The "Bible code" is an organization of the curious. On a constant the environment of such has provided much talk in simple conversation ever since I can remember, this is the avenue of explanation to date.
The constant harp on the "Fibonacci" is the basis of a conch, of which the shell itself has the presence of mind to end the shell and produce the beauty of such magnificence that held to the ear the ocean can be heard, this is the string! 
Take the Fibonacci and apply it to the alphabet, repeat the process and the bible will be the answer of chapter and not of verse. Good luck and may the A.) Man mean something more than men, may it apply to girl as mankind is not a broken proverb should the verb be a professional!
English alphabet
| English alphabet | |
|---|---|
 An English pangram displaying all the characters in context, in Dax Regular typeface. | |
| Type | Logographic (non-phonetic ideographic) and alphabetic
|
| Languages | |
Time period | c.1500 to present |
Parent systems | |
Child systems |
|
| Direction | Left-to-right |
| ISO 15924 | Latn, 215 |
Unicode alias | Latin |
| U+0000 to U+007E Basic Latin and punctuation | |
The modern English alphabet is a Latin alphabet consisting of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form. It originated around the 7th century from the Latin script. Since then, letters have been added or removed to give the current Modern English alphabet of 26 letters (the same as in the ISO basic Latin alphabet). The word alphabet is a compound of first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta.
The exact shape of printed letters varies depending on the typeface (and font), and the shape of handwritten letters can differ significantly from the standard printed form (and between individuals), especially when written in cursive style.
Written English has a number of digraphs and some longer multigraphs, and is the only major modern European language that requires no diacritics for native words. A diaeresis may be used to distinguish two vowels with separate pronunciation from a double vowel, such as "coöperation",[nb 1][1] and a grave may be used to indicate that a normally silent vowel is pronounced (as in learnèd).
Letter names
Modern letters
The names of the letters are sometimes spelled out. Some compound words (e.g., tee-shirt, deejay, emcee, okay, etc.), derived forms (e.g., exed out, effing, to eff and blind, aitchless, etc.) and objects named after letters (e.g., em in printing and wye in railroading) may be written with the letter names. The spellings listed below are from the Oxford English Dictionary. Plurals of consonant names are formed by adding -s (e.g., bees, efs, ems) or -es in the cases of aitch, ess, and ex (i.e., aitches, esses, exes). Plurals of vowel names add -es (i.e., aes, ees, ies, oes, ues), but these are rare. Most commonly, the letter (generally in capitalized form) and not its name is used, in which case plural just adds -s.
| Letter | Name | Name pronunciation | Frequency | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Modern English | Latin | Modern English | Latin | Old French | Middle English | ||
| A | a | ā | /ˈeɪ/, /ˈæ/[nb 2] | /aː/ | /aː/ | /aː/ | 8.17% |
| B | be | bē | /ˈbiː/ | /beː/ | /beː/ | /beː/ | 1.49% |
| C | cee | cē | /ˈsiː/ | /keː/ | /tʃeː/ > /tseː/ > /seː/ | /seː/ | 2.78% |
| D | dee | dē | /ˈdiː/ | /deː/ | /deː/ | /deː/ | 4.25% |
| E | e | ē | /ˈiː/ | /eː/ | /eː/ | /eː/ | 12.70% |
| F | ef | ef | /ˈɛf/ | /ɛf/ | /ɛf/ | /ɛf/ | 2.23% |
| eff as a verb | |||||||
| G | gee | gē | /ˈdʒiː/ | /ɡeː/ | /dʒeː/ | /dʒeː/ | 2.02% |
| H | aitch | hā | /ˈeɪtʃ/ | /haː/ > /ˈaha/ > /ˈakːa/ | /ˈaːtʃə/ | /aːtʃ/ | 6.09% |
| haitch[nb 3] | /ˈheɪtʃ/ | ||||||
| I | i | ī | /ˈaɪ/ | /iː/ | /iː/ | /iː/ | 6.97% |
| J | jay | – | /ˈdʒeɪ/ | – | – | [nb 4] | 0.15% |
| jy[nb 5] | /ˈdʒaɪ/ | ||||||
| K | kay | kā | /ˈkeɪ/ | /kaː/ | /kaː/ | /kaː/ | 0.77% |
| L | el | el | /ˈɛl/ | /ɛl/ | /ɛl/ | /ɛl/ | 4.03% |
| ell as a verb | |||||||
| M | em | em | /ˈɛm/ | /ɛm/ | /ɛm/ | /ɛm/ | 2.41% |
| N | en | en | /ˈɛn/ | /ɛn/ | /ɛn/ | /ɛn/ | 6.75% |
| O | o | ō | /ˈoʊ/ | /oː/ | /oː/ | /oː/ | 7.51% |
| P | pee | pē | /ˈpiː/ | /peː/ | /peː/ | /peː/ | 1.93% |
| Q | cue[nb 6] | qū | /ˈkjuː/ | /kuː/ | /kyː/ | /kiw/ | 0.10% |
