“… A person cannot comprehend the deeds that are done under the Sun. No matter how much he works in research, he will still not comprehend this, and if any wise man said that he knows, he cannot comprehend it. Ecclesiastes
Supercrossword in Hebrew
Half a century ago, the American rabbi Michael Dov Weismandel asked a strange, at first glance, question: why do Jews call the Mosaic Pentateuch Torah, if there is no such word on any scroll? In the text of the Holy Book itself, it is also not found anywhere. "Isn't this word encrypted in some way?" - thought the rabbi and began to investigate.
In the very first word of the first book of Genesis, he took the letter "tav" (conveying the sound "t"), then began to look for the second letter of the word "Torah" - "vav" (conveying the sound "o") - with certain intervals, missing a certain amount letters. The rabbi was interested in the intervals that remained between the letter "vav" and the third, "reish" (sound "r"), between "reish" and "hey" (sound "a").
One of these turned out to be an interval of 50. For Jewish history recorded in the Old Testament, the number is very remarkable: on the 50th day after the Exodus from Egypt, the Torah was given to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Weismandel found the word "Torah" with various intervals between letters in all five books of Moses. The results of the search for the rabbi did not make much impression, but they found a successor. It turned out to be Abraham Oren, who began tirelessly to search for other numerical codes in the Torah.
Oren followed the path of Weismandel. In the third book of the Old Testament, Leviticus tells about the high priest Aaron, but it is in this book that he is not named by name. Maybe the name is hidden somewhere inside the text? Oren began to look for him, jumping from one letter to another at various intervals. And on the very first page of the episode about Aaron, I found his name mentioned 25 times with steps 9, 18, 28, 36, 87, -6, -21, -32 …
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Mathematicians got down to business
Until the computer age, this quest remained entertaining arithmetic in the field of theology. But in the early 80s, the inquisitive Abraham Oren turned to the Jerusalem mathematician Eliyahu (Ilya) Rips, a recent repatriate from Riga, with the question: how significant is the result he obtained from the point of view of the theory of probability? Rips was not too lazy - he counted. Taking into account the frequency of the letters included in the name
Aaron, it could happen 7-8 times in this passage by accident. But not 25! There is an obvious concentration of the keyword in the corresponding passage of the book. At that time, Professor Rips did not yet know that the effect of concentration of keywords is a general law that permeates the Book of Books through and through.
Professor of mathematics Michelson strengthened the meaning of the result obtained by Abraham Oren - he took all possible variants of the four letters of the name Aaron. Each word received from them occurred in this passage from 5 to 11 times (this mathematics did not surprise - a common accident), and only the only variant of the meaningful arrangement of letters, giving the word "Aaron", was encountered 25 times.
This effect, which makes it possible to compare the Book with an intelligent creature, has been tested by Dr. Rips on other passages. Taking a part of the text, which tells about the Garden of Eden, the mathematician suggested that the names of plants in this garden could be encrypted here. However, not a single plant is directly named in the plain text. In total, 25 of them are mentioned in the Pentateuch. Rips mistook them for keywords, ran a computer search program, and, imagine, found all 25 with different letter intervals.
A fragment of the first book of Genesis tells how the Serpent (in Hebrew - Nahash) seduced Eve. The serpent is named openly. Is it possible to find it in an encoded form? You will never find it manually. And the computer doesn't care at what intervals to search. So I found the word "Nakhash" twice: at intervals of 248 and 365.
By the way, these numbers are also not random. 248 - the number of commandments of the Torah of the type “do so”, 365 - the number of commandments of the type “do not do”. In total, there are 613 commandments in the Old Testament: 248 + 365 = 613. The episode about the Snake is just about what will happen if you break the commandment.
The most important opening took place
Rips did not limit himself to keywords taken from the Holy Scriptures. They are, as they say, God himself ordered to be there. The scientist was shocked when he tried to throw into the information space of the Torah a word that is impossible in the plain text simply because it appeared three millennia later. Well, could the author of the Pentateuch know about the Great French Revolution, which was destined to play out in the 18th century? new era?
Don't rush to answer
Rips took the word "Bastille" and found it, of course, at letter intervals, in Genesis. It was crossed by the biblical phrase "A prison is a place where the king's prisoners are kept." (It was about the prison in which Joseph was sitting together with the baker and the cupbearer.) Agree, there is a semantic coincidence of the phrase of the plain text and the external word, as if abandoned from the distant future.
The Torah is written in the form of a scroll - no punctuation marks, no gaps between words. The lines are arranged one below the other so that the letters are arranged in a "square-nested" manner. True, an ordinary reader of the Bible, even if he knows Hebrew, is unlikely to guess to connect the equidistant letters that make up the name of the Paris prison with a dotted line. But when the computer has calculated the required letter spacing, it remains only to circle the highlighted letters - and before you is the word "Bastille" in the Mosaic text.
