Is there anyone out there ? (part 5)

For those who need hard proof for everything and are mathematically inclined, here is an interesting item that you might like to follow up yourself.

It appears that a group of Orthodox Jews at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem have discovered, with the help of a computer, that the original Hebrew text of the Torah (the first part of the Bible) contains a complex series of codes, so complex that they could not have possibly been put there by a human writer. Among other things they discovered the following :

* If you took the first Hebrew 'T' in the first verse of Genesis (the first book) and counted out 49 letters (49 is a significant number in the Bible, chiefly because it is 7 X 7, a square of a perfect number e.g. God rested on the '7'th day) you would get the Hebrew 'O'. So what? Well, let's go on, because the next 49 letters gives you an 'R', the next 49 letters an 'A' and finally, the next 49 letters brings you an 'H'.

The word spelt is Torah, the name given to this part of the Bible. The amazing thing is that exactly the same thing happens in Exodus, the second book of the Bible! In the third book, Leviticus, the same happens, but with the Hebrew word for God. In the other two books, Numbers and Deuteronomy, you get the word Torah again, but this time it is backwards. Statistically here we are talking of odds against these combinations happening naturally at millions to one!

* Using a similar system researchers have found the word for Eden (as in garden of ..) coded in 16 times within the section dealing with Adam and Eve and, later in the passage, where it talks about the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, they found the word Galut (meaning 'exile'), which they also found within later passages which also had 'exile' as a theme.

* Perhaps more questionably they found the names Hitler and Auschwitz within the story of Noah (the first holocaust?) and the names of 64 famous Rabbis, all within one portion of Genesis!

There were many, many other examples. The thing that is stressed is that the study was (and probably still is) conducted on strict scientific guidelines, with constant verification and checking and running the results against 'control' data (i.e. other books). To those of you who need such verifications you have read it here first. To others who, like myself, prefer to accept the Bible by faith, we welcome such assurances.

So there's the Bible for you. I hope that you have learned something from this brief overview. Let me encourage you to learn more - by reading the book itself.