| R | ar | er | /ˈɑːr/ | /ɛr/ | /ɛr/ | /ɛr/ > /ar/ | 5.99% |
| or[nb 7] | /ˈɔːr/ | ||||||
| S | ess | es | /ˈɛs/ | /ɛs/ | /ɛs/ | /ɛs/ | 6.33% |
| es- in compounds[nb 8] | |||||||
| T | tee | tē | /ˈtiː/ | /teː/ | /teː/ | /teː/ | 9.06% |
| U | u | ū | /ˈjuː/ | /uː/ | /yː/ | /iw/ | 2.76% |
| V | vee | – | /ˈviː/ | – | – | – | 0.98% |
| W | double-u | – | /ˈdʌbəl.juː/[nb 9] | – | – | – | 2.36% |
| X | ex | ex | /ˈɛks/ | /ɛks/ | /iks/ | /ɛks/ | 0.15% |
| ix | /ɪks/ | ||||||
| Y | wye | hȳ | /ˈwaɪ/ | /hyː/ | ui, gui ? | /wiː/ ? | 1.97% |
| /iː/ | |||||||
| ī graeca | /iː ˈɡraɪka/ | /iː ɡrɛːk/ | |||||
| Z | zed[nb 10] | zēta | /ˈzɛd/ | /ˈzeːta/ | /ˈzɛːdə/ | /zɛd/ | 0.07% |
| zee[nb 11] | /ˈziː/ | ||||||
Etymology
The names of the letters are for the most part direct descendants, via French, of the Latin (and Etruscan) names. (See Latin alphabet: Origins.)
The regular phonological developments (in rough chronological order) are:
- palatalization before front vowels of Latin /k/ successively to /tʃ/, /ts/, and finally to Middle French /s/. Affects C.
- palatalization before front vowels of Latin /ɡ/ to Proto-Romance and Middle French /dʒ/. Affects G.
- fronting of Latin /uː/ to Middle French /yː/, becoming Middle English /iw/ and then Modern English /juː/. Affects Q, U.
- the inconsistent lowering of Middle English /ɛr/ to /ar/. Affects R.
- the Great Vowel Shift, shifting all Middle English long vowels. Affects A, B, C, D, E, G, H, I, K, O, P, T, and presumably Y.
The novel forms are aitch, a regular development of Medieval Latin acca; jay, a new letter presumably vocalized like neighboring kay to avoid confusion with established gee (the other name, jy, was taken from French); vee, a new letter named by analogy with the majority; double-u, a new letter, self-explanatory (the name of Latin V was ū); wye, of obscure origin but with an antecedent in Old French wi; izzard, from the Romance phrase i zed or i zeto "and Z" said when reciting the alphabet; and zee, an American levelling of zed by analogy with other consonants.
Some groups of letters, such as pee and bee, or em and en, are easily confused in speech, especially when heard over the telephone or a radio communications link. Spelling alphabets such as the ICAO spelling alphabet, used by aircraft pilots, police and others, are designed to eliminate this potential confusion by giving each letter a name that sounds quite different from any other.
Ampersand
The ampersand (&) has sometimes appeared at the end of the English alphabet, as in Byrhtferð's list of letters in 1011.[2] & was regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet, as taught to children in the US and elsewhere. An example may be seen in M. B. Moore's 1863 book The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks.[3] Historically, the figure is a ligature for the letters Et. In English and many other languages it is used to represent the word and and occasionally the Latin word et, as in the abbreviation &c (et cetera).
Archaic letters
Old and Middle English had a number of non-Latin letters that have since dropped out of use. These either took the names of the equivalent runes, since there were no Latin names to adopt, or (thorn, wyn) were runes themselves.
- Æ æ ash /ˈæʃ/, used for the vowel /æ/, which disappeared from the language and then reformed
- Ð ð edh or eth /ˈɛð/, used for the consonants /ð/ and /θ/
- Œ œ ethel /ˈɛðəl/, used for the vowel /œ/, which disappeared from the language quite early
- Þ þ thorn /ˈθɔːrn/, used for the consonants /ð/ and /θ/
- Ƿ ƿ wyn or wynn /ˈwɪn/, used for the consonant /w/ (the letter 'w' had not yet been invented)
- Ȝ ȝ yogh /ˈjɒɡ/ or /ˈjɒx/, used for various sounds derived from /ɡ/, such as /j/ and /x/.
Diacritics
The most common diacritic marks seen in English publications are the acute (é), grave (è), circumflex (â, î or ô), tilde (ñ), umlaut and diaeresis (ü or ï – the same symbol is used for two different purposes), and cedilla (ç).[4]
Loanwords
Diacritic marks mainly appear in loanwords such as naïve and façade. Informal English writing tends to omit diacritics because of their absence from the keyboard, while professional copywriters and typesetters tend to include them.
