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"Bible Code" studies are silly!
#1
February 17, 2008

DISREGARD ANY ARGUMENT BASED ON So-Called ???BIBLE CODES???.

The true study of the Peshitta text is not a mathematical or scrabble-like game.

As I reported in a submission to the old forum (that got zapped), Dave Bauscher???s Bible Code ???studies??? and the ???Divine Contact??? theory are completely meaningless.

There is really NOTHING miraculous about Dave???s 95 ???divine names??? study. What he did (and I reproduced) was a simple statistical analysis of the variance of observed short words or groups of Aramaic characters (which he called ???divine names??? ) in an exhaustive sorting and manipulation of equally spaced Aramaic alphabetical characters using a complex computer program called Codefinder and a high-speed computer. All he found in his study of 95 short words (???divine names???) is that the millions of observations that he made with his Peshitto text were MORE VARIED THAN EXPECTED FOR AN IDEAL THEORETICAL DISTRIBUTION of letters. The ideal distribution upon which he based his analysis assumes that the separate letters of the alphabet were perfectly randomly distributed in the text. Of course, they are not. Skipping between letters does not create randomness out of orderliness because the underlying words do not have random letter patterns.

In Dave Bauscher???s study about half of the ???divine names??? were more prevalent than expected and about half were less prevalent. Nothing surprising about these results. However, as I previously explained, their variance about the expected mean values were sometimes much larger than predicted from the ideal theory for random letters. A few were much more than the expected average number and a few were much less than the expected average. Dave Bauscher reasoned that the larger variance than expected was a Godly miracle. The hypothesis that he framed was that God intentionally put some names in much more frequently than expected and intentionally put some names in much less frequently than expected. The natural increase in variance caused by the non-random organization of letters in the text he interpreted as a divine contact. All I found looking at his data was a typical Gaussian distribution of observations having a larger than ideal variance.

Alas, all Dave observed was a typical Gaussian (the so-called ???normal???) distribution of observations having a larger than ideal variance. About half of the ???divine names??? were somewhat more frequent than expected for an ideal sample from an ideal random distribution and about half were less frequent. Some were significantly more common and about an equal number were significantly less common than would be expected for samples from a group of perfectly random alphabetical letters. That???s just what you would expect by pure chance since the letters in the text are not perfectly random. The somewhat larger variance is not miraculous, but the result of having a series of letters that are not randomly distributed because they are formed into words and groups of words using the Aramaic language. His ???control??? was a perfectly random distribution of letters, so it agreed with the expectation based on a random distribution of letters. He also wrote that his analysis of a Hebrew version ???War and Peace??? did not give a similar results. But with over 3.1 million characters ???War and Peace??? has almost ten times the characters to juggle and sift through than does the Peshitto, so it might be expected to yield closer to perfect randomness, and a translation from Russian would be expected to have other different word/letter structure properties. [But using the same foolish ???Bible code ??? methods, someone has claimed that there was a miraculous find of words related to the Candles of Chanukah, hidden in the first 78064 letters of the Hebrew translation of War and Peace, see <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/candles/">http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/candles/</a><!-- m --> Maybe Dave can find some divine names in that part of War and Peace.]

Previously Dave claimed that this natural phenomena proved that the specific version of the 1905, 1920 Peshitto with 461,094 letters was the perfect original text of the New Testament. I suggested to him that he would get basically the same result even if he removed a chapter from the text. Now I think he is reporting that he got the same basic result with every version of the Peshitto/Peshitta that he tried. Obviously, the so-called ???divine names??? study does not provide any ???Bible Codes???. So, the text with 461,094 letters is not necessarily special.

The so called ???long codes??? are constructed as in a game of ???Scrabble???. Dave used the Codefinder computer program to create a long string of letters to search for so-called ???long codes???, a series of letters that created a phrase. Using a seed word or phrase, such as Jesus Messiah, he searched the long string of letters generated by the Codefinder for a phrase that made sense. He found some! Since he did not search for or expect these particular ???long codes???, finding a readable series of letters among the millions of letters dealt by the Codefinder has no statistical significance at all. It is like seeing the perfect image of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich. It???s a interesting finding, but not statistically unlikely since that is what was found by chance. Finding something you are not expecting has a probability of 100%! He could search any version of the Peshitto/Peshitta and find some other ???long codes???, but what a waste of time and talent.

