Help me debunk biblical numerology - CT style

[arthwollipot]

I originally posted this in the Religion and Philosophy forum, but some of the nice folks over there suggested that I post here as well, since you CTers have some experience in this sort of thing.
Someone on another forum posted this:

GOD COUNTS
This material comes from Ivan Panin's little book, now long out of print called God Counts. It’s about the Hebrew text of Genesis 1: 1.

It is the most staggering collection of numerical facts I have ever read, and I can well remember the shock to my system when I first came across these.

This verse, and the associated facts Panin mentioned, alone proves the inspiration of the Bible. There are problems, of course, but this verse stands at the gateway to the Bible, flaunting the fact that no human could have contrived it.

That's a big claim. But I challenge any and all readers to do anything like this by whatever means you choose.

As you may not know, ancient Hebrew did not have characters which acted as numbers like 1,2,3... They used the letters of the Hebrew alphabet instead. So aleph stood for 1, beth stood for 2 etc etc. Any textbook of Hebrew grammar will tell you what the values are.

Genesis 1
1 There are 7 words
2 There are 28 letters = 7 x 4
3 The sentence divides into 2 equal halves.
The first 3 words contain 14 letters = 7 x 2
The second 3 contain 14 letters = 7 x 2
4 The second half divides into 2 equal halves
“The heavens” contains 7 letters
“And the earth” contains 7 letters
5 The 3 nouns God, heavens, earth have 14 letters = 7 x 2
6 The numeric value of the 3 nouns is 777 = 7 x 111
7 The numeric value of the verb created = 203 = 7 x 29
8 The middle word and the word after it contain 7 letters
9 The middle word and the word before it contain 7 letters
10 The value of the first and last letters of the first half = 42 = 7 x 6
11 The value of the first and last letters of the last half = 91 = 7 x 13
12 The value of the first and last letters of all the words taken together = 1393 = 7 x 199
13 The value of the first and last letters of the first and last words only = 497 = 7 x 71
14 The numeric value of the 1st letter of the first and last words is 7 = 7 x 1
15 The numeric value of the last letters of the 1st and last words = 490 = 7 x 70 = 7 x 7 x 10

So there are 15 features of 7 in a single sentence.

Have a go at trying to do something similar for yourself. Then stop and realize that Our Creator is just that teensy little bit brighter than us.

Can the wonderful folks here provide me with some ammunition that I can use against this numerological garbage? I'm not that great with number puzzles and to be honesst I haven't the time to sit down and come up with something myself. Are there any JREFers who have a ready copy & paste that I can pass on?
Thanks.

 

[defaultdotxbe]

other than the claim at the end that a human could never come up with such an assortment of 7s (but one can find it apparently) whats to debunk?

 

[Orphia Nay]

Hi arthwollipot.

It looks like they're cherry picking "data" any way they can.

4 The second half divides into 2 equal halves
“The heavens” contains 7 letters
“And the earth” contains 7 letters

What's the importance of 2?

(Cue mumbo-jumbo. )

They just threw the 2 in there hoping no-one would notice, or so you would go, "wooooo, another number, wooooooo".

5 The 3 nouns God, heavens, earth have 14 letters = 7 x 2

No, they have 15 letters.

So there are 15 features of 7 in a single sentence.

What's the big deal even if there are 315 "features of 7 in a single sentence??

Every point they make is a cue for woos to go, "woooooo", and that's all. There is no meaning or significance.

 

[Gravy]

Here's some debunking that's specific to Panin
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/panin.html
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/panin_mark.html
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html

Mathematicians' Statement on the Bible Codes
http://math.caltech.edu/code/petition.html

Extensive links and discussions of Bible code refutations from the same site
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/torah.html

Drosnin's The Bible Code discussed here, with some good links
http://skepdic.com/bibcode.html
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbiblecode.html
http://www.csicop.org/si/9711/bible-code.html

I wonder which is better for the obsessive-compulsive person: this nonsense, counting ceiling tiles, or picking at scabs.

 

[Brainache]

I had my tenth birthday in the same year that my son (now 12) turned ten and I will have my eleventh birthday in the same year that my daughter (now ten) turns eleven.

Therefore I conclude that God is a complete loony. Well, either him or the person who invented leap years. Or me.

 

[arthwollipot]

Gravy, that is exactly what I was after. Thank you ever so much.

Orphia and defaultdotxbe, you have also given me some ideas. Thanks to both of you as well.

 

[Gravy]

You're very welcome, arth. We here at the CT subforum aim to displease.

 

[boloboffin]

Division into 3 equal halves would have been much more impressive.

Ophelia: Small nit. The author means the words in Hebrew have 14 letters.

 

[The Almond]

Division into 3 equal halves would have been much more impressive.

Ophelia: Small nit. The author means the words in Hebrew have 14 letters.

You think the author would have been so kind as to mention that. Actually, I have no experience at all in hebrew, so I don't know what the letters total up to.

As to the OP, the problem with numerology is that it rationalizes things after the fact. You simply can't predict anything with numerology. That's why it isn't a science.

 

[Nick227]

I'm pretty sure Panin's been fairly extensively debunked. Drosnin too. Holy Blood Holy Grail was a hoax, and The Da Vinci Code was written on the back of it.

