🚀 go-pugleaf

Quixote Digital Typography <qui...@shell2.bayarea.net> wrote:
> Judson D. McClendon <ju...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> 
> >with the Bible Codes and used some programs to check it out first hand. 
If
> >you want to know the facts, read the article "Equidistant Letter
Sequences
> >in the Book of Genesis" by Witzum, Rips and Rosenberg, in Statistical
> >Science magazine (vol. 9, no. 3), August 1994.  In my opinion and, much
> >more importantly, in the opinion of the authors of the article, you
cannot
> >predict the future with the Bible Codes.  But that doesn't mean that the
> >Bible Codes aren't real.  They are real and have been objectively
> >demonstrated under peer review.
> 
> >In any text, even random combinations of letters, you can select every
Nth
> >letter from the text and here and there find actual words.  The point is
> >that in any other text other than the original Hebrew of the Bible, the
> >words you find will fit what would be expected from statistical analysis
of
> >the frequency of the letters.  In other words, you find random words
> >scattered at random intervals.  Any 'meaningful' word pairings, for
> >instance, occur only as frequently as you would expect from a random
sample
> >of text with the same letter distribution.  However, study of the
original
> >Hebrew Bible text shows something quite different.  The frequencies of
> >certain kinds of word pairings have been demonstrated to be far, far
above
> >any random expectation.  Not a little bit more, but thousands of TIMES
> >more!  There has been petty squabbling about how the word pairings were
> >selected and tested, but in fact, it doesn't really matter, because no
> >other text has been shown to have this property to any degree at all,
> >except for text where patterns were coded on purpose.  
> 
> Were the control texts also in Hebrew? There is a lot less difference
> in letter frequency in Hebrew than there is in, say, English. Add in
> Hebrew's non-written vowels and it turns out that nearly any random
> combination of letters is a word.

Yes, of course.  The control texts are explained in the article (the text
of which is available on the web), but they were versions of Genesis
randomized in various ways and a Hebrew translation of part of War and
Peace the same size as Genesis.

> Frequent word pairings can be the result of certain formulaic
> phrases. Was this controlled for?

Yes.  One of the control texts was Genesis with all the verses intact but
rearranged in random order.  This control text was essentially identical in
result to the other random texts.  You really should read the article.

> Bogus science is usualy the result of lack of proper controls and
> analysis of the experiment.

That article went through a particularly aggressive peer review process,
and the final selection of names/dates for the search was suggested by one
of the more skeptical reviewers, I understand.

> There's a lot of smoke around the so-called Bible codes that could use
> some clearing. 

You are correct, and that is what prompted my post.  So many people are
making unsubstantiated claims that the real issue is becoming clouded. 
That there are intelligently placed hidden codes in the Hebrew text of the
Bible is a demonstrable fact, as far as I am concerned.  The problem is
that much more research needs to be done before we know the scope of these
codes and how best to understand them.
-- 
Judson McClendon          This is a faithful saying and worthy of all
Sun Valley Systems        acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the
ju...@mindspring.com      world to save sinners  (1 Timothy 1:15)