As such words become naturalised in English, there is a tendency to drop the diacritics, as has happened with many older borrowings from French, such as hôtel. Words that are still perceived as foreign tend to retain them; for example, the only spelling of soupçon found in English dictionaries (the OED and others) uses the diacritic. However, diacritics are likely to be retained even in naturalised words where they would otherwise be confused with a common native English word (for example, résumé rather than resume).[5] Rarely, they may even added to a loanword for this reason (as in maté, from Spanish yerba mate but following the pattern of café, from French, to distinguish from mate).
Native English words
Occasionally, especially in older writing, diacritics are used to indicate the syllables of a word: cursed (verb) is pronounced with one syllable, while cursèd (adjective) is pronounced with two. For this, è is used widely in poetry, e.g. in Shakespeare's sonnets. J.R.R. Tolkien uses ë, as in O wingëd crown.
Similarly, while in chicken coop the letters -oo- represent a single vowel sound (a digraph), they less often represent two which may be marked with a diaresis as in zoölogist and coöperation. This use of the diaeresis is rare but found in some well-known publications, such as MIT Technology Review and The New Yorker.
In general, these devices are not used even where they would serve to alleviate some degree of confusion.
Punctuation marks within words
Apostrophe
The apostrophe (ʼ) is not considered part of the English alphabet nor used as a diacritic even in loanwords. But it is used for two important purposes in written English: to mark the "possessive"[nb 12] and to mark contracted words. Current standards require its use for both purposes. Therefore, apostrophes are necessary to spell many words even in isolation, unlike most punctuation marks, which are concerned with indicating sentence structure and other relationships among multiple words.
- It distinguishes (from the otherwise identical regular plural inflection -s) the English possessive morpheme 's (apostrophe alone after a regular plural affix, giving -s' as the standard mark for plural + possessive). Practice settled in the 18th century; before then, practices varied but typically all three endings were written -s (but without cumulation). This meant that only regular nouns bearing neither could be confidently identified, and plural and possessive could be potentially confused (e.g., "the Apostles words"; "those things over there are my husbands"[6])—which undermines the logic of "marked" forms.
- Most common contractions have near-homographs from which they are distinguished in writing only by an apostrophe, for example it's (it is or it has), we're (we are), or she'd (she would or she had).
Hyphen
Hyphens are often used in English compound words. Writing compound words may be hyphenated, open or closed, so specifics are guided by stylistic policy. Some writers may use a slash in certain instances.
Frequencies
The letter most commonly used in English is E. The least used letter is Z. The frequencies shown in the table may differ in practice according to the type of text.[7]
Phonology
The letters A, E, I, O, and U are considered vowel letters, since (except when silent) they represent vowels, although I and U represent consonants in words such as "onion" and "quail" respectively.
The letter Y sometimes represents a consonant (as in "young") and sometimes a vowel (as in "myth"). Rarely, W may represent a vowel (as in "cwm")—a Welsh loanword. W and Y are sometimes referred to as semi-vowels by linguists, however, they are both vowels in Welsh.
The remaining letters are considered consonant letters, since when not silent they generally represent consonants.
History
Old English
The English language itself was first written in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet, in use from the 5th century. This alphabet was brought to what is now England, along with the proto-form of the language itself, by Anglo-Saxon settlers. Very few examples of this form of written Old English have survived, mostly as short inscriptions or fragments.
The Latin script, introduced by Christian missionaries, began to replace the Anglo-Saxon futhorc from about the 7th century, although the two continued in parallel for some time. As such, the Old English alphabet began to employ parts of the Roman alphabet in its construction.[8] Futhorc influenced the emerging English alphabet by providing it with the letters thorn (Þ þ) and wynn (Ƿ ƿ). The letter eth (Ð ð) was later devised as a modification of dee (D d), and finally yogh (Ȝ ȝ) was created by Norman scribes from the insular g in Old English and Irish, and used alongside their Carolingian g.
The a-e ligature ash (Æ æ) was adopted as a letter in its own right, named after a futhorc rune æsc. In very early Old English the o-e ligature ethel (Œ œ) also appeared as a distinct letter, likewise named after a rune, œðel[citation needed]. Additionally, the v-v or u-u ligature double-u (W w) was in use.
In the year 1011, a monk named Byrhtferð recorded the traditional order of the Old English alphabet.[2] He listed the 24 letters of the Latin alphabet first (including ampersand), then 5 additional English letters, starting with the Tironian note ond (⁊), an insular symbol for and:
- A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z & ⁊ Ƿ Þ Ð Æ
Modern English
In the orthography of Modern English, thorn (þ), eth (ð), wynn (ƿ), yogh (ȝ), ash (æ), and œ are obsolete. Latin borrowings reintroduced homographs of æ and œ into Middle English and Early Modern English, though they are largely obsolete (see "Ligatures in recent usage" below), and where they are used they are not considered to be separate letters (e.g. for collation purposes), but rather ligatures. Thorn and eth were both replaced by th, though thorn continued in existence for some time, its lowercase form gradually becoming graphically indistinguishable from the minuscule y in most handwriting. Y for th can still be seen in pseudo-archaisms such as "Ye Olde Booke Shoppe". The letters þ and ð are still used in present-day Icelandic, while ð is still used in present-day Faroese. Wynn disappeared from English around the 14th century when it was supplanted by uu, which ultimately developed into the modern w. Yogh disappeared around the 15th century and was typically replaced by gh.
