Mysterious Hebrew Codes by Grant R Jeffrey
- as presented by Guy Cramer, on The Triunity Report.
Regimet kommenterer: Vi har valgt ut dette uformelle notatet som en grei og instruktiv matematisk belysning, skjønt vi ikke vil underskrive på for mye av skribentens teologiske videreføringer.
En håper snart å kunne tilby et norsk resymé.
Pt. 1: Problems with math - finding "codes" in texts.
Pt. 2: Problems with language - phrases and words
Pt. 3: Problems with arguments - now who´s capsizing?
Pt. 4: Problems with philosphy and theology - if it where right, what would
it say about God?
Pt. 5: Conclusion
Pt. 1: Problems with math - finding "codes" in texts.
I´ve gone through this whole "Mysterious Hebrew Codes " thing and here are
some of my thoughts on it. I think first it´s important to get a grasp on
what these people are doing, mechanistically, to arrive at their "codes".
This gives us as readers a chance to estimate what the probability of finding
a similar code in a random text might actually be. One thing I immediately
noticed is that while impressive numbers are constantly thrown about ("The researchers calculated the probability of these key words occurring
by chance ... was less than one chance in seventeen billion"), there is never an example how these probabilities are calculated. And
exactly this is what we have to do!
Another strange thing is that the "improbability" of the whole thing seems
to be somewhat uncertain. At one point, it is said of the entire study, "The odds against these biblical codes occurring by random chance are one
in several billion.", but then, again of the entire work, that the merit of its results lies "in the unusually small odds (less than 1 in 62,500) that they were
due to chance". This is a disturbing disparity by a factor of 100,000!
What the bible experts looked for in this study were "equidistant letter sequences", or ELS. An example for an ELS is found in the phrase, "in the passage of Deuteronomy". If you omit the spaces, you will find with a distance of 1, GOD: "inthepassaGeOfDeuteronomy". You find the word GOD if you start at the first G in the phrase, and then always skip one letter and read on.
This is exactly what Weissmandl, Witztum et al. did in principle.To simplify
the matter, they used computers that "enabled the researchers to examine every possible combination occurring
in any of hundreds of possible intervals throughout the millions of Hebrew
letters in the Old Testament".
So in our example, if they didn´t find "GOD" or whatever other word they
were searching for by skipping one letter, they´d skip more letters until they found it:
Once the computer found the first letters in Hebrew of "hammer," it would look for the second letter at various intervals or spaces between letters. If the program couldn't locate the second letter of the target word "Hammer" following the first letter at a two-space interval, it would then search at a three-space interval, then a four-space interval, etc. Once it located the second letter at, say, the twelve-space interval, it would then look for the third letter at the same twelve-space interval, and so on... The sophisticated computers could examine every one of millions of possible combinations to discover encoded words that no human could ever have found manually, including such words as Hitler, Berlin and Sadat.
Now let´s spend a few moments of thought on probabilities. For example, I found the word GOD encoded in the text of "Mysterious Hebrew Codes" for a total of four times with a spacing of 1, and also four times with a spacing of four. I found the word EVIL encoded once with a spacing of six. How probable or improbable are these examples of encoding? Would I find them in other texts, too?
How should we go about calculating this?
Well, consider rolling dice. As everybody knows, the probability of rolling one individual number is one in six, if you aren´t using loaded pieces. Or, p=0.166.. or 16.7% for, say, a six. The probability of rolling two sixes consecutively is calculated by multiplication: it is one in thirty-six. The probability of rolling nine sixes in a row, consecutively, is one sixth to the ninth power, or 9.92 E -08, as a calculator will spit it out in scientific notation. This means 9.92 times ten to the minus eighth power. By dividing 1 by this value, you get to the popular value of "one in so many...", it is a probability of one in 10,077,696. - "one in ten million". I mention this because it happen to me while playing D&D.
