NEW STUDY UNDERMINES SKEPTICS' MAIN OBJECTIONS TO [BIBLE] CODE [COMPARISON STDY 4 open-minded]

As our investigation of code phenomena has expanded and deepened, every one of the stock opinions of most code skeptics, as well as those of most code proponents, has been contradicted by new evidence. It shouldn’t be surprising that reality can stubbornly disagree with preconceptions, yet it is often true.

The saga of Bible codes has been characterized by attempts to rush to judgment. To advance above this primitive state, we must bravely confront and listen to the realities of hard data—impartially gathered and analyzed.

The articles in this issue support various findings that are upsetting to both code critics and proponents. Here are some of those findings:

Longer ELSs in grammatically reasonable Hebrew can be found in books other than the Bible.

The rate at which such longer ELSs appear in non-Biblical texts is dramatically less than in the Bible. Consequently, there is strong support for the claim that real Bible codes do exist in abundance.

The primary claim of code critics that “codes can be found in any book” is a primitive assertion that greatly over-simplifies and distorts the real situation. Much more relevant would be the question, “Is the discovery rate of longer ELSs in the Bible decidedly greater than that from a control text?”

Any long ELS in the Bible could be a coincidence, or it could be partly intentional and partly coincidence. The longer it is, the less likely it is to be coincidental. For example, an ELS from our Ezekiel 37 cluster that is 25 to 31 letters long is about 70% likely to be intentional. If it is 39 to 45 letters-long, it is about 95.5% likely to be intentional; if 45 to 59 letters-long, 99%; and if 60 or more letters-long, it is 99.8% likely to be intentional.

To date there is no reliable way of objectively distinguishing among these alternatives, although subjective reviews may indicate that a particular ELS is unusually “appropriate” or “descriptively accurate.”

Because of the many uncertainties inherent in the message of any single ELS, Bible codes cannot reliably be used to make predictions or to attempt to support doctrinal positions or opinions. Furthermore, even if we could be certain a code is real, we do not know for certain who is speaking, and the source could be an untruthful one.

It is only natural to ask why a superior intelligence would intentionally encode messages underneath a sacred text when those messages are unreliable. A plausible answer is that the intelligence sought to provide implicit evidence within the text of its authenticity as its composition, while at the same time discouraging human attempts to derive new truths or predictions from encoded messages. This suggests an intent to emphasize the importance of the content of the literal text (as opposed to the content of any encoded messages).

Perhaps the only real purpose of codes is analogous to that of the embedded strip in new $20 bills. It adds nothing but proof that the bill is the real thing. Alternatively, encoded material could merely be a by-product of a super-human intelligence for which the mere task of producing a literal text without such supplemental content would be too mundane.

The great rallying cry of the Bible code skeptics has always been, “You can find codes like this is any book.” When they were talking about Drosnin’s examples, these skeptics were dead right. But what about such an assertion regarding the extensive clusters presented on our web site? And what about clusters of intermediate complexity? Where should the line be drawn?

With our Isaiah 53 cluster vs. Hanukah cluster in War and Peace study we compared the extensive cluster about the last days of Christ with the Hanukah codes in War and Peace to show that while it may be possible to find codes like the ones presented by Drosnin in his two books, the skeptic’s counter-example does nothing to call into question the reality of many of the codes in clusters like those in Isaiah 53 (as well as Ezekiel 37).

While Drosnin did much to introduce the public to Bible codes, he simultaneously did code researchers a great disservice by giving skeptics an entire book of trivial examples that skeptics could easily discredit.

Although code research has come a long way since his first book in 1997, there has been a lingering question mark over the whole phenomenon because of skeptical opinions that continue to appear on the internet even though they are long out of date.

So while code research has moved on dramatically, it is also fighting a rear guard action against these old, outdated statements from critics of the codes. It is a rare week when we don’t get at least one e-mail asking us about the codes in Moby Dick or War and Peace.

Most likely, code skeptics would take exception to our comparison of the Hanukah cluster from War and Peace with the Ezekiel 37 cluster. It is not a fair comparison, they would say, because we searched for many more ELSs in Ezekiel 37 than they did in War and Peace. And they are right. However, our purpose in making such a comparison was to show that the Hanukah cluster is no longer a relevant counter-example. It has been hopelessly outclassed.

There has been a great need for a level playing field on which some kind of head-to-head comparison would be made of Bible codes with those “discovered” in an admittedly ordinary book. A natural way to do this would be to conduct an experiment in which a Hebrew expert would be handed a sizeable collection of pre-defined initial ELSs, equally drawn from the Hebrew Bible and from War & Peace (or some other control text). The Hebrew expert would then search for extended ELSs around each initial ELS. The two collections of extended ELSs would be compared and analyzed. For the past six months the BCD research team has been conducting such a study—the Islamic Nations ELS Extension Experiment. We present the preliminary findings here.