The true study of the Peshitta text is not a mathematical or scrabble-like game.

DISREGARD ANY ARGUMENT BASED ON So-Called ???BIBLE CODES???.

Sincerely,

Otto
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#2
Shlama Otto,

Very interesting.

Ya'aqub

ograabe Wrote:February 17, 2008

DISREGARD ANY ARGUMENT BASED ON So-Called ???BIBLE CODES???.

The true study of the Peshitta text is not a mathematical or scrabble-like game.

As I reported in a submission to the old forum (that got zapped), Dave Bauscher???s Bible Code ???studies??? and the ???Divine Contact??? theory are completely meaningless.

There is really NOTHING miraculous about Dave???s 95 ???divine names??? study. What he did (and I reproduced) was a simple statistical analysis of the variance of observed short words or groups of Aramaic characters (which he called ???divine names??? ) in an exhaustive sorting and manipulation of equally spaced Aramaic alphabetical characters using a complex computer program called Codefinder and a high-speed computer. All he found in his study of 95 short words (???divine names???) is that the millions of observations that he made with his Peshitto text were MORE VARIED THAN EXPECTED FOR AN IDEAL THEORETICAL DISTRIBUTION of letters. The ideal distribution upon which he based his analysis assumes that the separate letters of the alphabet were perfectly randomly distributed in the text. Of course, they are not. Skipping between letters does not create randomness out of orderliness because the underlying words do not have random letter patterns.

In Dave Bauscher???s study about half of the ???divine names??? were more prevalent than expected and about half were less prevalent. Nothing surprising about these results. However, as I previously explained, their variance about the expected mean values were sometimes much larger than predicted from the ideal theory for random letters. A few were much more than the expected average number and a few were much less than the expected average. Dave Bauscher reasoned that the larger variance than expected was a Godly miracle. The hypothesis that he framed was that God intentionally put some names in much more frequently than expected and intentionally put some names in much less frequently than expected. The natural increase in variance caused by the non-random organization of letters in the text he interpreted as a divine contact. All I found looking at his data was a typical Gaussian distribution of observations having a larger than ideal variance.

Alas, all Dave observed was a typical Gaussian (the so-called ???normal???) distribution of observations having a larger than ideal variance. About half of the ???divine names??? were somewhat more frequent than expected for an ideal sample from an ideal random distribution and about half were less frequent. Some were significantly more common and about an equal number were significantly less common than would be expected for samples from a group of perfectly random alphabetical letters. That???s just what you would expect by pure chance since the letters in the text are not perfectly random. The somewhat larger variance is not miraculous, but the result of having a series of letters that are not randomly distributed because they are formed into words and groups of words using the Aramaic language. His ???control??? was a perfectly random distribution of letters, so it agreed with the expectation based on a random distribution of letters. He also wrote that his analysis of a Hebrew version ???War and Peace??? did not give a similar results. But with over 3.1 million characters ???War and Peace??? has almost ten times the characters to juggle and sift through than does the Peshitto, so it might be expected to yield closer to perfect randomness, and a translation from Russian would be expected to have other different word/letter structure properties. [But using the same foolish ???Bible code ??? methods, someone has claimed that there was a miraculous find of words related to the Candles of Chanukah, hidden in the first 78064 letters of the Hebrew translation of War and Peace, see <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/candles/">http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/candles/</a><!-- m --> Maybe Dave can find some divine names in that part of War and Peace.]

Previously Dave claimed that this natural phenomena proved that the specific version of the 1905, 1920 Peshitto with 461,094 letters was the perfect original text of the New Testament. I suggested to him that he would get basically the same result even if he removed a chapter from the text. Now I think he is reporting that he got the same basic result with every version of the Peshitto/Peshitta that he tried. Obviously, the so-called ???divine names??? study does not provide any ???Bible Codes???. So, the text with 461,094 letters is not necessarily special.

