Holy Moses! PBS Documentary Suggests Exodus Not Real

OrlandoSentinel.com ^ | July 21, 2008 | Hal Boedeker

[mvpel]

This premise sounds about line one of the tenets of Reform Judaism, springing from the 19th Century "documentary hypothesis" work of Julius Wellhausen in Germany. Reform Judaism had its origins in 19th Century Germany, so this connection is to be expected The initial forays into this multiple-source theory were in 1651 by Thomas Hobbes.

The only reason it's "shocking" is because most people aren't aware of this thesis.

But when you consider some simple markers within the text, you can discern a kind of "watermark" within it that tends to cast doubt on the notion that it was written by a variety of independent sources. For example, if you start with the first letter TAV in Genesis, then skip 49 (7x7) letters, you'll find VAV. Repeat this twice more and you'll find RESH and HAY - spelling out the word "TORAH."

This pattern is repeated in Exodus, but then in Leviticus, you find "YHVH" - the sacred name - spelled out with a separation of seven letters.

And in the final two books, Numbers and Deuteronomy, "TORAH" is encoded as well, but this time backwards starting with the last TAV, not the first. The contextual aspects of some other equidistant letter sequences is also notable. Obviously, this is not a random phenomenon.

It's easy to get distracted by mystical future-prediction codes, or War and Peace analysis of the "Rabbis test," the fact is that the skeptics simply gloss over the significance of the connection between significant numbers of intervening letters and significant phrases within significant contexts, because they can't calculate such significance:

"The problem with putting a number on the remarkableness of this detail is, of course, that it is ad hoc." - Maya Bar-Hillel, Dror Bar-Natan, and Brendan McKay, The Torah Codes: Puzzle and Solution

CxxxxxAxxxxxNxxxxxYxxxxxOxxxxxUxxxxxRxxxxxExxxxxAxxxxxDxxxxxTxxxxxHxxxxxIxxxxxSxxxxx?

The "Moby Dick" analysis would be more persuasive if they'd found, say, "Bildad" encoded on page 74 or thereabouts with a 60-letter separation ("...the goodly age of sixty...") or the like.

[Polarik]

“The program contradicts the biblical view that the Israelites came from somewhere else into the land of Canaan. “The film shows that they were Canaanites,”

Patently ridiculous! The Canaanites would be the last people on Earth to accept one God and the Torah.

[mtntop3]

PBS has been running a three-part series on WWII as a blatant, revisionist version that, naturally and diabolically, seeks to make moral equivalency between America, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

To subjugate people and their country, liberals and their Communist brethren known that the path is through undermining religious faith, and undermining the great history of a nation such as America.

[dmanLA]

Should someone whisper in the ear of some imams that PBS is going to claim that Abraham never existed? ;)

[markman46]

bump for later

[ghostcat]

Thank you, you are correct the second was my intended statement. Darn these old eyes!! They see what I intended to type, not what I did type <]:)