But (!)...there are still guys out there who are interesting in this field, mostly former maths professors who seem drawn to these things in their twilight years.

Check especially Prof Vernon Jenkins...
http://nick2211.yage.net/2701.htm
www.whatabeginning.com/Misc/Wonders/P.htm

and Dan Gleason...
www.jesus8880.com
www.revelation2368.com

The weak points, or areas of contention, in these gematria and isopsephia-based articles are invariably (i) getting the original Hebrew or Greek spelling verified, and (ii) establishing statistical significance.


Nick

 

[Nick227]

Of course it's worth mentioning that the very first word of Genesis 1 is berashith - in the beginning. It's a Hebrew compound word made from two particles - be, in & - rashith, beginning. The numerology of rashith is 911!

Nick

 

[The Doc]

This reminds me of Cartman's comments in the 9/11 South Park episode lol. Bible codes are right up there on my "crazy" list.

Nice links Gravy, btw.

 

[Minadin]

Of course, it's silly to try and use the number systems of ancient Hebrew to try and come up with meanings relative to today, or any day. This is akin to some person in the distant future re-discovering Shakespeare's iambic pentameter and trying to ascribe some mythical meaning to it.

Besides, God didn't write the Torah in Ancient Hebrew, anyway. That's just the language the Joos used back then to convey it, because they hadn't yet discovered English, the real language of God. That's why everyone speaks English on Star Trek in the future, it's universal. (Unless you're watching Star Trek in Mexico.)

Of course, even English is just our best possible verbal approximation of God's Language. Scientists now know that much of it is mathematically based, which can be hard to render into speech. (How do you pronounce ∑ anyway?) When written, it's remarkably similar to a combination of PERL and LISP . . .

 

[Nick227]

Of course, it's silly to try and use the number systems of ancient Hebrew to try and come up with meanings relative to today, or any day. This is akin to some person in the distant future re-discovering Shakespeare's iambic pentameter and trying to ascribe some mythical meaning to it.

Unless of course they articulate a periodic universal truth in symbolic form.

Nick

 

[Jonnyclueless]

Ya know, if we weren't stuck on a base 10 numeric system who's only advantage is that we have 10 fingers, we wouldn't be dealing with this.

 

[Swing Dangler]

A book written by man is a book written by a god but man changes god's language to English to prove number counts in English prove god exists.

Can't argue with that...

 

[rwguinn]

Ya know, if we weren't stuck on a base 10 numeric system who's only advantage is that we have 10 fingers, we wouldn't be dealing with this.

Ya.
Ain't it amusmazing how the man-made language and numeric systems can be used to show that "our way is the truth, and here's all this amazing stuff we had to make up to prove it!"

 

[defaultdotxbe]

Ya know, if we weren't stuck on a base 10 numeric system who's only advantage is that we have 10 fingers, we wouldn't be dealing with this.

we were made in god image, so god must have 10 fingers too

A book written by man is a book written by a god but man changes god's language to English to prove number counts in English prove god exists.

Can't argue with that...

supposedly this is done with the hebrew version, and any good bible literalist will tell you the bible wasnt written directly by god, it was divinely inspired, so in this case ancient hebrew is "gods language"


i still think the main argument is that only god could put such numerology into a sentence, debunk that and the whole thing turns into some mathemetician 2500 years ago with too much time on his hands

 

[Jonnyclueless]

I imagine God has a Yiddish accent too.

 

[Nick227]

Ya know, if we weren't stuck on a base 10 numeric system who's only advantage is that we have 10 fingers, we wouldn't be dealing with this.

Hebrew numerology is usually base 9, as in Kaballah of the Nine Chambers. They didn't bother with a zero, a 0. They didn't even bother with giving numbers their own symbols for quite a time. They just used the letters of their alphabet and attributed values to each viz... aleph - 1; beth - 2; gimel - 3......yod - 10; kaph - 20 etc. This is where the so-called "secret" number systems of the Bible sprang from. Because words also represented numbers, whole systems of connection arose between words that had the same, or mathematically related, numeration. Thus achad, meaning one, is related to ahebar, meaning love, as both add to 13.

This correlation of meaning through similar numeration is usually known as isopsephia. The other use of numbers in the Bible is called gematria, where numbers are related to geometrical shapes. If you look at Genesis 1:1, and add up all the numbers of the letters in the Hebrew words - Berashith berah Alhim vath Ha-Shamaim ath Ha-Aretz (in the beginning created Gods, the Heavens, and the Earth) it comes to 2701. This number is a figurate number because it can be resolved into a geometric shape - a triangle. Furthermore it possesses "reflective factorisations" because it is the sum of 37 x 73, making it quite an special number.

Later on, the Hebrews, and the Greeks, started giving numbers their own symbols - 1, 2, 3, etc, and the old system of connections between words and geometric shapes became progressively lost from public view.

These things are studied extensively in some schools of Jewish Kaballah, Judaeo-Christian Qabalah, Gnosticism, and other areas of the Western Mystery Traditions. Guys like Pavin or Drosnin are quite unrelated to this. They're just freelancers coming up with their own theories.

The zero, 0, didn't show up until later, if I recall, and was even then the subject of much controversy, with the Greeks in particular concerned that having a number represent something that didn't exist was not a good start for any mathematical system

Nick