The so called ???long codes??? are constructed as in a game of ???Scrabble???. Dave used the Codefinder computer program to create a long string of letters to search for so-called ???long codes???, a series of letters that created a phrase. Using a seed word or phrase, such as Jesus Messiah, he searched the long string of letters generated by the Codefinder for a phrase that made sense. He found some! Since he did not search for or expect these particular ???long codes???, finding a readable series of letters among the millions of letters dealt by the Codefinder has no statistical significance at all. It is like seeing the perfect image of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich. It???s a interesting finding, but not statistically unlikely since that is what was found by chance. Finding something you are not expecting has a probability of 100%! He could search any version of the Peshitto/Peshitta and find some other ???long codes???, but what a waste of time and talent.

The true study of the Peshitta text is not a mathematical or scrabble-like game.

DISREGARD ANY ARGUMENT BASED ON So-Called ???BIBLE CODES???.

Sincerely,

Otto
Reply
#3
Shlama Otto,

You wrote: "All I found looking at his data was a typical Gaussian distribution of observations having a larger than ideal variance."

I have had a professional statistician determine otherwise. Have you had someone similarly qualified evaluate my data and come to your conclusion?
A Gaussian distribution is a normal bell shaped curve in which the following are true:
Quote:For a normally distributed data set, the empirical rule states that 68% of the data elements are within one standard deviation of the mean, 95% are within two standard deviations, and 99.7% are within three standard deviations. Graphically, this corresponds to the area under the curve as shown below for 1 and 2 standard deviations. The empirical rule is often stated simply as 68-95-99.7. Note how this ties in with the range rule of thumb, by stating that 95% of the data usually falls within two standard deviations of the mean.

The data from the Peshitta searches come nowhere near to fitting these normal patterns. 42% of the Standard deviations are greater than 3.0, whereas only 0.3% should be that large. I have Standard Deviations which exceed 15.0 and many are greater than 10.0. The results of the control are perfectly normal, with 0.27% of the Z Scores being 3.0 or more. The War and Peace edition I used is the same size as the Torah (307,804 letters), so it is somewhat smaller than The Peshitta NT. That is the largest alternate literary Hebrew text available for searching ELS's.

Otto, you simply don't know what you're talking about, and your anti code bias is shining through plainly for all to see. I don't think you can be objective about this subject, because you have made up your mind a priori that Bible codes cannot exist, no matter how much evidence exists to the contrary.

Ed Sherman has a very good book available which goes through hundreds of long codes and analyzes them statistically and gives the stat formulas and methods used. The book is Bible Code Bombshell He also takes on Brenadan McKay's purported debunk methods and quite conclusively domonstrates that McKay has not produced anything close to rivaling the long messages found and presented on Bible Code Digest's web site by code researchers PHD Physicist and Mathematician, as well as Hebrew expert,Nathan Jacobi, Moshe Shak and others (including lil' ole' me). McKay has produced a few 7 letter long codes and thinks this disproves Bible codes. We have found dozens of long code messages in long sentences over 40 letters long, many more than 100 letters long; several are several hundred letters long, in The Hebrew and Aramaic Testaments. The statistical probabilities of these occurring by chance are zero, and they have not been duplicated in any control text thus far.


Many Blessings,

Dave
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#4
I dont know why you bother responding to Otto's post. It most likely wasnt even his. Havent you noticed a majority of his posts are ASKING questions, never answering? I think he was insecure about this debunking ARTICLE that he saw from ANOTHER poster, posted it on here in hopes to find assurance and support from the fine scholars on this forum for fear it was true, and is now smiling that you have now retaliated and his mustard seed of faith is now no longer under attack. Otto is full of insecurities and questions. I know I"m not supposed to judge, but that's what it seems like. <!-- sConfusedtern: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/stern.gif" alt="Confusedtern:" title="Stern" /><!-- sConfusedtern: -->
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#5
February 18, 2008

Dear Dave,

My training and experience in statistics are quite solid.

Your statistician apparently did not carefully read what I wrote and you apparently did not understand it.

What I clearly wrote concerning the distribution of your observations is "...their variance about the expected mean values were sometimes much larger than predicted from the ideal theory for random letters." "Dave Bauscher reasoned that the larger variance than expected was a Godly miracle." THIS IS APPARENTLY STILL YOUR POSITION.

