Yes. It's shed.
Firstly, we have to take the author's word on how literal his translations
of "encoded" historical references are. It'd be hard for an excited
researcher to avoid using meanings of found letter-combinations that
shoehorn the historical information into those patterns.
Next... did they, when they found the date of the World's End, check for
words nearby that said "untrue" or "not" or "is a lie"? How about searching
for every combination of references to ideas like "this is untrue", or "the
Bible is wrong", or every piece of /inaccurate/ history "encoded in the
Torah"? I bet there's loads... but who'd look for them?
I read that a comparison test was done on (the Hebrew translation of) War
And Peace, and that Saddam Hussein was mentioned in the Bible but not War
and Peace. Well why should he be? The correct test would be, a similar
number of references in other comparably sized texts, regardless of their
subject. I favour a historical text, so there's plenty of dates, and make it
about some irreverant subject, like... a history of drug-taking in America.
Or the complete works of Darwin.
Also, I believe (correct me if I'm wrong here) that Hebrew doesn't use
vowels in the same way as English. I'm wondering if this means that words
are inflected differently? That there might be more meanings-per-word than
in English?
The frequency of positive IDs on "encoded words" would depend on how many
letters in the alphabet, how much pronunciation/meaning depends on spelling
or context, what proportion of possible letter combinations yield a valid
word... as an English speaker (or if you do the combination-maths on English
words/letters) you may get a misleading impression of how impressive a
positive "hit" would be for the Bible Code program.
PLUS the article shows a chunk of the grid layout of characters and a number
of highlighted lines, diagonal, vertical and horizontal. Remember here that
a shallow diagonal could correspond to every 3000th character, and you get
an impression of just how much searching the computer's doing to find its
matches.
Plus, in the text of the (pro-)Bible Code article that I read, it was noted
that the current version of the Torah wasn't fixed until 1000AD. So, the
"prophecies" weren't encoded into the book until 2000-3000 years after work
first began on it.
The search technique has been selected and developed to pick up more and
more combinations, and the tests have never been of negative or garbage
references, and other texts run through the system have been tested with THE
SAME SEARCH STRINGS, which is a mistake, because you aren't looking for
potentially loads of other patterns that MIGHT exist in your other texts.
It's an imposed meaning thing.
Dave Pape
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