The horizontally manifested words "maapekha" (revolution) and "terror" coexist with the vertically located "guillotine". Let's remind: the doctor Guillotin invented this instrument of execution 3 thousand years after people got acquainted with the text of the Old Testament.
Another miracle: the Torah phrase "And now you will go and kill him" and the phrase "arrested king" from bottom to top intersect with the manifested keyword "Convention" (the highest legislative and executive body of the First French Republic, by decision of which the king was arrested and then beheaded) …
What kind of king you ask? And the Old Testament gives an exhaustive answer to this question. On the plaintext phrase "The King will be beheaded" are superimposed on the computer-found "Louis", "Bourbon" and again "guillotine".
Here is the text says: "The end of all life has passed before me." A little further: "Let's strengthen the bricks and burn them." And vertically in the same place in the text we read: "Same in Auschwitz" - this is, of course, about the Holocaust - the tragedy of the Jewish people in World War II.
The verb “destroy” in the clear text is crossed with the computer-found surname Eichmann, and vertically both words are crossed out with the words “a third of the people” (6 million Jews died in the Holocaust - a third of the then population).
In a certain place on the scroll, the words "chief executioner" appear. The word "Hitler" crosses them vertically.
Rips and his colleague Doron Weiztum found in the Torah the names of Caesar, Napoleon, Stalin … It is characteristic that next to, across or at an acute angle to the found name, a phrase from the open text is certainly read, with a figurative meaning somehow connected with a historical figure who lived three millennia later …
Is this not a coincidence? The same question was asked by mathematicians who were looking for the realities of different eras in the Old Testament. And in strict accordance with the theory, the probability of coincidences was calculated. Here are the numbers they got: 1: 770 million, 1: 890 million, 1:10 billion. Simply put, there are no such coincidences. These results were presented to world-class mathematicians Kazhdan and Feinstein. They were not too lazy to double-check the values and even independently solved several complicated problems. The effect was the same.
Four years later, a group of mathematicians confirmed the truth of the discovery. The article by Drs. Rips, Weizthum and Rosenberg in Statistical Science revolutionized knowledge.
According to Israeli mathematicians, biasedly rechecked by American colleagues, it turns out that the canonical text of the Old Testament is unique …
Of the modern critics of the Torah codes, Michael Heizer stands out, proving, and seemingly not unfounded, that the sacred text was repeatedly supplemented, edited and revised. And if the text is not canonical, it is pointless, they say, to look for equidistant codes.
However, anyone who is familiar with Jewish ritual knows that there has never been any editing of the main religious shrine and, in principle, cannot be. Each new Torah scroll is copied by a specially trained scribe from a well-known scroll corresponding to the canon. He writes with pen and black ink on parchment, scrupulously copying not only every letter, but every curl (and there are many of them in the Hebrew alphabet) and every dot in the vowels (only consonants are written in Hebrew, and vowels are in the form of one, two or three dots are placed under the letters). While the scribe is copying the text, there is a reviewer behind him, who is charged with comparing the old text with the new one. If a mistake or just a slip of the tongue happens somewhere, it is not corrected, not cleaned up, not covered up - such a scroll is thrown away. And then it all starts over. Only another scribe starts to work.
Since the Jews have always had such strict rules for copying the Torah, or rather the last 3.3 thousand years - from the moment Moses received the Holy Scriptures on Mount Sinai, it must be assumed that each subsequent scroll was like two drops of water similar to the previous one. This means that they are all similar to the original version, which the prophet Moses held in his hands. That is why speculation about numerous insertions and editorial changes is nothing more than an atheistic delusion.
Three days later - war
So, the Old Testament foresaw the events and names of historical figures that appeared many centuries after the writing (giving) of the text. So the Book of Books is a universal predictor? Why, in this case, not assume that the Torah has its own codes for the future? And is it possible to more fully predict the course of events?
It is impossible, mathematicians working with Torah codes are convinced (by the way, they are all believers). And this is not a scientific conclusion, but an ethical prohibition imposed by religion not to tempt fate by looking into tomorrow.
But there are still exceptions even among devout Jews, such as Eliyahu Rips. On January 15, 1991, he was asked to give a lecture on the 18th. He refused for a more than strange reason: "This is not the best day for lectures: the war will start." Indeed, on January 18, Iraqi missiles flew to the cities of Israel. How did a person far from politics know about this? From the Bible.