What I clearly wrote and you quoted was "All I found looking at his data was a typical Gaussian distribution of observations having a larger than ideal variance."


However, as I clearly wrote, this is the natural result of "...the natural increase in variance caused by the non-random organization of letters in the text...." Don't you get it? The variance is not ideal but rather is several times larger than the variance for observations that would result from a population of letters that were perfectly random. Your assumed variance is wrong because you assumnptions are wrong. As long as you insist on using an unrealistic theoretical variance that does not apply to this real situation you will reach the same incorrect conclusion.

"Alas, all Dave observed was a typical Gaussian (so-called "normal") distribution of observations having a larger than ideal variance."

Later this week I will calculate the variance correction factor and demonstrate that the results you observed fit quite well into the resulting Gaussian bell-shaped curve with corrected variance.

Sincerely,

Otto

To Whom It May COncern: I, Otto am the author of this post and I approved this message.
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#6
Shlama Otto,

You wrote
Quote::"All I found looking at his data was a typical Gaussian distribution of observations having a larger than ideal variance."

That is a self contradiction. A Gaussian distribution, by definition,cannot have the over 160 large variances from expected results I have found. Gaussian distribution is a normal bell shaped curve. Mine is anything but that. The data have variances which are almost 5 times what is expected, on average. Such a large standard deviation represents a one in 1.6 million probability. 42% of the variances are 3 standard deviations or greater. That is 140 times the expected number of 3 standard deviations.It is simply incorrect for you to call this a Gaussian distribution. A Gaussian curve would have had 1 SD of 3 or more, just like the control data has.

You may not like the way I did the experiment, but that does not change the data results I have found. The control data was generated in exactly the same way
as was the Peshitta data, and the control data is Gaussian in nature. You seem to think that abnormal Peshitta results proves that I analyzed the text "improperly". Who sets the standard and parameters by which one should search for coded information? Otto?

We've been throgh this before , Otto, and I know where you're going with this. Even if you sum up the numbers for each search word, you still get highly abnormal results overall. The results would still not be Gaussian. And you can't change the results by not liking them. They are what they are and will remain what they are. If you want to discredit them, repeat the experiment on another non Bible text of similar size with approx. the same number of data and show the same abnormal non Gaussian results. Get your feet wet and do the hard work, then perhaps you will appreciate what I have done.

I also did a more exhaustive text using Randy Ingermanson's (PHD in Physics) Codecracker software for the Peshitta. It tests for Hebrew or Greek language patterns in a series of skip texts. Randy claims in his book Who Wrote The Bible Code? that the software shows that there is probably no Bible Code in the Hebrew Bible or in The Greek NT. The problem with his experiment was that he tested less than 1% of the possible skip texts (skipping 1-150 letters for each search). I have tested the Hebrew and Aramaic Testaments with his software, at skips 1-5000. The results are practically identical to my Codefinder experiment. Codecracker also analyses the data statistically, and about 42% of the Z scores are greater than 3.0 for 3 Western versions of The Peshitta. This validates and confirms the first results. I further did a test on 10 individual NT Peshitta books in Codecracker. Those results also agree with the other two experiments and yield equivalent Z Score results.

All of the above led me to believe in 2003 that The Peshitta is the original inspired NT text and that the Greek is a translation of it. This I verified by several more exhaustive Aramaic-Greek word comparisons throughout the respective Peshitta-Greek Testaments, to see which was truly the translation, by using the Hebrew Bible and LXX as a model by which to compare. The results are also in my book,
Quote:Divine Contact
. There is also an analysis of conjunctions & personal pronouns in the Greek & Aramaic, compared to the LXX-Hebrew model.

All ten analyses essentially say the same thing, but I would not have gotten to step 10 without the codes experiment in step 1. Step 1 strongly suggested The Peshitta was written by God. Step 2 confirmed it. Step 3 also confirmed it. Steps 4 (Historical evidence, Internal Greek & Aramaic, Linguistics,several Primacy tests) thru 10 confirmed the secondary premise that the Greek was translated from The Peshitta.
All this is in my book.
Thank you Otto, for your rigorous skepticism. It is understandable and healthy, in the face of claims such as I have made for codes in The Peshitta, and I welcome it. It can only strengthen the pro arguments if the phenomenon is real. If it is not real, then the skeptics will find that out, and will have done us all a service.
It is interesting, is it not, that Ingermanson's skepticism and software which he claims refuted the codes, has actually verified them, when used to more comprehensively search for ELS's?