So what about GOD and EVIL in "Mysterious Hebrew Codes", or finding "hammer", Hitler, Berlin or Sadat in the Torah? Well, to decide whether we should regard these "encodings" as special or normal, we can try to calculate what the probabilty would be of finding them in a text of equal length that consists of random letters. The length of "Mysterious Hebrew Codes", with all spaces and punctuation removed - as Weissmandl, Witztum et al. did - is about 39000 characters. The Torah is "millions of letters" long, as stated above. I don´t know the exact number, so we´ll assume the minimum of two million that is implied by "millions".
So let´s calculated the probability of finding a select word encoded in a random text of 2,000,000 letters. Let´s assume this text is written in Hebrew. This is a language I do not know. I found that the web site "Sounds of Israel - the Hebrew Alphabet" lists 22 Hebrew letters. So we are rolling 22-sided dice, here.
Let´s start by calculating the probability of finding a four letter word, like YHWH (Hebrew writing is pretty short on vowels). In our random text, the probability that the very first letter is Y is one in 22.
Let´s just imagine that this were the case. What is the probability to find
an H, say, when skipping one letter? This is like rolling the dice again.
It is one in 22 again. And so forth for the W and the H. So the chances
of finding the HWH spaced at an interval of one after the first Y are one
in 22 times 22 times 22, or one in 10,648. But the chance of the very first letter actually being a Y (which we just assumed for this example) is of course
also one in 22, so the entire probability of finding YHWH encoded with interval
one beginning with the first letter is one in 22 to the fourth power, or
1 in 234,256.
That is not a very high probability.
But of course it´s not only allowed to search for YHWH encoded with interval one! We can look for interval two, or three, etc. (see above quotes). The text of "Hebrew Codes" mentions intervals up to 500, but in the tables I found far higher values used, up to 8,000 and higher. This suggest a search algorithm that doesn´t quit before 10,000.
So now we have a lottery with a one in 234,000 chance of winning, but we have 10,000 tries. What is the chance of winning now? It is tempting to just go and multiply the probability by 10,000, but that is wrong.
If you roll the dice seven times, what is the chance of getting a six at least once? If you just go and muliply 1/6 by 7, you get a probability of seven in six, which is mathematically of course nonsensical. The problem has to be approached differently. The probability of NOT getting a six with each throw is five in six. What is the probability of NOT having a six after rolling six times? 5/6 to the sixth power, or about one in three. So the chance of GETTING the six, at least once, is the remainder to one - two in three.
We can calculate the probability for the encoding in the same way. What is the probability of NOT finding those four letters with any of the 10,000 possible intervals? It is (one minus the probability of getting it for one interval), taken to the power of possible intervals. Or, (1-1/234,256)^10,000; or 0.99999573^10,000.
As you see, the probabilty of NOT finding the encoding in a single try is very high: greater than 99.999 percent. After 10.000 tries, it´s 0.9582, or just short of 96 percent. That means that the probability of finding the encoding is now somewhat above 4 percent for the 10,000 different intervals - while for only one interval, it was only 0.0004%. (You will find that the increase of probability in this example is almost the same result you would get by using the wrong method of muliplication - but that´s because we´re dealing with still rather low probabilities. Once we get into higher values, the difference becomes significant)
Well, 4 percent still isn´t much of a probability, after all we´re only talking about one word. But this is not all. Remember we have a text that is 2,000,000 letters long. What we have looked at so far is only the probability of finding the encoding starting from one of those letters!
So how many Y´s can we expect in that long text? Well, if ever 22nd letter is on average a Y, that gives us roughly 91000 Y´s.
One little problem is, if we start from the last Y in the text, we can´t complete our search, because given the highest possible interval - 10,000 - we need 30,000 more letters that aren´t there. The last Y that we can use for *all* intervals would be at position 1,970,000; however, we could still use later Y´s for many of the intervals, e.g. one at 1,985,000 for all intervals up to 5.000. Since that is half of the intervals we can use, let´s just shorten the relevant part of our text to 1,985,000 letters to correct for this deviation. In this text, we can expect roughly 90,000 Y´s.