Using the Hebrew spellings of a group of Islamic nations, we located ELSs of them in a 78,064-letter portion of War and Peace that is provided with Codefinder software. We also found them in the 78,083-letter book of Ezekiel using the same software. (Actually, in order to have enough letters to match the size of the War and Peace text, we had to use part of Jeremiah as well as the beginning of Hosea. So the text actually runs from Jeremiah 51:52 through Ezekiel to Hosea 1:9.)

The nations we searched for as ELSs appear in the following table, along with their Hebrew spellings:

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We then conducted a blind experiment with the participation of our Hebrew expert, Dr. Nathan Jacobi. We sent him five occurrences from Ezekiel (and five occurrences from War & Peace) of the name of each of the above nations as an ELS. We asked him to tell us whether letters before and after the terms created longer terms. Throughout the experiment, and to this day, Dr. Jacobi has not known which of the initial ELSs and surrounding letter strings were from Ezekiel and which were from War and Peace.

This experiment was conducted over a six month period by slipping in both of these sets of letter strings without Nathan knowing when we started doing so and when we were finished. We also were continuing to submit to him our regular supply of letter strings from other parts of the Bible on other topics as part of a number of research projects. (Curiously, at one point in this process, soon after we had submitted a sizeable group of Islamic nation ELSs, he commented that he was getting rather frustrated about how few long codes he had been finding lately and that he was thinking of quitting such searches altogether. He noted that he felt that he was “losing his touch.”)

Perhaps the most surprising result of the experiment was that two of the longest ELSs Nathan found were from War and Peace. These ELSs were each more than 30 letters-long, and represent the longest ELSs of which we are aware from any text other than the Bible. These long ELSs clearly underscore the fact that lengthy ELSs can be found in any Hebrew text, however uninspired.

On the other hand, eight of the ten longest ELSs were from Ezekiel. Apart from the two long ELSs in War and Peace, there was a relative dearth of long ELSs that emerged from Tolstoy’s novel.

In a future issue we will be disclosing the Hebrew and English of all the extended ELSs (as well as their specific lengths). At this point another phase of the experiment is being designed. It is likely that in this phase it will be essential that our participant(s) be blind as to the source text of each extended ELS.

In this experiment we counted the total number of extensions found around 50 initial ELSs in Ezekiel and 50 initial ELSs in War & Peace. An extension is a phrase or brief sentence that appears entirely on one side of an existing ELS. The extension must represent a grammatically reasonable continuation of the existing ELS. As such, it could either incorporate part of the existing ELS or be a stand alone phrase or sentence that could reasonably precede or follow the existing ELS. It is of course possible to find several extensions around an initial ELS to form one lengthy final ELS. The average extension found in this experiment consisted of two Hebrew words that totaled seven letters.

The following table summarizes the results of the experiment. In all, 21 ELS extensions were found around the initial ELSs in War & Peace, while 37 extensions were located by Nathan in Ezekiel. This represents a 76.2% higher frequency of extensions in Ezekiel, a difference that is clearly statistically significant:

As the above table shows, there were 47 Hebrew words in the entire group of extensions from the control text, whereas there were 75 from Ezekiel, a 59.6% difference. And there were 146 letters in the control extensions, versus 229 in the Ezekiel extensions, a 56.8% difference.

A useful statistic that emerged from this experiment was an estimate of the percentage of opportunities for finding an extension in the control text. That rate of “discovery” was 18.0%. Having that rate, one can determine how many long ELSs of various lengths would be expected from a control text. We did exactly that for the Ezekiel 37 cluster in a later article in this issue. We then compared the actual number of long ELSs found in Ezekiel 37 with those expected by chance for several length categories. By doing so, the probability that a cluster as extensive as Ezekiel 37 could be the result of chance can be reasonably estimated using standard testing procedures.

The rate of discovery in Ezekiel was 27.0%, which is 50.0% higher than the discovery rate of 18.0% from Tolstoy’s novel. The discovery rate is defined as the ratio of the actual number of extensions found to the number of opportunities available for potentially finding an extension. At the beginning of each search of a new letter string, there are two opportunities to find an extension—one before the name of the given Islamic nation, and one after. If an extension is found, one new opportunity (not two new opportunities) to find yet another extension is created. That opportunity will consist of the new letters that are now next to the extension that had just been discovered. There is no new opportunity on the other side of the ELS where an extension wasn’t found, since that opportunity has already been counted.

