Posted by DK on 12/30/2001, 12:39 am

Aw, you blew my cover! Posted by Tom Zähler on 11/18/2001, 5:12 pm , in reply to "A remark..." What? And you didn’t recognize that “Tom” is “mot” spelled backwards (French for “word”)? Just another of the many encounters with Mr. Different-Alias-for-Every-Subject-He-Talks-About-on-the-Chapelboard. Sometimes I’m just too shy to post my real name here (and there are other reasons why I don’t like to). So I just ask some people I know who speak different languages, or look it up at at a translation site on the Internet, and figure out an appropriate name each time. When I posted my first one, D. Jame Verquienes (which, when pronounced in Spanish, sounds like “Déjame ver quién es [Ud.]”—“Let me see who [you] are”) on the post on the old board, “Suggestion to Dave: Could you consider enforcing Board Rule 6, Paragraph 2?” I was surprised that nobody noticed it, and others later. All right, so I’m a little shy about posting my name, but as for what I pointed out above, I wouldn’t call it a hoax. The letters really do line up. I agree with you, Steve, when we start doing things with the Bible that the Bible didn’t instruct us to do, we really need to be careful about it, and I would stop short of trying to prove any doctrine with it or anything like that. But just like the difference between man-made objects and God-made objects, the way the closer you look at man-made objects under a microscope the more defects you find in them, and the closer you look at God-made objects (a flower, for example), the more you see that they are perfectly constructed, even it their minute details. And I think the same holds true with the Word of God, when we show how mathematically it defies the possibility of just being something men wrote. So on the one hand, we be careful with this kind of thing and what we do with it. On the other hand, it shows us something about God’s creation and his Word. Regards, Mr. da Feshtac --------- Superstition can't stand the light of truth. Posted by Anthony W. Savini on 11/19/2001, 11:21 am , in reply to "A remark..." Garbage in Garbage out. ---------- But what about the mathematical probabilities? Posted by Tom Zähler on 11/19/2001, 11:47 am , in reply to "Superstition can't stand the light of truth." Did they suddenly disappear? Did they suddenly change? Does four plus four now equal zero? ---------- Posted by Anthony W. Savini on 11/19/2001, 3:29 pm , in reply to "But what about the mathematical probabilities?" Where's the data? The probability that you have a really quirky sense of humor: Is very high. Anyway every scholar worth his salt knows, every 150th letter read backwards says: 1. English: "Donald Duck is God" 2. If pronounced in Hebrew and listened to backwards says, "Bin Ladin is my man." The biggest problem is that some person will get hold of this trash and actually believe it! ____________________ A claim investigated Posted by Steve B. on 11/23/2001, 10:18 am This is addressed to whoever it is that has been posting, under several different aliases, the claim that every fiftieth letter of the Pentateuch spells out "torah" over and over. As I posted once below, I think that he has inadvertantly fallen victim to a hoax and I believe that such a claim appeals only to the human tendencey toward superstition and detracts from what God would really have us to understand about His Word. But I haven't had time until now to investigate this further. Now that I have, it appears to be even more blatantly false than I thought. I intially wondered whether or not the first few verses of Genesis might coincidentally fit this pattern, and was being used by some as the basis for the broader claim. The difficulty, due to the different alphabet of the Hebrew language and the right-to-left reading order, would naturally contribute to the propagation of this myth. However, as happens so often, when a person actually takes the trouble to check out the claim, it falls apart rather quickly. The person making this claim posted a link to a Hebrew Bible site. The site uses a downloadable browser plug-in that transforms a predefined set of Roman characters into Hebrew characters. However, if one does not download the plug-in but instead allows the browser to display the page without the decoding, one ends up with verses in Roman characters that anybody can use in any computer text editor. The text is of course unreadable in either English or Hebrew, but under this scheme the Hebrew word "torah" is represented by the characters HRWT (reading, in Hebrew fashion, from right to left). The claim made was that the letter sequence begins with the first Hebrew letter “tau,” which comes at the end of the