The letters u and j, as distinct from v and i, were introduced in the 16th century, and w assumed the status of an independent letter. The variant lowercase form long s (ſ) lasted into early modern English, and was used in non-final position up to the early 19th century. Today, the English alphabet is considered to consist of the following 26 letters:
Written English has a number[9] of digraphs, but they are not considered separate letters of the alphabet:
- ch
- ci
- ck
- gh
- ng
- ph
- qu
- rh
- sc
- sh
- th
- ti
- wh
- wr
- zh
Ligatures in recent usage
Outside of professional papers on specific subjects that traditionally use ligatures in loanwords, ligatures are seldom used in modern English. The ligatures æ and œ were until the 19th century (slightly later in American English)[citation needed] used in formal writing for certain words of Greek or Latin origin, such as encyclopædia and cœlom, although such ligatures were not used in either classical Latin or ancient Greek. These are now usually rendered as "ae" and "oe" in all types of writing,[citation needed] although in American English, a lone e has mostly supplanted both (for example, encyclopedia for encyclopaedia, and maneuver for manoeuvre).
Some fonts for typesetting English contain commonly used ligatures, such as for ⟨tt⟩, ⟨fi⟩, ⟨fl⟩, ⟨ffi⟩, and ⟨ffl⟩. These are not independent letters, but rather allographs.
Proposed reforms
Alternative scripts have been proposed for written English—mostly extending or replacing the basic English alphabet—such as the Deseret alphabet, the Shavian alphabet, Gregg shorthand, etc.
See also
- Alphabet song
- NATO phonetic alphabet
- English orthography
- English-language spelling reform
- American manual alphabet
- Two-handed manual alphabets
- English Braille
- American Braille
- New York Point
Notes and references
Notes
- Linguistic analyses vary on how best to characterise the English possessive morpheme -'s: a noun case inflectional suffix distinct to possession, a genitive case inflectional suffix equivalent to prepositional periphrastic of X (or rarely for X), an edge inflection that uniquely attaches to a noun phrase's final (rather than head) word, or an enclitic postposition.
References
- "Digraphs (Phonics on the Web)". phonicsontheweb.com. Archived from the original on 2016-04-13. Retrieved 2016-04-07.
Further reading
- Michael Rosen (2015). Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story. Counterpoint. ISBN 978-1619027022.
- Upward, Christopher; Davidson, George (2011), The History of English Spelling, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 978-1-4051-9024-4, LCCN 2011008794.
Languages
Bible code
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The Bible code (Hebrew: הצופן התנ"כי, hatzofen hatanachi), also known as the Torah code, is a purported set of encoded words hidden within the Hebrew text of the Torah, that according to its proponents, have seemingly predicted significant historical events. The statistical likelihood of the Bible code arising by chance has been thoroughly researched, and it is now widely considered to be statistically insignificant, as similar phenomena can be observed in any sufficiently lengthy text.[1] Although Bible codes have been postulated and studied for centuries, the subject has been popularized in modern times by Michael Drosnin's book The Bible Code and the movie The Omega Code.
Many examples have been documented in the past. One cited example is that by taking every 50th letter of the Book of Genesis starting with the first taw, the Hebrew word "torah" is spelled out. The same happens in the Book of Exodus. Modern computers have been used to search for similar patterns and more complex variants, as well as quantifying its statistical likelihood.
Some tests purportedly showing statistically significant codes in the Bible were published as a "challenging puzzle" in a peer-reviewed academic journal in 1994, which was pronounced "solved" in a subsequent 1999 paper published in the same journal.[2]
Overview
Contemporary discussion and controversy around one specific steganographic method became widespread in 1994 when Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg published a paper, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis", in the scientific journal Statistical Science.[3] The paper, which was presented by the journal as a "challenging puzzle", presented what appeared to be strong statistical evidence that biographical information about famous rabbis was encoded in the text of the Book of Genesis, centuries before those rabbis lived.[citation needed]
Since then the term "Bible codes" has been popularly used to refer specifically to information encrypted via this ELS method.
Equidistant Letter Sequence method
The primary method by which purportedly meaningful messages have been extracted is the Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS). To obtain an ELS from a text, choose a starting point (in principle, any letter) and a skip number, also freely and possibly negative. Then, beginning at the starting point, select letters from the text at equal spacing as given by the skip number. For example, the bold letters in this sentence form an ELS. With a skip of −4 (that is, reading backwards every fourth letter), and ignoring the spaces and punctuation, the word safest is spelled out.
Often more than one ELS related to some topic can be displayed simultaneously in an ELS letter array. This is produced by writing out the text in a regular grid, with exactly the same number of letters in each line, then cutting out a rectangle. In the example below, part of the King James Version of Genesis (26:5–10) is shown with 21 letters per line. ELSs for "Bible" and "code" are shown. Normally only a smaller rectangle would be displayed, such as the rectangle drawn in the figure. In that case there would be letters missing between adjacent lines in the picture, but it is essential that the number of missing letters be the same for each line.[3]
Although the above examples are in English texts, Bible codes proponents usually use a Hebrew Bible text. For religious reasons, most Jewish proponents use only the Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy).
