Posted on 02/14/2005 5:29:01 PM PST by Quix
Blessings to all fair-minded folks who wish to discuss it.
Frankly, the rabid naysayers are welcome to--as mother might say--go chase a duck; suck rocks or go fly a kite.
Is it possible that what we have is the encryption of a higher level story which is then contained, more or less, within the bounds set by a far more ancient but well known story?
Might be worth a look at the "originals" to determine where the additive parts might be.
"So, in other words, you bless only those who agree with you on the nonsense of "Biblic Codes" and curse those who disagree. "
That's the way it usually works.
The 'bible code' is a load of dung. It's so ridiculous that it looks like someone was playing a practical joke to see how many people would fall for it.
The Bible(s.) The most perfectly flawed and perfectly compelling documents ever authored since human memory was wiped clean 6 thousand years ago, give or take hundreds of years.
Humbug!
Haven't you got better things to do with your time (life) as well?
Prior to that folks learned (and remembered) immense bodies of information using what the Jesuits called a "Memory Palace". Noah's Ark, of course, was one ~ and though we have the basic dimensions of the vessel we no longer have the basic descriptions of each of the many tens of thousands of animals on board ~ Moses took care of that part, FUR SHUR, and today we have folks looking for a wooden boat in the mountains when they should, instead, be striving to recover the animal tales.
That the oldest parts of the Bible may well be repositories of encrypted information is not beyond belief. After all, the original "data dump", from oral to written form, had to have had encrypted references so you could keep it all straight. On the other hand, to claim that the information refers to the future is a tad questionable.
man, what are you? Epilectic? Don't you believe in paragraph breaks?
This is the latest installment on exploring and analyzing the phenomena. As I recall, nothing even close to a mosaic has EVER been found in ANY other Hebrew text--that is--nothing that has the same sort of appearance of something theologically sound and supernaturally coded. To my laymans mind, some of them have been beautiful and awesome in their simplicity and in their faithfulness to Biblical theologyespecially regarding Christs deity etc. Yet, its been troublesome and frustrating not to be able to assess them scientifically compared to chance.
I realize its not fashionable for seemingly most naysayers to actually read the quality research in support of the codes. But I hope that even skeptics will look at the mosaic type of codes fair-mindedly and closely. In any caseheres this section of the latest Digest]
Bible Code Digest January/February 2005
The Controversy Over Mosaics: Round Five
Given a Hebrew word, a search text and a range of skip sizes, leading code software will instantly tell you how many times ELSs of that word will appearby chance. What are we to make of instances where there is a large difference between the expected number of occurrences and the number of times the given ELS actually appears? And what if large differences occur for many different skip size ranges? When that happens, we call it a "mosaic."
Now, we aren't talking about an ELS that is only expected to appear one or two times in the search text. We're talking about ELSs that are expected to appear 50 or 500 or 5,000 timesbecause the ELS only consists of a few letters.
Let's look at an interesting example. Take the Hebrew word Eckad (alef-khet-dalet), which means "one." It is undoubtedly one of the most significant words in the Jewish faith. It appears at the end of the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4 ("Shema Yisrael! Adonai Elohenu Adonai Eckad" or "Hear O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one.").
This places it at the heart of Judaism and its belief in a single, living God. Within the first 17 chapters of Genesis, the three-letter-long Eckad ELS consistently appears much more often than expected by chance over all but one range of skip sizes, as shown in the following table.
For example, the Eckad ELS appears 1,252 times with skips between 6,001 and 7,000 within Genesis 1-17, even though it is only expected to appear 844 times. That it should appear 48.4% more often than expected by chance seems highly unlikely. The following graph summarizes the above results.
Mosaics differ from traditional ELS findings in a number of key ways. First, for mosaics, the shorter the ELS, the better; while for traditional ELSs, the longer the ELS, the better. Second, a broad range of skip sizes is included in a mosaic; whereas, for traditional ELSs, typically the focus is only on the occurrence with the shortest skip, or those with the shortest skips.
The phenomenon of mosaics has been covered in seven past issues of BCD. These issues cover key parts of the introduction and debate over the potential reality of this kind of Bible code phenomena. (To view Digests prior to January 2002, click on Subscribers and log on with your user name and password. Then, scroll to the bottom of the page and select the Digest you would like to view. We have provided links in the text below for Digests after January 2002.)
Quix note: Go here at the BCD site:
Here: http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/288
In the November and December 2000 issues, BCD introduced the concept, much as was done above. Questions were raised by skeptics, who asserted that mosaics are simply caused by dramatic differences in letter frequencies between various parts of the search text.
What was the problem? Take the Eckad mosaic, for example, and let us assume that Genesis 1-17 is 20,000 letters long (it is actually slightly longer). Within that search text, the Eckad ELS with the longest possible skip would be one where the letters were the 1st, the 10,000th and the 19,999th.
Now consider all Eckad ELSs with skips of 9,000 to 9,999. The first possible such ELS would cover letters 1, 9,001 and 18,001 and the last possible such ELS would cover letters 2,000, 11,000 and 20,000. Thus, all of the letters of the Eckad ELSs in this skip size range appear in three ranges: 1-2,000, 9,001-11,000 and 18,001-20,000.