90,000 Y´s means 90,000 starting points for our search. And we know that for each letter, the search has over 4% chance of being successful, and will fail with ca. 96% probability. So what is the chance that the search will STILL fail, after 90,000 trials, each with a probability of 95.82% of failing? (Now we have a lottery with a 96%chance of drwing a blank, but we have 90,000 tries!)
It´s 0.9582^90,000 - or - what?
Sorry, my calculator gives in at this point. The floating point accuracy is not high enough.
With just 10,000 tries instead of 90,000 - a search accounting only for 11% of the book - I get a probability of about one in 10^185 of NOT finding the word. This means that the actual chance of finding YHWH encoded in that book SOMEWHERE in the 2,000,000 leters, in SOME interval of Equidistant Letter Sequences, is something like
99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 percent. Give or take a few of those nines, it doesn´t matter, does it?
This surely cannot be called improbable anymore. And remember, this was calculated only for 10,000 Y´s, simply because my calculator gives in for higher values - which means, that it is so UNAVOIDABLE finding this encoding that my calculator´s microprocessor cannot express any number different than probability one (or certainty) for this. Strictly mathematically that is of course not true, but I´m not going to buy a new calculator because of that. The result is:
And let me just add one thing - this calculation even vastly underestimates the torrential frequency, the unavoidable abundance of such codes, because I calculated only for forward searches. But "Hebrew Codes" also uses backward masking, that is - intervals with negative values. That opens a whole new can of worms, to be more precise, it drives up our initial number of tries to 20,000
So we get this: (1-1/234,256)^20,000 = 0.9181, i.e. 8% probability of finding
the code starting from one individual letter.
Now let´s make an equation to find out after how many start letters the
code becomes so common that the probability of NOT finding it hits one in
a million (i.e., 10^-6)
10^-6 = 0,918 ^ X
Where X is the number of start letters (e.g. Y´s) we need to get there.
The solution is:
log(10^-6) / log (0.918) = X, or
-6 / -0.03707... = X , or
161.817... = X
Round that to 162. That means we need 162 starting letters to make the occurrence
of the code so flabbergastingly, stupendously, overwhelmingly COMMON that
there is only a 0.0001 % chance of not finding it. Remember we can expect to find our starting letter, whichever
one it is, about 90,000 times. Therefore, after searching through only 162
/ 90,000 = 0.18 % of the book, it is already getting well nigh IMPOSSIBLE
not to trip over the "code". Or, said in another way, if the book has FIVE
HUNDRED AND SIXTY chapters, looking in just one of them is with exceedingly high probabilty enough to be swamped by the code. No wonder people find "codes" by looking only at Genesis;
no wonder there are even "codes" in the text of "Hebrew Codes" itself!
In truth, we should have to expect either divine or satanic intervention if there were NO codes!
The whole trick is, that although we start out with a very low probability (one in 200,000), we have lots of tries for each and every Y (20,000 intervals), AND we have lots of Y´s in the first place (90,000, that is). Combinatorics and probability usually work with exponents, and they are damn hard to imagine intuitively. That´s why it´s so important to go through some of those calculations by oneself.
One thing I want to mention is this - NOWHERE in the Mysterious Hebrew Codes is a "control experiment" like this offered - not even as an addendum link for the mathematically interested. Of course, that is a basic necessity if they want to make their claims believeable. Everyone can check my calculations above, and correct me if I´ve made a mistake somewhere (which is quite probable :). Since Mysterious Hebrew Codes offers no calculations, their claims cannot be investigated by anyone - and to me become suspicious.