ELS extensions
Once a specific word has been found as an ELS, it is natural to see if that word is part of a longer ELS consisting of multiple words.[4] Code proponents Haralick and Rips have published an example of a longer, extended ELS, which reads, "Destruction I will call you; cursed is Bin Laden and revenge is to the Messiah"[5] (though the Hebrew, using appositives in place of to be, lacking helper verbs, and employing definite articles less frequently, would entail far fewer words than the English phrasing).
ELS extensions that form phrases or sentences are of interest. Proponents maintain that the longer the extended ELS, the less likely it is to be the result of chance.[6] Critics reply, as in the Skeptical Inquirer deconstruction of 1997,[7] that the longer ELS is in fact effectively nothing more than further increased number of permutations, employing a massive application of the Look-elsewhere effect.
History
Early history
Jewish culture has a long tradition of interpretation, annotation, and commentary regarding the Bible, leading to both exegesis and eisegesis (drawing meaning from and imposing meaning on the texts). The Bible code can be viewed as a part of this tradition, albeit one of the more controversial parts. Throughout history, many Jewish, and later Christian, scholars have attempted to find hidden or coded messages within the Bible's text, notably including Isaac Newton.[citation needed]
The 13th-century Spanish rabbi Bachya ben Asher may have been the first[citation needed] to describe an ELS in the Bible. His four-letter example related to the traditional zero-point of the Hebrew calendar. Over the following centuries there are some hints that the ELS technique was known, but few definite examples have been found from before the middle of the 20th century. At this point many examples were found by Michael Ber Weissmandl and published by his students after his death in 1957. Nevertheless, the practice remained known only to a few until the early 1980s, when some discoveries of an Israeli school teacher Avraham Oren came to the attention of the mathematician Eliyahu Rips at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Rips then took up the study together with his religious studies partners Doron Witztum and Alexander Rotenberg, among several others.
Rips and Witztum
Rips and Witztum designed computer software for the ELS technique and subsequently found many examples. About 1985, they decided to carry out a formal test, and the "Great rabbis experiment" was born. This experiment tested the hypothesis that ELS's of the names of famous rabbinic personalities and their respective birth and death dates form a more compact arrangement than could be explained by chance. Their definition of "compact" was complex but, roughly, two ELSs were compactly arranged if they can be displayed together in a small window. When Rips et al. carried out the experiment, the data was measured and found to be statistically significant, supporting their hypothesis.
The "great rabbis experiment" went through several iterations, and was eventually published in 1994, in the peer-reviewed journal Statistical Science. Prior to publication, the journal's editor, Robert Kass, subjected the paper to three successive peer reviews by the journal's referees, who according to Kass were "baffled". Though still skeptical,[8] none of the reviewers had found any flaws. Understanding that the paper was certain to generate controversy, it was presented to readers in the context of a "challenging puzzle." Witztum and Rips also performed other experiments, most of them successful, though none were published in journals.
Other experiments
Another experiment, in which the names of the famous rabbis were matched against the places of their births and deaths (rather than the dates), was conducted in 1997 by Harold Gans, former Senior Cryptologic Mathematician for the United States National Security Agency.[9] Again, the results were interpreted as being meaningful and thus suggestive of a more than chance result.[10] These Bible codes became known to the public primarily due to the American journalist Michael Drosnin, whose book The Bible Code (Simon & Schuster, 1997) was a best-seller in many countries. Rips issued a public statement that he did not support Drosnin's work or conclusions;[11] even Gans has said that although the book states that the codes in the Torah can be used to predict future events: "This is absolutely unfounded. There is no scientific or mathematical basis for such a statement, and the reasoning used to come to such a conclusion in the book is logically flawed."[12]
In 2002, Drosnin published a second book on the same subject, called Bible Code II: the Countdown. The Jewish outreach group Aish-HaTorah employs Bible codes in their Discovery Seminars to persuade secular Jews of the divinity of the Torah, and to encourage them to trust in traditional Orthodox teachings. Use of Bible code techniques also spread into certain Christian circles, especially in the United States. The main early proponents were Yakov Rambsel, who is a Messianic Jew, and Grant Jeffrey. Another Bible code technique was developed in 1997 by Dean Coombs (also Christian). Various pictograms are claimed to be formed by words and sentences using ELS.[13]
Since 2000, physicist Nathan Jacobi, an agnostic Jew, and engineer Moshe Aharon Shak, an orthodox Jew, claim to have discovered hundreds of examples of lengthy, extended ELSs.[14] The number of extended ELSs at various lengths is compared with those expected from a non-encoded text, as determined by a formula from Markov chain theory.[15]
Criticism
The precise order of consonantal letters represented in the Hebrew Masoretic Text is not consistent across manuscripts in any period. It is known from earlier versions, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, that the number of letters was not constant even in the first centuries CE. The Bible code theory thus does not seem to account for these variations.[16]
The primary objection advanced against Bible codes is that information theory does not prohibit "noise" from appearing to be sometimes meaningful. Thus, if data chosen for ELS experiments are intentionally or unintentionally "cooked" before the experiment is defined, similar patterns can be found in texts other than the Torah. Although the probability of an ELS in a random place being a meaningful word is small, there are so many possible starting points and skip patterns that many such words can be expected to appear, depending on the details chosen for the experiment, and that it is possible to "tune" an ELS experiment to achieve a result which appears to exhibit patterns that overcome the level of noise.
