🚀 go-pugleaf

Judson D. McClendon wrote:
> [...]the Bible code discovered by Dr.
> Rips exists, and I stand by my statement, as does Harold Gans below.
> [quotes H.Gans}
> the probability that they are mere coincidence is vanishingly small.

Gans says that what is called "Bible code" is a phenomenon he has
observed, and that by some statistical analysis it appears to be
quite a remarkable phenomenon. Whether or not they "exist" in the
sense that they were put there on purpose is not a statement to 
which Gans commits without qualification. 

I have no idea what these people mean by "vanishingly small" 
probabilities. By some measure, my individual existence has a 
"vanishingly small" probability. Yet here I am.

I'm not inclined to worry too much about "vanishingly small" 
probabilities. Aren't the names and dates and whatnot of these
sages already in the OT in plain text? If so, then finding that
some transformations turn up the names again, although "encoded"
may be a forgone conclusion. Has that hypothesis been tested?

Also, to me finding that the Jews returning from Babylon decided to 
make their first organized shot at holy writ more than just a 
collection of stories isn't too unbelievable. It's just that if I
were writing such a document I'd try a bit harder to impose a sense
of order on the hidden names and dates - why else go to the trouble?
So, while I can believe that it was done, I don't think that the 
discovered "codes" are evidence of this, since they appear to be
much too random.

I'm thinking that if the codes are in fact there on purpose, then
it is likely that Ezekiel didn't come up with this on his own. Does 
anyone know if Babylonian religious writings had similar codes 
embedded? Or were the post Babylonian Jews the first group from this
part of the world to come up with this idea?

(I'm basing my assumption that the Jews didn't bother writing their
Bible until this time on Kromer's assertion in _Testament_ that 
there are no known written fragments of any biblical text dated
from before the Babylonian captivity.)
-- 
 Helge "Look for the hidden name of 
 the next president of the USA in my text!" Moulding
 mailto:h...@slc.unisys.com                Just another guy
 http://www.geocities.com/Athens/1401     with a weird name