One point that may be raised against my example calculations is that they are not a very faithful representation of an actual text in a real language:
However, what I set out to prove is that assuming a random chain of letters (i.e. complete, designless nonsense) we find the appearence of codes to be inescapable. This means that the appearance of codes is no measure at all of design. Finding lots of "codes" says nothing about design. Additionally, both effects mentioned above cancel out in a large text searched for codes with intervals -10,000 to 10,000: Letters that are dozens or hundreds of positions apart are essentially fully independent; and though it is true that you will find less X´es than E´s in an English text, when looking for codes, you will also be searching for more E´s than X´es; so the effect cancels out.
Pt. 2: Problems with language - phrases and words
Now, admittedly...
The Mysterious Hebrew Codes don´t provide only individual words. They lob entire phrases at us, like "will be activated" - this is supposed to be a prophecy of Scud missiles fired at Israel.
Doesn´t this lower the probabilities again, if we´re looking for whole phrases?
Well, actually not. Hebrew Codes itself explains "will be activated" as meaning, "fired off". That could be "fired at" too. Or "launched". "Ignited" "Started" "Put to use" "Deployed" etc. With a moment´s thought, one realizes that there are so many equivalent ways of saying things in short phrases that the probability of finding something vaguely compatible will even rise with progression from word to phrase! How many ways are there of saying, God is Great!. Especially when you allow very nebulous formulations. Hebrew Codes states specifically and emphatically that the programs do not themselves find phrases and words. You have to EXPLICITLY and LITERALLY enter the search strings: they let " the program look for the name of the person or the event and check to see if the codes contain the information".
So when they started searching for words or phrases connected to the Gulf War, they had to enter phrases they thought up.In this connection, Hebrew Codes itself uses the word, "arbitrarily". Of course, if they did not find the phrase "launched a medium-range surface to surface ballistic missile" they didn´t conclude that no information about the Gulf War is "encoded". They hacked in more and more phrases until they hit paydirt.
And other examples show they even use different languages: they find the plain word "viruses" encoded - and additionally, "viruses - in Hebrew".
If they list "in Hebrew" separately, this means they also obviously searched for the term in other languages. That, of course, means double tries! - and double trouble with the probabilities.! Another can of worms!
What is the Hebrew word for "virus?". The term denotes a specific reproducing agent of infection that is distinguishable from bacteria by a number of ways. The term has been used in this way since ca. 1925. What it actually means, is "poison", in Latin, a language of similar age as Hebrew.
There is of course no original Latin term for a concept of 20th century medical science, nor is there a Biblical Hebrew one. So what did they look for? The ancient Hebrew word for "poison", or the modern Hebrew word used for the medical/biological phenomenon we mean today?
Similar problems apply to all the other non-Hebrew terms (especially German ones) they look for. They admit to using written forms of Hebrew phonetic renditions of German terms. Just as many phrases transcribed from languages with other alphabets to English have many alternative spellings (just consider Beijing/Peking; Moskva, Moscow etc.), English or German phrases cannot be unambiguously transcribed to Hebrew.
Spellings people finally settle on - be it what Germans agree to spell Hebrew
terms like, or Hebrews on how to spell German utterances - are defined by
arbitrary convention. Today most Western languages spell the prophet of
Islam as "Mohammed", but not so long ago, "Mohameth" and "Muhammad" were
also in use. The problem is obvious, but not even mentioned in "Codes".
One other thing that "Hebrew Codes" makes a big fuss of is "word pairs".
This is the idea that certain "encoded" terms (which we by now know inevitably
MUST be there, with that colossal, suprahimalayan 99.999...999...999 % probability)
do not just occur, but occur together in some way, and should thus add additional "significance" to the so called
codes - a significance that we know to be initially virtually zero. So what
do we get - "word pairs" like:
"light beams/the candles/and burn"
"King of Sweden/Gustav/The Swedish"
Gibberish! And what is it that supposedly "links" these "pairs" (actually triplets, but let´s not be pedantic) of words? The first three terms have intervals of 975, 7 and 1. The second triplet has -2890, 6504, and -7.