first word in Genesis, “beresheet” (“in the beginning”), and from there you count every 50 letters... But there is a letter-for-letter transliteration into Roman script in the link I have posted below, if you want to go to it and count the letters yourself. “Torah” is spelled “tau-wau-raysh-hay” in Hebrew. (Remember that Hebrew reads from right to left, and the transliteration does too, so you have to count from right to left, starting from the “tau” at the end of “beresheet” [which looks like the beginning, if you look at it left-to-right, as we are accustomed to doing in our Latin alphabet]). Since it is not entirely clear to me whether this "tau" ("T" in the Roman script) should be included as the first letter of the sequence or not, I did it both ways below. I copied and pasted the Roman script characters of the first five verses of Genesis from the untransformed Web page, being careful to preserve the right-to-left reading order of the whole as I went, into lines of fifty characters each, as can be seen by the numbers at the top of each section, which begin at "1" on the rightmost side. In the first two blocks I also removed all the spaces, as I first assumed that spaces were not to be counted. Arranged like this, the leftmost column (the fiftieth) should be the one in which we see "TWRH" (or maybe, in the opposite reading order as in Hebrew, "HRWT") spelled over and over down the page, if the claim is true. Instead, we see in the first case below, if the "tau" of "beresheet" is not to be counted, "T)k)", which obviously is not very close to "TWRH". If we count the "tau" of "beresheet", we end up with the letters "Y-$m", which is if anything even further from "TWRH". Finally, in the third section, I decided to try counting the spaces to see if this gives us anything closer, but even this was a bust. We end up with "[space])+W". 5 4 3 2 1 09876543210987654321098765432109876543210987654321 TTYNP-L(k$XWWHBWWHTHTYHcR)HW:cR)HT)WmYM$HT)mYHL))RB )-YHYWRW)YHYmYHL)RM)YW:mYMHYNP-L(TPXRMmYHL)XWRWmWH k$XHnYBWRW)HnYBmYHL)LDBYWBW+-YKRW)H-T)mYHL))RYW:RW )mWYRQB-YHYWBR(-YHYWHLYL)RQk$XLWmWYRW)LmYHL))RQYW: :DX 5 4 3 2 1 09876543210987654321098765432109876543210987654321 YNP-L(k$XWWHBWWHTHTYHcR)HW:cR)HT)WmYM$HT)mYHL))RBT -YHYWRW)YHYmYHL)RM)YW:mYMHYNP-L(TPXRMmYHL)XWRWmWHT $XHnYBWRW)HnYBmYHL)LDBYWBW+-YKRW)H-T)mYHL))RYW:RW) mWYRQB-YHYWBR(-YHYWHLYL)RQk$XLWmWYRW)LmYHL))RQYW:k :DX) 5 4 3 2 1 09876543210987654321098765432109876543210987654321 WHBW WHT HTYH cR)HW :cR)H T)W mYM$H T) mYHL) )RB )YW :mYMH YNP-L( TPXRM mYHL) XWRW mWHT YNP-L( k$XW +-YK RW)H-T) mYHL) )RYW :RW)-YHYW RW) YHY mYHL) RM W)L mYHL) )RQYW :k$XH nYBW RW)H nYB mYHL) LDBYW BW :DX) mWY RQB-YHYW BR(-YHYW HLYL )RQ k$XLW mWY R Though I took a great deal of care, perhaps I botched the job of copying-and-pasting, or perhaps I have misunderstood the method by which this supposed "torah" letter sequence is to be seen. In any case, I think the burden of proof is now clearly upon those who make the claim. If this sequence does indeed exist, show us how it works out in the first five or ten verses of Genesis. Don't post vague, unattributed references to studies done by "teams of computer scientists and mathematicians using super computers at Jerusalem's Hebrew University and the Jerusalem College of Technology." Anyone can see that this exercise does not need computer scientists and supercomputers. Use the method above to actually show us how it works out so we can go to that Hebrew Bible site and verify the claim for ourselves. This has broad importance for the way we perceive spiritual realities. God is not the God of the kabbalists, who reveals things to us via secret codes and mystical patterns. What he wants us to know, he has revealed in a fairly straightforward fashion in the scriptures. If this sort of counting scheme really worked out, it would have entered general knowledge long ago, because for those who spoke Biblical Hebrew as natives, this would have been an easy thing to verify. Sincerely, Steve ---------- Posted by Anthony W. Savini on 11/23/2001, 1:11 pm , in reply to "A claim investigated" Thanks for your hard work Steve. I too ran my test and came up with rubbish, I am glad you publicised your findings. I'd also like to add that this sort of rumormongering is far beneath the holiness that God desires of us. The world looks at statements as you mentioned and laughs at the credulity of christians. There is far more of this sort of superstitious garbage out there. The worst part is that many think that living by faith means living without discernment or skepicism. So you have the Peter Popovs, Jimmy and Tammy, Mike Warnecke, Hovinds out there in their hundreds fleeceing the flock.