Others have criticized Drosnin by stating that Drosnin's example of "Clinton" in his first book violated the basic Bible code concept of "Minimality"; Drosnin's "Clinton" was a completely invalid "code". In addition, McKay claimed that Drosnin had used the flexibility of Hebrew orthography to his advantage, freely mixing classic (no vowels, Y and W strictly consonant) and modern (Y and W used to indicate i and u vowels) modes, as well as variances in spelling of K and T, to reach the desired meaning.
Criticism of the original paper
In 1999, Australian mathematician Brendan McKay, Israeli mathematicians Dror Bar-Natan and Gil Kalai, and Israeli psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel (collectively known as "MBBK") published a paper in Statistical Science, in which they argued that the case of Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg (WRR) was "fatally defective, and that their result merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it."[17] The MBBK paper was reviewed anonymously by four professional statisticians prior to publication. In the introduction to the paper, Robert Kass, the Editor of the Journal who previously had described the WRR paper as a "challenging puzzle" wrote that "considering the work of McKay, Bar-Natan, Kalai and Bar-Hillel as a whole it indeed appears, as they conclude, that the puzzle has been solved".[8]
From their observations, MBBK created an alternative hypothesis to explain the "puzzle" of how the codes were discovered. MBBK's argument was not strictly mathematical, rather it asserted that the WRR authors and contributors had intentionally or unintentionally (a) selected the names and/or dates in advance and (b) designed their experiments to match their selection, thereby achieving their "desired" result. The MBBK paper argued that the ELS experiment is extraordinarily sensitive to very small changes in the spellings of appellations, and that the WRR result "merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it."
The MBBK paper demonstrated that this "tuning", when combined with what MBBK asserted was available "wiggle" room, was capable of generating a result similar to WRR's Genesis result in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace. Bar-Hillel subsequently summarized the MBBK view that the WRR paper was a hoax, an intentionally and carefully designed "magic trick".[18]
The Bible codes (together with similar arguments concerning hidden prophecies in the writings of Shakespeare) have been quoted as examples of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
Replies to MBBK's criticisms
Harold Gans
Harold Gans, a former Cryptanalyst at the National Security Agency, argued that MBBK's hypothesis implies a conspiracy between WRR and their co-contributors to fraudulently tune the appellations in advance. Gans argues that the conspiracy must include Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and S. Z. Havlin, because all of them say that Havlin compiled the appellations independently. Gans argues further that such a conspiracy must include the multiple rabbis who have written a letter confirming the accuracy of Havlin's list. Finally, argues Gans, such a conspiracy must also include the multiple participants of the cities experiment conducted by Gans (which includes Gans himself). Gans concludes that "the number of people necessarily involved in [the conspiracy] will stretch the credulity of any reasonable person."[19] Gans further argued that while "the mathematical issues are difficult for non-mathematicians to comprehend, I can summarize as follows: Professor McKay and his colleagues never claimed to have discovered real codes in those non-Torah texts. Their only “successful” results were obtained by deliberately rigging the experiment in such a way that the layman wouldn't recognize the mathematical flaws."[20]
Brendan McKay has replied that he and his colleagues have never accused Havlin or Gans of participating in a conspiracy. Instead, says McKay, Havlin likely did what WRR's early preprints said he did: he provided "valuable advices". Similarly, McKay accepts Gans' statements that Gans did not prepare the data for his cities experiment himself. McKay concludes that "there is only ONE person who needs to have been involved in knowing fakery, and a handful of his disciples who must be involved in the cover-up (perhaps with good intent)."[21]
WRR authors
The WRR authors issued a series of responses regarding the claims of MBBK,[22] including the claim that no such tuning did or even could have taken place.[23] An earlier WRR response to a request by MBBK authors presented results from additional experiments that used the specific "alternate" name and date formats which MBBK suggested had been intentionally avoided by WRR.[24] Using MBBK's alternates, the results WRR returned showed equivalent or better support for the existence of the codes, and so challenged the "wiggle room" assertion of MBBK. In the wake of the WRR response, author Bar-Natan issued a formal statement of non-response.[25] After a series of exchanges with McKay and Bar-Hillel, WRR author Witztum responded in a new paper[26] claiming that McKay had used smoke screen tactics in creating several straw man arguments, and thereby avoided the points made by WRR authors refuting MBBK.[27] Witztum also claimed that, upon interviewing a key independent expert contracted by McKay for the MBBK paper, that some experiments performed for MBBK had validated, rather than refuted the original WRR findings, and questioned why MBBK had expunged these results from their paper. McKay replied to these claims.[28]
No publication in a peer reviewed scientific journal has appeared refuting MBBK's paper. In 2006, seven new Torah Codes papers were published at the 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR'06).
