Rebutting the Skeptics' Likely Criticisms

Let's look at some of the skeptic's likely responses to what we have presented, and consider their validity.



The Hanukah Example Wasn't Intended to be the Result of Exhaustive Searching

While this is true in a strict sense, such a response belies the fact that there is a very serious limit to how many relatively improbable ELSs you can find about one topic in any text if the author of the text wasn't trying to embed them. If the Hanukah researchers were to try to expand their search, they might find a few more ELSs like the ones in their posted example. But only a few. And it is highly unlikely they could find any ELSs much longer than 20-30 letters. And the longer the ELS, the more unlikely.


Bible Code Digest's Citations of "Probabilities" are Invalid

Skeptics may argue that the only context within which a probability has meaning or validity is within a tightly controlled scientific experiment. This is simply not true. Let's start with a very simple example. Take the statement, "The probability that any one flip of a fair coin will result in 'heads' is 50%." That is a true statement where a calculated probability has validity and yet no scientific experiment has been performed. Instead, the probability was based on a priori assumptions that are well known and undisputed.

The probabilities that we calculate regarding any specific ELS when we assign a rating to it are no different in nature than the 50% probability of a fair coin yielding 'heads.' They are answers to the question, "What is the probability that the given ELS will cross any specific, randomly selected 1,000-letter long section of text in the Tanach?" The only difference is that the math is more extensive. Just like the coin flip situation, all we need to do is apply some basic algebra and probability theory to determine what the chances are that the given ELS will show up. The math used was developed by a veteran mathematician with 27 years of experience, and it has been validated by a statistics professor. Click here for more information.


Bible Code Digest's Use of "Statistical Significance" is Invalid and Misleading

Here the skeptics would be resorting to a narrow technicality that they are trying to incorrectly generalize to all situations. It's more than a bit like a crafty lawyer who gets a hardened criminal off the hook by using a legal technicality. Everyone knows the guy is guilty, but he gets let off anyway.

So what kind of technicality are we talking about? Because we have made a few simplifying assumptions, it is true that the probability we have calculated is not exact. What they won't tell you, however, is that the probability doesn't need to be exact, because all we really need to know is whether the cluster is statistically significant. If your standard of significance is odds of 1 in 1,000 and you can show that something has odds less than 1 in 1,000,000, you have shown its significance. It doesn't matter that we can't tell you exactly what the odds are as long as we can show that the odds are far less than 1 in 1,000,000.


BCD's Findings Should Be Rejected Because They Haven't
Reported All of the ELSs They Looked For and Did Not Find.


We have such a list (with 75 ELSs we didn't locate in Isaiah 52-53) and would be happy to send it to whoever requests it. We haven't included it in this document because it is already too long and we don't have a listing of the ELSs that either Yacov Rambsel or Grant Jeffrey looked for and did not locate. In spite of that we included their findings, with some deletions because of marginal Hebrew spellings or usage. What we have done instead is to go way overboard in using excessively strict assumptions when calculating the odds of chance occurrence of a cluster similar to the one we have detailed. We have assumed that for every ELS we did find, that there were 16 others that we didn't find. That's going to an unreasonable extreme because the reality is that we found about 80% of the ELSs that we searched for.


Only Findings Drawn from Scientific Experiments Are Valid.

Visit any good museum and you will see a collection of testimonies that this assertion is not true. Much of science consists of observation, measurement, recording and categorization-without any scientific experiment being conducted. Rocks are weighed, chemically analyzed for their composition, and measured on a hardness scale. Fossil samples are tested for age by various dating methods. No experiment was conducted, and yet science is steadily advanced by these approaches. We are taking the same approach to Bible codes. We assess them in terms of their relative rarity or commonness and also factor all of this into the odds that an entire cluster (or one similar to it) could appear by chance. By so doing, the scientific study of Bible codes is advanced.

Many skeptics would have us believe that the only way to do anything scientific is to conduct an experiment. But experiments are, by their very nature, designed to test the operation of some universal law. If Bible codes are valid, they may well not be the result of some universal law, but rather of intentional, unique placement.

To say that the only way to properly evaluate Bible codes is to conduct an experiment is a bit like saying that the only way to find out whether any dinosaur bones exist is to conduct an experiment. Randomly pick 1,000 different locations and dig pits five feet wide by five feet long by five feet deep, and see if you find any dinosaur bones. That's no way to determine whether any dinosaur bones exist. The way to determine that is to go to a site where someone claims to have found dinosaur bones and to examine those bones and dig for more. That's the kind of research we are doing with codes.


Bible Code Digest's Hebrew is Improper.

Dr. Nathan Jacobi, physicist, Hebrew teacher and 25-year resident of Israel, has accepted the appropriateness of the Hebrew spelling and grammar we use. Dr. Jacobi, a self-described secular Jew, is eminently qualified to opine on these issues.


We Couldn't Duplicate Your ELS Findings.

Our research was conducted using Bible Codes 2024 software, which was produced by Computronic Corporation in Savyon, Israel. This software uses the Koren version of the Hebrew Bible, which is widely considered the most accurate version available today. There are some letter differences between the Koren version and other versions.


If nothing else, a common sense look at the comparisons in this article should overcome these possible technicalities.

Even if you remove some of the pieces of evidence because you don't agree with their appropriateness, or we have perhaps made some error, there is so much evidence remaining that the conclusions are the same. The Isaiah 53 cluster is real.




CLICK HERE back to the beginning or on a link below to continue:

  • Comparing Clusters First of all, how does the Hanukah cluster compare to a truly significant example such as the Isaiah 53 cluster? And what do they look like when shown as matrices?

  • Comparing ELSs Just take a look at the huge number of ELSs in the Isaiah 53 cluster compared with the seven valid Hanukah ELSs.

  • Odds See the truly astonishing odds that codes from both sources would appear where they do by chance.

  • Compactness How close are these codes to each other? We compared the remarkable compactness of the Isaiah 53 cluster with the War and Peace cluster.

  • In Hebrew We also did a very illuminating side-by-side comparison between the Hebrew spellings of words in each cluster.

  • Curiosities There are some other very unusual aspects of the Isaiah 53 cluster, including mind-boggling word patterns far more intricate and extensive than the Hanukah codes.

  • Meanings We've also shown explanations of the Isaiah 53 terms in the cluster.

  • Anticipating Skeptics And finally, we've tried to anticipate how the skeptics might respond to this report.













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Code Skeptics' Arguments Trashed

Ever since the first Bible codes were announced, skeptics have been saying, "Oh, well, you can also find codes like that in books like War and Peace and Moby Dick."

We took the time to examine this notion and the best example of it that the skeptics have been able to come up with. The results of our research have completely blown away their theory.
Click here to see for yourself.

NEW: Second Study Undermines
Skeptics' Main Objection
to Codes
Click here for report


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