Sherman's statistics have all been double checked with a PHD statistician professor in Southern Oregon State University. The stat formulas have been determined to be correctly applied to the ELS searches. Sherman used the same methods to analyse my results as he did his own and others in the Hebrew Bible.

Have You have read Sherman's book or Satinover's book Otto?

I think it behooves you to read them before making up your mind in general, to the effect that codes do not exist in The Bible.


All my experimental results are available to everyone for viewing and download at my web site: aramaicnt.com

The exact Peshitta module I used in Codefinder is also available at my web site in a zip file, along with 2 other Peshitta versions, including the Khabouris ms.
The modules have all spaces removed from between words, and are only useful with Codefinder software. Just look for "Peshitta Research" on the home page and follow the links.

Many blessings,



Dave
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#7
February 26, 2008

Here is a simple explanation of the misunderstanding associated with Dave Bauscher???s Bible Code ???divine names??? study.

Dave is using a computer program called CodeFinder to sort letters of the Peshitto text by skipping one or more alphabetical letters between letter selection. This is called equal letter spacing (ELS). This program can skip from one to many hundreds of letters in making each letter selection, and can go around through the text in both directions until all possible unique combinations have been made for the desired ELS???s. This creates a very, very, very long string if letters. The program then searches for every occurrence of a desired short string of letters chosen by the user. For a short string of letters like a short word it will typically locate about a MILLIONS copies. Wow! This would not be possible without a modern high-speed computer.

So, if you choose to ???search??? this very, very long string of letters obtained from the text of the Peshitto New Testament for the Aramaic word Yeshua (four Aramaic letters) you might get a million copies ???found???. Dave ran this word and CodeFinder found 944,519 copies of Yeshua.

How would you decide whether this is a ???significant??? find?

This is not an easy question to answer, because that many might be expected to be ???found??? by pure chance considering it was nothing more than a massive shuffling and dealing of alphabetical letters.

One way of evaluating this find would be to ASSUME that all of the letters in the text are perfectly randomly distributed. Then you can ASSUME that the actual word that was chosen for the search does not affect the probability of finding a the chosen combination of letters, the word for which you are searching. The CodeFinder program will tell you how many copies of each letter are found in the whole text and it can use simple probability mathematics to estimate the chance of finding each letter in the word and then estimate the ideal number of copies of the whole word that would be expected for the whole search.

Thus, assuming the normal approximation of the Poisson distribution CodeFinder can estimate the ???expected??? total number of ???finds??? that you should get and ???standard deviation??? of the expected variability. CodeFinder estimated that ???theoretically??? it should have found 942,600 copies of ???Yeshua???. Therefore, it ???found??? 1,919 ???extra??? copies in the 944,519 that it found. That is a mere and meaningless 0.2% of the total, but a simple textbook statistical test would tell you that the probability of this number of extra copies is only 2.4%. Wow! Dave probably concluded that this ???extra??? 0.2% among the 944,519 copies of ???Yeshua??? was a Godly miracle. Both truth and common sense suggest that there is something wrong with this logic.

The logical error is in the assumption part of the process. To believe this result you have to ASSUME that all of the letters in the text are ???perfectly randomly??? distributed. They are not! They are, in fact, organized in a very systematic fashion in the form of meaningful words, phrases, and sentences, a virtual mosaic rather than a random mess. If they were randomly distributed the text would be pure jibberish. This is a common mistake in the logical process involved in looking for ???Bible Codes???.

In addition there is a second erroneous assumption. You cannot ASSUME that the actual word that was chosen for the search does not affect the probability of finding a the chosen combination of letters. The actual word chosen may have letters that tend to have a commonly recurrent paired relationship in the Aramaic language. Such a paired relationship can affect the result in a complex way for which the simple probability calculation does not account. For example, in English the letter ???t??? and ???h??? are often adjacent. If you are searching for the word ???hit???, every ???h??? that is found that is adjacent to a ???t??? removes a t as well as an h from the calculated total of available letters since adjacent letters are not allowed in the equal letter spacing (ELS) process. This suggests that a few extra shortages and a few extra excesses of chosen words at the tails of the distribution are to be expected.