Why is it that the total number of extensions found in Ezekiel was 76.2% higher than in War & Peace, while the discovery rate was only 50.0% higher? It is because the denominators are not the same. Each new extension opens up a new opportunity to find yet another extension. So there were many more opportunities to find new extensions in Ezekiel because more extensions were initially found in Ezekiel.

We also noted that:

The average number of Hebrew letters per word in the extensions found was 3.05 in Ezekiel and 3.11 in War & Peace.
The average number of Hebrew words in the extensions found was 2.03 in Ezekiel and 2.24 in War & Peace.
The average number of Hebrew letters in the extensions found was 6.19 in Ezekiel and 6.95 in War & Peace.

From the above summary observations derived from this experiment we have constructed a model to determine the expected number of lengthy ELSs that may be found in a non-encoded text, given the total number of original ELSs that have been searched for possible extensions. The model is based on the following two assumptions:

The discovery rate is 18.0% of the opportunities for finding extensions.
The average number of Hebrew letters to be found in extensions is assumed to be 7.0 (the actual average was 6.95 in War & Peace).

The key formula resulting from the model is that the total number of final ELSs consisting of k extensions expected to emerge from a search around n initial ELSs is

Derivation of this formula is detailed in the Technical Addendum HERE http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/150

We applied this model to the Ezekiel findings and determined how many final ELSs would fall in different length categories if the search had been done in a non-encoded text. A p-value calculated by EXCEL’s CHITEST function indicated that the odds that the Ezekiel results from the Islamic Nations Experiment could be due to chance were 1 in 81,303. Given this level of improbability, the Ezekiel findings should be viewed as being statistically significant. This provides definitive evidence that some ELSs from the Ezekiel group are intentional.

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True Head to Head

Comparison Continues

In response to skeptics who say that you can find codes in any book, we conducted an experiment earlier this year comparing equidistant letter sequences (ELSs) from the Bible and from a Hebrew translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace.

We e-mailed ELSs of a group of Islamic nations in Hebrew to our Hebrew expert, Dr. Nathan Jacobi, along with letters before and after each ELS. We asked him to try to extend them, or to see whether it was possible to make longer phrases or sentences from the one or two word names of nations. Half of the ELSs were taken from the book of Ezekiel and half from a segment of War and Peace. It was a blind experiment, so Dr. Jacobi did not know which text any of the ELSs were from.

The major surprise of the experiment was the discovery of a few long ELSs in War and Peace. However, the results also showed that the Ezekiel searches were significantly more productive than those from War and Peace. The findings of this first phase of the experiment are summarized in the following table, which appeared in the March issue.

In the second phase of this experiment, we asked code researcher and Hebrew expert, Moshe Shak, a native of Israel and an engineer living in Montreal, to examine the same set of Hebrew letter strings. What effect would a different set of eyes have? We summarized the results in the next table.

We had found statistically significant differences between the control and Ezekiel from the translations of another Hebrew expert. And the important “discovery rate” from the control text was very similar (18.6% versus 18.0%).

We also found that there were sizeable differences between the length of the extended ELSs in Ezekiel and War & Peace. For example, 10 of Nathan’s extensions from Ezekiel were 20 or more letters long, while only two from War & Peace were that long. These comparisons are presented below.

Appreciable differences between the length of the extended ELSs in Ezekiel and War & Peace also appeared among Shak’s translations. For example, seven of Moshe’s extensions from Ezekiel were 20 or more letters long, while only two from War & Peace were that long. These comparisons are shown below.

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New Study Underscores

Hebrew’s Challenges

Continued

The Hebrew language, arguably man’s oldest, is delightful in its directness. One interesting example is the word for blood, "dahm":

The first human being to live because of blood was Adam, pronounced in Hebrew "a-DAHM":

What was Adam made of? The dust of the ground, or earth ("dust to dust, earth to earth"), pronounced "a-dahm-AH":

Our Hebrew expert, Nathan Jacobi, has always told us that, on the other hand, Hebrew is also quite subjective when being translated. Ask 10 experts to translate a string of Hebrew letters into English, for instance, and so you will get 10 different versions of what the letters say.

This issue was driven home to us recently during one phase of our Islamic Nations Experiment. A key component of the project required "blind" attempts to extend single word ELSs of the names of Islamic nations from both War and Peace and the book of Ezekiel into longer ELSs.

Born in France before World War II, Nathan survived the holocaust. He was seven years old when his parents took him to Israel after the war, so he studied Hebrew nearly all of the way through school, during a time when Israeli schools taught biblical Hebrew as well as the "every day" language. Nathan holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Weizman Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and received the M.Sc. in Physics and the B.Sc. in Mathematics from Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. He also teaches Hebrew to adult classes weekly.

