mammon), "execute," "potter's field," "deceived," "darkness," "whipping," "Caesar" and "enemy."

If we were only able to say that we had found all of these ELSs in the entire Hebrew Bible, you would yawn- and you should. If we could only say that we had found all of these ELSs in just one book of the Bible, you should still yawn, but not quite as deeply. However, when we say that all of these discoveries cross a tiny span of only 18 letters of text in the 13th and 14th verses of Isaiah 52, you should be astonished. Finding that many thematically related ELSs in one small space is almost certainly not coincidental.

PRAISE GOD FOR HIS TIMELESS MAJESTY!

Soooooooooooooo,

it seems that posting extensive evidence contrary to your biases

=

"childish behavior."

Fascinating.

Chariot wheels were found under water at the point historians always assumed was where the parting of the Red Sea ocurred.

If I find old horse-drawn carriage wheels in Atlanta, would this be "convincing proof" that Rhett and Scarlett actually made their firey ride?

Somehow, I'm underwhelmed.