Page 25 - Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrew

COINCIDENCES IN THE BIBLE AND IN BIBLICAL HEBREW
4 4 COINCIDENCES IN THE BIBLE AND IN BIBLICAL HEBREW

words. We will not address such coincidences; neither do we express here our
attitude about whether this practice—part and parcel of established Judaism since
the time of the writing of the Talmud—has validity (the author does not feel

qualified, nor of any authority, to render it meaningful conveying in public his
attitude on such matters).
The Bible Code refers to the claim, made by respectable scientists and statisti-
cians and supported by statistical analyses whose validity is debated to this day,
that there are hidden messages in the Bible that are coded in a certain fashion.
These messages can be exposed by treating the biblical text as an undivided string
of letters and creating the words of the hidden message by equal skipping of letters
(denoted equidistant letter sequence, or ELS).
For example, one could begin reading the first chapter of Genesis (in the origi-

nal Hebrew language) and find the first T (tav in Hebrew). The first occurrence

of this letter is as the last letter of the first word (bereshit). Then skip the next

forty-nine letters to read the fiftieth letter as vav (the sixth letter in the Hebrew
alphabet). You continue this way two more times to obtain the word “Torah,”
the Hebrew word for the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch). If more

than one ELS exists that generate the same message (for example, skipping more
than forty-nine letters or less), then experience has shown that the real message
is hidden in the ELS with the shortest number of skipped letters (we will not
elaborate here on how “real” is distinguished from “unreal,” but there are various
criteria that can be found in the related literature).
While the above example may seem simplistic, and is perhaps doing injustice
to the whole approach (more interesting and intriguing instances have been found
and made public), we again do not wish here to express our attitude toward the
Bible Code, except to say that this book is not about the Bible Code and is not
related to it in any way.
The interested reader may search for more information about the Bible Code
via numerous published papers, books, and Internet sites (a Google search for “the
Bible Code” produces, at the time of writing this chapter, 59,400 matches!).
Having delineated coincidences that are not addressed here, we may now qual-
ify coincidences that are included, and explain the sense of uneasiness that has
ultimately led to the writing of this book.
We start with coincidences in the Hebrew language. Unlike most other lan-
guages, which are based on conventions, the Hebrew words are all based on a root
that contains three letters (and sometimes four letters, though rarely). Variations
of this root produce words with different meanings. Occasionally, the same word
serves to convey different meanings. Thus, the verbs “sin” and “miss” (as in “miss
the target”) are the same word in Hebrew, sharing one and the same root, although