Comparing Productivity

We used the results of his extensions to compare the lengthy code productivity of the two books. One surprising outcome of this experiment was the discovery of a few long codes in War and Peace. Bible code proponents, including us, had said that the longest code found in any book other than the Bible was just seven letters long. But we found codes 40 letters long from War and Peace during our research. However, not only were there no discernible clusters of codes in War and Peace.

As a test of the ambiguity of Hebrew and to double check our results, we asked another Hebrew expert to translate the same 22 ELSs that Nathan extended. Moshe Shak, a highly qualified and experienced code researcher and frequent contributor to this newsletter, agreed to take on the challenge. A mechanical engineer and now a resident of Montreal, Moshe is a Sabra, a native Israeli, so Hebrew is his native tongue. He is a graduate of Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University in Montreal.

We were expecting a difference of opinion here and there on the translations of these strings, but not the frequent differences that we saw when comparing the two expert’s translations. In some cases the differences had to do with the ways in which the letters were parsed. In others they were due to use of words of the same spelling, but with different meanings or pronunciations (homographs), like the "bow" of a ship, "bow" and arrow and "bow" and scrape. And in some cases, it was a conflict between meanings in biblical Hebrew and modern Hebrew.

Dr. Jacobi developed the rating system for Hebrew translations, or Hebrew Quality Component (HQC), which both translators applied to their translations. The ratings are based on a mix of language quality, syntax and poetic beauty. The highest is 1.0, which Nathan has used only once, for the focal code of the Isaiah 53 cluster, Gushing from Above, My Mighty Name Arose Upon Jesus, and the Clouds Rejoiced.

By the way, it should also be said that we often work with the translations we receive, trying different meanings on Nathan, especially in the case of ambiguous translations, until we have ELSs that make some sense. We did not do that in this case, because we were not that concerned with the meanings for this experiment. Moshe’s comment on the results was, "The weakest part in this research is the subjectivity of both Hebrew specialists in assigning values."

Here is the first group of ELSs with their original letter presentations, how the Hebrew experts parsed and translated them, with letter counts and quality ratings. The rest of the experiment ELSs will be in the July issue.

Comparing Productivity

Dr. Jacobi developed the rating system for Hebrew translations, or Hebrew Quality Component (HQC), which both translators applied to their translations. The ratings are based on a mix of language quality, syntax and poetic beauty. The highest is 1.0, which Nathan has used only once, for the focal code of the Isaiah 53 cluster HERE: http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/9 , Gushing from Above, My Mighty Name Arose Upon Jesus, and the Clouds Rejoiced.

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COMPARING CLUSTERS:

New Evidence Overturns Skeptics' Case

Explosive 1,400+ ELS Cluster in Isaiah 53 Dwarfs Skeptics' Counter-Example

Opponents of Bible codes say that you can find meaningful clusters in any book. To support their case, they presented an example of a code cluster about Hanukah they found in Tolstoy's War and Peace.

While this example was fairly comparable to clusters Bible code researchers had presented back then, our researchers have unearthed clusters that look like mountains compared to the molehill of the Hanukah example. In this report we present a detailed side-by-side comparison of the Hanukah example and the most extensive cluster researchers have located to date-- the explosive Isaiah 53 codes. In short, what skeptics told us three years ago is now completely out of date.

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The Skeptics' Arguments Don't Hold a Hanukah Candle to Extensive Evidence of the Reality of Bible Codes

Ever since the Bible codes were introduced, skeptics have been saying, "Oh, well, you can find codes like that in books like War and Peace and Moby Dick."

In fact, skeptic Brendan McKay even went so far as to collect a fairly impressive looking cluster of codes about Hanukah in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace. His findings have been posted for some time at

HERE: http://wopr.com/biblecodes/TheCase.htm

We took the time to examine this cluster and compare it to a truly significant one—the Isaiah 53 cluster. The results, detailed below, reveal the irrelevance of the Hanukah example. The argument that you can find other supposedly meaningful code clusters in books other than the Bible—and the Hanukah cluster—have done much to reduce the credibility of Bible codes in the eyes of many. In the case of some codes presented in best-selling books this was appropriate, because it would be misleading to attach significance to clusters that are comparable to the Hanukah example. For this contribution, we owe Dr. McKay a debt of gratitude.