In Dave???s divine names study he used CodeFinder to separately search for 95 words or short phrases in Aramaic or Hebrew which he viewed as being of spiritual significance. There actually were no remarkable trends with about half of the observed number of ???divine names??? being slightly more than the calculated expected number and about half being slightly fewer. Here is a summary of the results:

(1) the distribution formed a typically Gaussian (or normal distribution) bell-shaped curve demonstrating a correction factor of about 2 for the calculated ideal standard deviations;
(2) 47 ???divine names??? had fewer than the calculated ???expected??? number (the ideal number is half or 47.5);
(3) 48 ???divine names??? had more than the calculated ???expected??? number (the ideal number is half or 47.5);
(4) within one standard deviation of the mean there were 38 that were fewer than the mean and there were 36 that were more (the ideal number for each is 32.4);
(5) within two standard deviations of the mean there were 43 that were fewer than the mean and there were 44 that were more (the ideal number for each is 45.3);
(6) beyond two standard deviations of the mean there were 4 that were more than the mean and 4 that were fewer than the mean (the ideal number for each is 2.2).

These results are rather ordinary and certainly not a miraculous finding.

As for Dave???s interpretation, I can only say:

???To err is human, but to really foul up requires a computer!???

Otto
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#8
Shlama Otto,

You are mischaracterizing my study and claims.
Quote:You wroteBig Grinave probably concluded that this ???extra??? 0.2% among the 944,519 copies of ???Yeshua??? was a Godly miracle. Both truth and common sense suggest that there is something wrong with this logic.
And you are assuming things I never said or thought. I never made any claim about "Yeshua" findings. It was analyzed with the other 94 names and titles and the results were included and averaged out.

You are also lumping search results together rather that dealing with the 150 abnormally high Z scores (standard deviations) I found, for which you cannot account. My experiment was done in good faith and the results presented as I found them. 42% of the 367 ELS searches I did have Z Scores greater than 3. This should not be happening. Nothing close to 42% of the Z Scores should be this high. Normal results would be 0.3% of the Z scores at 3.0 or more. As it is, The number of Peshitta ELS Z scores greater than 3.0 (3.0 represents approx. a 1 in a 1000 probability) is 140 times greater than normal or expected results.
That is not a Gaussian distribution. Until you can show similar results in a control text of any sort, you cannot make the effect go away by simply ignoring it.
Lumping all the search results together is simply to ignore the aberrations uncovered. It is akin to looking at the spectrum of sunlight broken down into its various colors of red through violet and recombining them into their original white light, and claiming: "Sunlight is simply white light, nothing more."

That is not science. It is science in reverse.

The Peshitta reveals a spectrum of Z scores which appears highly unusual.

Please explain and reproduce my results in another control text using Hebrew letters.

Blessings,

Dave
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#9
March 17, 2008

Dear Dave,

Your supposition that the alphabetical letters in the Peshitta are perfectly randomly distributed is obviously wrong. Therefore, all of your calculated Z values are meaningless. In addition, the distribution of your observations is not surprising, as I have shown.

The smaller fractional samples that you analyzed for each ???divine name??? would be expected to have greater variability than the total sample, and then those Z values are also meaningless.

You are obviously a skilled linguist and translator. Your Bible Code theories will tend to detract from the more important issue of Aramaic/Peshitta primacy because knowledgeable people will view them as goofy. Please stop marring your excellent translations with references to these irrelevant ???Bible Code??? theories.

Sincerely,

Otto
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#10
Dear Otto,

I have answered this in the Bible Codes forum, so I would direct you to that.


PS Go to the Aramaic Bible Codes forum and then to Bible Codes in Peshitta and look at how many views that topic has gotten (4000 +). I don't see any other single topic that comes close to that in number of views. Apparently people are quite interested!
Shlama AKhi,


Dave
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