Robert Aumann
Robert Aumann, a game theorist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005, has followed the Bible code research and controversy for many years. He wrote:[29]
Though the basic thesis of the research seems wildly improbable, for many years I thought that an ironclad case had been made for the codes; I did not see how 'cheating' could have been possible. Then came the work of the 'opponents' (see, for example, McKay, Bar-Natan, Bar-Hillel and Kalai, Statistical Science 14 (1999), 149–173). Though this work did not convince me that the data had been manipulated, it did convince me that it could have been; that manipulation was technically possible.
After a long and interesting analysis of the experiment and the dynamics of the controversy, stating for example that "almost everybody included [in the controversy] made up their mind early in the game" Aumann concluded:
A priori, the thesis of the Codes research seems wildly improbable... Research conducted under my own supervision failed to confirm the existence of the codes – though it also did not establish their non-existence. So I must return to my a priori estimate, that the Codes phenomenon is improbable".[30]
Robert Haralick
Robert Haralick, a Professor of Computer Science at the City University of New York, has checked the Bible Code for many years and became convinced of its validity. He contributed a new experiment : he checked whether besides the minimal ELS, in which it was known that WRR's list was successful in Genesis, and MBBK's list was successful in War and Peace, there are other, non-minimal ELSs where there is convergence between the rabbis' names and their respective dates. In other words, what convergence will be found at 2nd minimal ELSs, 3rd minimal ELSs and so on. According to him the results were impressive: WRR's list was successful until the 20th minimal ELS, whereas MBBK's list failed after the 2nd minimal ELS.[31] Haralick lectured on the subject in front of the participants of the international conference on pattern recognition in 2006.[32]
Criticism of Michael Drosnin
Journalist Drosnin's books have been criticized by some who believe that the Bible code is real but that it cannot predict the future.[33] On Drosnin's claim of Rabin's death, Drosnin wrote in his book "The Bible Code" (published in 1997) on page 120; "Yigal Amir could not be found in advance". This is very telling in that dangerous period of Israeli politics from the Oslo Accords of 1993 to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995.[34] Critics have noted a huge error in the "code" Drosnin claimed to have found: Drosnin misused the Biblical verse Deuteronomy 4:42. Scholars note; "For example, citing again the passage intersecting with Rabin: that passage is from Deuteronomy 4:42, but Drosnin ignores the words immediately following "a murderer who will murder." What comes next is the phrase "unwittingly" (biveli da'at). This is because the verse deals with the cities of refuge where accidental killers can find asylum. In this case, then, the message would refer to an accidental killing of (or by) Rabin and it would therefore be wrong. Another message (p. 71) supposedly contains a "complete" description of the terrorist bombing of a bus in Jerusalem on February 25, 1996. It includes the phrase "fire, great noise," but overlooks the fact that the letters which make up those two words are actually part of a larger phrase from Genesis 35:4 which says: "under the terebinth that was near Shechem." If the phrase does tell of a bus bombing, why not take it to indicate that it would be in Nablus, the site of ancient Shechem?" [35]
Drosnin also made a number of claims and alleged predictions that have since failed. Among the most important, Drosnin clearly states in his book "The Bible Code II", published on December 2, 2002, that there was to be a World War involving an "Atomic Holocaust" that would allegedly be the end of the world.[36] Another claim Drosnin makes in "The Bible Code II" is that the nation of Libya would develop weapons of mass destruction that they would then be given to terrorists who would then use them to attack the West (specifically the United States).[37] In reality Libya improved relations with the West in 2003 and gave up all their existing weapons of mass destruction programs.[38] A final claim Drosnin made in "The Bible Code II" was that Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat would allegedly be assassinated by being shot to death by gunmen which Drosnin specifically stated would be from the Palestinian Hamas movement.[39] This prediction by Drosnin also failed, as Yasser Arafat died on November 11, 2004[40] of what was later declared to be natural causes (specifically a stroke brought on by an unknown infection).[41][42] The only conspiracy theories about Yasser Arafat allegedly being murdered have been made by a few Palestinian figures, and have involved alleged poisoning that was supposed to have been on the orders of Israeli officials. The only alleged Palestinian collaboration in this conspiracy theory involve two leading Palestinian figures from the Palestinian Fatah movement; those are current Palestinian Authority and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and Mohammed Dahlan the former head of Fatah in Gaza.[43] Writer Randy Ingermanson criticized Drosnin by stating that; "And that's all they are, even for Drosnin – possibilities. He believes that the future is not fixed, and that the Bible code predicts all possible outcomes. Which makes it not much of a predictive tool, but again, he seems not to mind this very much. If you are laying bets based on Drosnin, you had better be willing to bet on all possible outcomes."[44]