It is reasonable to object: the Holy Scripture does not say anything about our time, much less contains specific dates. Rips thinks differently: everything is predicted there - you just need to be able to read. In the first book of Genesis, where it tells about the wars of Abraham with the kings of Canaan, he found the date of the beginning of the war in the Persian Gulf, the name Tsadam (this is how the name of Saddam Hussein sounds in Arabic), the words "tal Rusi", which in Hebrew means "Russian rocket". To see the name of Hussein, one should read in the first case every 14th letter of the text, and in the second - every 74th. For Tal Rus, these intervals were 12 characters.
In 1992, the Israeli soldier Nissim Toledano was kidnapped. The whole small country experienced like one family. When it was not yet known whether the soldier was still alive, Rips was nevertheless persuaded, contrary to his principles, to look into the Torah - a person's life is dearer than any principles. He gave up: he turned on the computer and began to search at various letter intervals for the name of the disappeared soldier. Found it soon. Nearby, the scientist hoped to see geographical names on the territory of Palestine, where they could hide the kidnapped. Alas, no such name has been formed from the letters of the biblical text. While Dr. Rips was working with Torah, the radio announced that Nishima Toledano's body had been found. And at that very second the mathematician saw a vertical column of letters next to the soldier's name, which showed the word "yamut" - he will die.
This episode, it would seem, confirmed the opinion of mathematicians: the Holy Book is a repository of historical information from the creation of the world to the present day. Undoubtedly, the whole future of humanity is encoded in it, for our past is the future for the Old Testament.
Nostradamus never dreamed of
It's strange, isn't it: the random name of a soldier appeared in the text of the Torah? So maybe my name and my phone number and the make of my washing machine will be there? Who knows … Looks like all the words are being searched. In any case, scholars who have found in the Torah a multitude of key words characterizing any concept from any time and place, it seems, have never been left unanswered. But whether it is permissible to cross the line of the current moment is still a question.
Does this mean that the text given by the Creator contains prophecies?
The sages who devoted their lives to studying the Book of Books knew that it not only contains information about the past, but also encodes key events of the future. Long before the advent of calculating machines, every now and then some of the Bible scholars found in it something inaccessible to ordinary reading.
So, Shimon Bar-Yohai, the alleged author of The Zohar, said in 120: in the six hundredth year of the sixth millennium according to the biblical chronology (corresponding to 1830-1840) an unprecedented leap in scientific knowledge will take place. It is predicted from the Bible for 17 centuries.
And this is what humanity has received from science over the years:
1828 J. Henry invents the electromagnet;
1831 - M. Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction and actually created electrical engineering;
1833 - K. F. Gauss designed the electromagnetic telegraph;
1834 - the same M. Faraday created the theory of electrochemistry;
1842 - the Doppler effect is discovered;
1843 - J. Joule formulated the second law of thermodynamics and the law of conservation of energy;
1845 - Created Boolean algebra - the basis of modern computer languages.
The time interval from 1805 to 1873, the lifetime of one generation, gave revolutionary discoveries and inventions in most natural sciences. Well, how could Bar-Yochai look into these years from antiquity?
Torah is the genetic code of the Universe. It records everything that happened and everything that could happen, but which humanity has escaped. A truly limitless repository of information!
However, religion prohibits any fortune-telling, because it narrows the possibilities for choice, prematurely programs the course of events. The search for prophecies that already belong to history is allowed, but it is forbidden to get ahead of events. Nobody relieves us of responsibility for our future.
Will Haifa Become Hiroshima?
But a rapid breakthrough into the future with the help of the biblical text was nevertheless accomplished. And this was done not by a professional scientist, but by an amateur, not constrained by the religious ban on fortune-telling.
American journalist Michael Droznin, having become acquainted with the method of catching keywords in the text of the Bible, began an independent search.
On September 3, 1994, 14 months before the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, he sent a warning letter to the country's leader: in the text of the Bible, his name and surname, found at a certain letter interval, intersect with the phrase "A killer who will be killed." Rabin, an atheist and pragmatist, ignored the warning. He became the fourth (after the Egyptian President Sadat and the Kennedy brothers), whose murder is reported in the Bible.
After the murder of Rabin, Michael found in the Torah the intersection of the word "Israel" and the words "nuclear disaster." He considered it necessary to inform the then successor of Rabin about this discovery. Shimon Peres, already informed about the murder of his predecessor predicted in the Bible, took the warning seriously and met with Michael. True, Peres's prime minister's career was short - he was replaced by Benjamin Netanyahu. Droznin met the father of the new prime minister, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, a scientist and philosopher, showed him his terrible find, also confirmed by Eliyahu Rips, and asked him to draw his son's attention to it. However, the new prime minister, like Rabin once, considered the prophecies nonsense and did not react to them.
Is a Bible prediction inevitable? Or is it just a warning signal, accepting and understanding which, you can change the course of events?
Scientists are not yet ready to answer these questions. Although the One who endowed the sacred text with the knowledge of the future surely knows the answers.
N. Batyuk