Sorry, I fail to see the "obvious" link. They just dredged lots of words
up, and heaped those together that seemed to relate to similar things. There
is no relationship between the "codes".
Pt. 3: Problems with arguments - now who´s capsizing?
I could go on for hours, but why not draw the line here. There are enough
other things to discuss about the whole style of argument used in "Hebrew
Codes". Some claims raised by Grant R Jeffrey:
To those who would casually ignore these odds and suggest that they are not that impressive, consider this equivalent scenario. Imagine that someone blindfolded you and laid out before you a mountain of one billion pills loaded with cyanide. In the whole pile of pills is one pill that contains sugar. Would you blindly swallow one of these pills by chance if you knew that only one pill contained sugar while all of the rest would result in instant death by cyanide poisoning?
No, Mr Grant R Jeffrey, it´s not like that at all. It´s like taking a billion
pills, and throwing big handfuls of them all across a pavement the size
of a football field, and then crawling over it going "ooh" and "aah" at
every heap of pills that has a "pattern". It´s like rolling bones, seeing
creatures in the clouds, or the man in the moon. It is the performance of
a modern-day haruspex.
Another claim of Jeffrey´s:
These scientific conclusions didn't just rock the boat of the scientific
community, they capsized it. ... The incredible data demolishes forever
the false claim by liberal scholars and skeptics that the Bible was written
and edited by uninspired men...
This as least tells us whom he considers his enemies to demolish and capsize
- those devils, the liberals; those pestilent skeptics; that dastardly conspiracy
called the "scientific community". Well, good luck with your fight, Jeffrey.
What I see demolished is the notion that "Hebrew Codes" have any significance.
Several critics attacked the author's argument and data in ways that revealed
they either failed to grasp the actual statistical method used to detect
the Hebrew codes or they didn't understand the rigorous methodology that
eliminated the possibility that this phenomenon had occurred by pure random
chance
Jeffrey - Explain the "actual method"! You own an ENTIRE WEB SITE, called www.grantjeffrey.com ( a site that contains things like God´s plan for your financial Success for only $13.95), why not place a link and just LIST the "original and highly complex" programs! Put down step for step what you call "methodology" - or is it just numerology?
"this phenomenon has nothing to do with numerology", he claims, but then rants...
Bible students know that the number fifty is very significant in Scripture. For example, God commanded Israel to free their slaves and return family lands that had been pledged to a lender on the fiftieth Year of Jubilee
Sure, and forty is significant, as in days and nights, and so are five, six, seven and seventeen and thirteen and umpteen and carrageen ... what else is new, and what else is this than...NUMEROLOGY?!?
Jeffrey says:
A reviewer insisted they attempt to find codes in a Hebrew translation of Tolstoy's famous novel War and Peace, because it was the same length as the Book of Genesis. However, the phenomenon was not present in War and Peace; nor any other modern Hebrew writing.
Really? Did he look himself? I doubt it. What is "the phenomenon" - after
all, there are "codes" everywhere, just remember the examples of God and
Evil, in a text of only 39000 letters! And guess why God came up more often
than evil, for intervals up to six - right!, evil has one letter more, so
should be expected to occur 26 times less commonly in an English text. Hebrew
texts, with less letters, will yield an even greater prodigy of codes!
This study has been republished in several other respected scholarly journals recently
Gotcha. I don´t know what Jeffrey´s notion of a scholarly journal is, but it´s not a scientific journal he means. Scientific journals don´t work that way, or otherwise any individual scientist could flood the presses, and lastly fill the textbooks, with his research - whether correct or not - by just republishing the exact same thing over and over again. But real scientific journals don´t work that way. They all have clauses like this, in the part called "Guidelines for submission of manuscripts" or "Note for authors":
Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it represents original work not previously published, that it is not being considered elsewhere for publication, and that if accepted for publication, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in any language, wothout the consent of editor and publisher (that applies to textbooks, basically).
This quotation is taken from a rather medium-sized scientific journal, Journal of Neurogenetics, which is in no way especially severe in its demands.