Given this, none of the Eckad ELSs with skips in this size range would include any letters in the ranges of 2,001-9,000 and 11,001-18,000. This would mean that none of the Eckad ELSs would draw from the 7,000 letters in the first range of text or from the 7,000 letters in the last range of text. Now suppose that the frequency of alefs, khets and dalets within those 14,000 letters of the literal text were dramatically less than in the ranges of the 6,000 letters from which the Eckad ELSs with skips of 9,000 to 9,999 had to be drawn. Then this would cause, all by itself, a seemingly dramatic mosaic effect within that skip size range.
At first glance, the above concern seemed to discredit the purported significance of mosaics of any kind. For some skeptics, their work had been done, and the whole thing could be dismissed. Looking further, however, there were various considerations that argued against dismissal:
First, the above concern is quite small for small skip size ranges. It does, however, grow for each category of successively longer skips.
Second, BCD presented the results of a study of the relationship between the relative meaningfulness of different ELSs and how strong the mosaic effect was within Genesis 1-17 ( February and March 2002 issues). The more often a given Hebrew word appeared in the literal text of the Bible, the more "meaningful" it was judged to be. And the greater the percentage variations of the actual number of occurrences were from the expected number, the more pronounced was the mosaic effect.
This strong relationship restored some credibility to the concept after criticisms posed by skeptics. Nevertheless, the whole phenomenon was a bit complicated in the first place, and it didn't help to have to offer complex explanations for why it was still worth noting, even though its existence could be shown, in many instances, to be significantly due to seemingly chance variations in letter frequencies between different parts of the search text.
Third, in the January 2001 issue, BCD put forth the concept of the author of the Bible as an incomparable chess master who had deliberately built in the major differences in letter frequencies between subsections of a search text in order to create the presence of mosaics for some ELSs. This concept was bolstered by the strong correlation between ELS meaningfulness and the strength of its mosaic effect.
In the September 2002 issue, we noted the presence of the significant David mosaic in 1 Samuel.
In the October 2002 issue and the January 2003 issue, we reported on some of the research conducted by David Bauscher in the Aramaic New Testament (the Peshitta). In the September 2003 issue, we reported on yet more of Bauscher's research, reviewing results for 29 different divine names as ELSs.
In the fall of 2003 and the winter of 2004, a number of Bible code researchers focused on quantifying the primary weakness of the mosaic phenomenon, and searched for solutions to addressing this weakness. The basic problem, as detailed above, was this: the higher the skip size, the greater the proportion of the search text that would never be accessed by any of the ELSs within a given skip size range. And yet, when code software computes the expected number of occurrences, it uses the letter frequencies for the entire range of the search text.
Bauscher set forth a potential solution for thismosaic searches should be done using a wrapped text. In such a text, when you come to the end of the literal text, you start all over with another copy of that text. This approach is analogous to treating the search text as a cylinder rather than a long straight line. Using a wrapped text fully eliminates the valid concern of skeptics. For each skip size range, all ranges of the letters of the original search text were equal candidates for being part of the selected ELS. So, there is no longer any bias in the estimation of the expected number of occurrences of the given ELS with skips in a specified skip range.
TO BE CONTINUED
Thanks for the ping!
Many fair-minded people understand that this whole Bible Code stuff is akin to numerology and not appropriate for understanding the Bible.
Then such people don't know how to read a dictionary very well or know nothing about the Bible Codes.
There is NOTHING similar to Biblical or other types of numerology to the Bible Codes.
I'd have thought you'd have known that.
BTW,
I personally do not think that the authentic codes have a great deal to do with understanding The Bible.
I believe they are a number of things
1) God's play. I think He's having fun confounding man's pontifical, arrogant wisdom.
2) God is affirming His timeless majesty with them.
3) God is providing for some sorts of skeptics grounds for considering the claims of The Bible.
4) Given that they affirm the basic doctrines of The Faith--INCLUDING THE BIBLICAL STANDARD THAT CHRIST CAME IN THE FLESH ETC. AND THAT they are inherently integral to the TEXT OF GOD'S WORD, they must have the same origin as the surface text--HOLY SPIRIT. I personally try to be very cautious about throwing rocks at Holy Spirit's work.
Quix, you said, 'I personally try to be very cautious about throwing rocks at Holy Spirit's work.' Well put.
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May ALL those who fear the Lord take care not to:
1. Say that something is not of God that actually is of God,
2. Say that something is of God that isn't.
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Thanks for all your great work, Quix! The Lord recompense thy work, and a full reward be given thee of the Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust.
JM
1 John 3 MSG: 13. So don't be surprised, friends, when the world hates you. This has been going on a long time.
WELL SAID.
As a well experienced counselor, such should no longer surprise me as much as it does.
Sometimes I still have this delusional thinking that believers should be quite logical.
When, actually, the attitudes of their hearts and their personality dynamics decide a lot more theological and other issues than logic does.
But, Christ seemed to know that when He walked around dealing with the very religious, as well.
Please let me know if you believe you have any Spirit born sense, hunch, insight.
Blessings,
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