Some accuse him of factual errors, claiming that he has much support in the scientific community,[45] mistranslating Hebrew words[46] to make his point more convincing, and using the Bible without proving that other books do not have similar codes.[47]
Criticism using ELS in other texts
Responding to an explicit challenge from Drosnin, who claimed that other texts such as Moby-Dick would not yield ELS results comparable to the Torah, McKay created a new experiment that was tuned to find many ELS letter arrays in Moby-Dick that relate to modern events, including the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He also found a code relating to the Rabin assassination, containing the assassin's first and last name and the university he attended, as well as the motive ("Oslo", relating to the Oslo accords).[48] Drosnin and others have responded to these claims, saying the tuning tactics employed by McKay were simply "nonsense", and providing analyses[49] to support their argument that the tables, data and methodologies McKay used to produce the Moby Dick results "simply do not qualify as code tables".[50] Skeptic Dave Thomas claimed to find other examples in many texts. While Thomas' methodology was alleged to have been rebutted by Robert Haralick[51] and others, his broader arguments about the law of large numbers stood essentially unchallenged. Also, Thomas's criticisms were aimed at Drosnin, whose methodology is considered even worse. (In fact, Drosnin's example of "Clinton" in his first book violated the basic Bible code concept of "Minimality"; Drosnin's "Clinton" was a completely invalid "code"). In addition, McKay claimed that Drosnin had used the flexibility of Hebrew orthography to his advantage, freely mixing Masoretic biblical (no vowels, Y and W overwhelmingly consonant) and modern (Y and W used to indicate i and u vowels) modes, as well as variances in spelling of K and T, to reach the desired meaning.
In his television series John Safran vs God, Australian television personality John Safran and McKay again demonstrated the "tuning" technique, demonstrating that these techniques could produce "evidence" of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York in the lyrics of Vanilla Ice's repertoire. And the influence and consequences of scribal errors (e.g., misspellings, additions, deletions, misreadings, ...) are hard to account for in claims for a Bible coded message left secretly in the text. McKay and others claim that in the absence of an objective measure of quality and an objective way to select test subjects (though that remains an objection as equally against Drosnin), it is not possible positively to determine whether any particular observation is significant or not. For that reason, outside of Davis' mathematical arguments, much or most of the serious effort of the skeptics has been focused on the scientific claims of Witztum, Rips, and Gans.
See also
- Alignment of random points, for another phenomenon of apparently mysterious coincidences
- Atbash
- Bibliomancy
- Confirmation bias
- Gematria
- Pi (film)
- Ramsey theory, for a notion of "unavoidable coincidences"
- Shemhamphorasch
- Texas sharpshooter fallacy
- Theomatics
- Synchronicity
- Symmetry in the Quran
References
- Robert M. "Skeptical About the Reasoning of the Bible Code Skeptic" (PDF). torah-code.org. Retrieved October 6, 2010.
Notes
- Drosnin, Michael (1997). The Bible Code. USA: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-81079-4.
- Satinover, Jeffrey (1997). Cracking the Bible Code. New York: W. Morrow. ISBN 0-688-15463-8.
- Drosnin, Michael (1997). The Bible Code. UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-81995-X.
- Drosnin, Michael (2002). The Bible Code II: The Countdown. USA: Viking Books. ISBN 0-670-03210-7.
- Drosnin, Michael (2002). The Bible Code II: The Countdown. UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-84249-8.
- Drosnin, Michael (2006). The Bible Code III: The Quest. UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-84784-8.
- Drosnin, Michael (2010). The Bible Code III: Saving the World. Worldmedia. ISBN 978-0-615-39963-8.
- Stanton, Phil (1998). The Bible Code – Fact or Fake?. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books. ISBN 0-89107-925-4.
- Haralick, Robert M.; Rips, Eliyahu & Glazerson, Matiyahu (2005). Torah Codes: A Glimpse into the Infinite. Mazal & Bracha Publishing. ISBN 0-9740493-9-5.
External links
 | This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. (October 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) |
- Dunning, Brian. "Skeptoid #408: The Bible Code: Enigmas for Dummies". Skeptoid.
- The Bible Code, transcript of a story which aired on BBC Two, Thursday November 20, 2003, featuring comments by Drosnin, Rips, and McKay.
- Doron Witztum's codes page from Doron Witzum, a coauthor of the Statistical Sciences paper
- Tutorial Website from Professor Robert Haralick
- "Scientific Refutation of the Bible Codes" by Brendan McKay (Computer Science, Australian National University) and others
- The Bible Code: A Book Review by Allyn Jackson, plus Comments on the Bible Code by Shlomo Sternberg, Notices of the AMS September 1997 (see the American Mathematical Society)
- The Bible "Codes": a Textual Perspective, by Jeffrey H. Tigay (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania)
- Madness in the Method, by Maya Bar-Hillel and Avishai Margalit, Chance, Dartmouth College
- Hidden Messages and The Bible Code from Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, publisher of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine
- Mathematical Codes in Genesis 1:1
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