Jeffrey´s argumentation is full of misrepresentations and amateurish trickery.
But that´s not all.
Pt. 4: Problems with philosphy and theology - if it where right, what would
it say about God?
Let´s just imagine for a moment that these "Hebrew Codes" really meant what Jeffrey wants them to. I want to state at this point that I do not even consider the question whether these "codes" do actually exist in the Hebrew text or not, I give the benefit of doubt and argue that, even if nobody had looked for them, we have to expect them to be there.
But what if they were the work of God - what would this tell us about that God? Jeffrey says:
I have often been asked by Jews about why the Bible's prophecies do not say anything about the Holocaust, the worst event in the history of God's Chosen People. Now we can see that God included these coded words beneath the text of the Bible describing this terrible time of persecution.
Uuh, what a consolation. Jeffrey tells us we can only get those codes out of the Torah with computers. Computers conveniently popped up on the stage of history after the curtain closed on WW II, and the evil tragedy of the Holocaust was completely irreversible. But God put that tragedy into the Bible 2,500 years before, we are asked to believe? Remeber, God had a Covenant with these people - and centuries before Jesus was born, millennia before Hitler was born - he decided minutely on the exact persons, places and numbers of the Holocaust, in order to bring the people of this Covenant to the very brink of destruction.
Where does this leave free will? If God planned it all 2500 years before it happened, then Hitler was neither a rabidly evil man, nor a minion of Satan, but nothing less than a remote-controlled tool of God! (And sickeningly enough, Hitler actually thought of himself as guided by Providence!)
The same applies to the Gulf War and all the other events "prophecied" in
the codes. If God has determined from millennia ago that Saddam Hussein
would be Dictator of Iraq, and Schwartzkopf would lead troops against him
- then both Hussein and Schwartzkopf have never made either a decision of
free will, or moral choice of evil or good. There were times in the 19th century, when - ironically - radical atheists misunderstood the science
of their day to prescribe a "strict determinism" in which every act of man
was nothing but mechanical necessity in a clockworld universe, emotions
meant nothing more than the unfeeling motions of a second hand, and free-will
was not only nonexistent, but hilarious as a concept. The world Jeffrey
proposes is just as bleak and empty of sense - the only difference is that
he insists that God built the clock and set it going, but it is a clock
nonetheless. Every motion, every decision, every deed, every emotion is
mechanical,fossilized, crystallized, read out of a ROM chip. No free will
- no choice of good or evil - thus, no sin - no justice. What a world is
that?
Yes, there certainly are ELS codes in the Torah. It is possible to make a reasonable judgement on their significance, based on mathematic consideratiojns. This judgement is clearly negative.
Yes, possibly there is such a thing as a God. It is not possible to make a reasonable, mathematically based judgement of the value of the speculation that "there is a God". This leaves us with a personal philosophical and moral judgement.
Maybe, if there is a God, it is somehow similar to that described in the Jewish Torah, or the Christian bible. My subjective judgement of the probability of this being so is similarly negative as the judgement on the significance of the "Mysterious Hebrew Codes"; but the one is a philosophical and moral judgement, which is mine alone - just as your so different one is yours alone - while the other is mathematical.
So maybe if there is a God, and maybe if this God is akin to what Christians worship - then ... maybe ... there is some elusive way of even proving this God. I, personally, am almost 100% sure - like, 99% plus just as much nines as I can type before getting carpal tunnel syndrome - that there cannot be such a proof.
But if I am wrong, and there is one - then,
It is not this.
And I dare venture 100% on that.
Even if it is only my brain which is just incapable of describing a probability so infinitesimal as the probability that gibberish like this could be proof of a Divine Creator - just like my calculator is incapable of describing the tiny gap that separates the probability of finding a code in the Torah from absolute certainty.
The original text of the Hebrew Codes presentation at Triunity is here
Also, look at www.grantjeffrey.com