The Expanded Isaiah 53 Cluster Vs. the Initial Isaiah 53 ELS

In the forward to Yacov Rambsel's book, Yeshua, published in 1996, the author cites one ELS translated as "Yeshua (Jesus) is my name" from Isaiah 53. Grant Jeffrey also refers to this ELS in his 1996 book, The Signature of God. These authors cited this ELS as significant evidence that Jesus was the messianic figure prophesied in Isaiah 53. This claim was extensively criticized in a paper, Jesus Codes: Uses and Abuses, by Rabbi Daniel Mechanic, which is posted on the Aish site. We agree with most of the criticisms that Rabbi Mechanic cites in his report, which is, however, seriously out-of-date.

First, both Rambsel and Jeffrey have disclosed their finding of dozens of ELSs "relevant" to Jesus in Isaiah 53 in various subsequent books. In Jeffrey's 1998 book, The Mysterious Bible Codes, he lists 44 ELSs about Jesus in this passage, and addresses most of Rabbi Mechanic's criticisms. In Rambsel's 2001 book, The Genesis Factor, he cites 74 ELSs about Jesus he has found in Isaiah 53.

(Our Hebrew consultant, Dr. Nathan Jacobi, has reviewed all of the findings of Rambsel and Jeffrey—just as he reviews our own findings—and has rejected some of them as being incorrect or inappropriate in his opinion. We have therefore removed these ELSs from the expanded cluster presented in this report. [These ELSs were: From the Atonement Lamb, The Disciples Mourned and The Marys Wept.] He also considered The Evil Roman City to be only passable because of gender inconsistencies.)

Second, over the past two years, our own researchers have also located hundreds of additional ELSs on the same topic in this passage. We refer in this report to the "expanded Isaiah 53 cluster" as this entire collection of ELSs.

While the subject of the Isaiah 53 ELSs is the highly controversial one of Jesus Christ, the focus of this article is not to convince anyone of a particular viewpoint about who Jesus was, but to examine this cluster as potentially compelling evidence of the reality of Bible codes.

It is our general view that ELSs consisting of phrases or statements about Jesus should initially be regarded as no more than simply being ELSs relevant to the topic of Jesus. Unless their statistical significance can be demonstrated, it would be inappropriate to assert that such words or phrases are "proof" of their content. For example, 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 below, the odds are 1 in 12 that the "true messiah" ELS could appear in the Isaiah 53 cluster simply by chance. Therefore, by itself, the appearance of this ELS within the cluster does not qualify as "proof" of that viewpoint.

The Comparison Says It All

Does the Hanukah example scuttle the potential validity of all Bible codes? New evidence answers with an emphatic "No." If anything, various clusters discovered in the last two years make this example look like a pile of sand next to Mt. Everest. The contrast between the Hanukah cluster and these new examples provides compelling evidence in favor of the validity of these clusters.

To illustrate this, let's look at a comparison of the Hanukah example with the most extensive and improbable code grouping discovered to date—the Isaiah 53 cluster about Christ's life, His crucifixion and the controversy over His claimed resurrection. No matter what your opinions of Jesus Christ are, the following comparison should make all skeptics reconsider their views about the reality of Bible codes.

Comparing the Clusters Charted on a Graphic Display

The first is a matrix of the Isaiah 53 ELSs in a 40-letter wide display. This is a continuous string of 720 letters from Isaiah 53:2 to 54:2, starting at the khet in upper right hand corner and ending at the heh in the bottom left corner. As in all Bible code search strings, spaces between words have been eliminated.

The focal code appears in two sections, in red with white letters. It shows up in two places because it has a skip of 20 and is laid out on this 40-column matrix. We used a 40-column matrix because it is graphically similar to the Hanukah matrix.

The letters in violet are places where the higher-rated ELSs in the tables are located in the matrix. Those in turquoise and yellow are where the letters of the rest of the ELSs appear in the text.

Keep in mind that the ELSs shown here are the most improbable of the hundreds of ELSs so far discovered in this passage. That represents less than 5% of the total number of Isaiah 53 ELSs listed below. Those in this matrix are only the ELSs shown in the tables in the Scrabble Factor section. The ELSs are not individually identified in order to keep the illustration simple. Some letters are touched by more than one ELS, and in those cases we used the code with the higher-scoring odds. ELSs with longer skips, such as "Son of Elohim" with a skip of 1,383, touch down only once in the matrix.

Matrix Showing Hanukah Cluster

Here's the War and Peace array displayed in a 47-letter wide matrix, again a continuous string of 1,128 letters. The string starts at the yod in upper right hand corner and ends at the koof at the bottom left. The colors show the positions of the seven ELSs in the cluster.

It is self-evident that these two clusters are leagues apart. Consequently, the Hanukah cluster should no longer be used as a reasonable example of how codes similar to Bible code findings can be found in any book.

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