Esther #5 Macrocodes in Esther Part 1 — Chuck Missler

Continuing the Study of Esther

We're going to continue our study of the Book of Esther. We have gone through now, in the previous sessions, the book itself, from verse 1 to the last verse, to examine superficially, and yet in some depth perhaps, the narrative itself, the text itself.

Hidden Elements in the Book of Esther

And one of the things that we've set aside tonight to do is to explore other things that are hidden in the Book of Esther. And this will be a review for some of you, because we've covered some of this material before in some other contexts, but it did seem appropriate for us to deal with this.

In order to cover rather complex material, we're going to use these graphics, and they will be, a summary of them will be in the notes that will accompany the tape, so don't try to copy each slide, that's the hard way, to deal with this.

In order to cover rather complex material, we're going to use these graphics, and they will be, a summary of them will be in the notes that will accompany the tape, so don't try to copy each slide, that's the hard way.

As probably most of you can guess, is that a large measure is that this has been excerpted from our hardback book, Cosmic Codes, Hidden Messages from the Edge of Eternity. But tonight, what we want to do is focus specifically on the Book of Esther, and we're going to take some excerpts from the book and take a look at the whole idea that there are hidden codes in the book.

Now, as most of you know, the Book of Esther has quite a controversial history in the church, because there were those that were arguing against it. And Martin Luther, among others, wanted it removed from the canon, because one of his primary arguments was that the name of God does not even appear in the Book of Esther.

And that was his argument. Well, turns out he was wrong, you see. Typical Gentile, he didn't have an Old Testament background. So, the first interesting observation is that the name of the book, Esther, Hadassah is the Hebrew name, but the name of Esther, according to Gesenius, who's one of the experts on Semitic languages, means something hidden.

And you know me well enough to know when I encounter something like that, that gets my antenna right up there to find out, oh, what's that all about? And so, it turns out we're going to discover that hidden in the text, within the text, or underneath the text, if you want to put it that way, are at least eight hidden messages.

Acrostics and Hidden Messages

And the first five of these are called acrostics. They're very well known. I didn't discover these things or invent these things, I just came across them in the literature, in the Talmudic literature.

It's well known among rabbinical scholars. First of all, what is an acrostic? Well, acrostic is simply the repetition of letters within a text which can have a significance of its own. That's all it really boils down to.

What are some examples? Well, Psalm 37, Psalm 111, Psalm 112, and Psalm 119 are well known in that they follow the Hebrew alphabet. Most of you, even in your English translations of Psalm 119, the longest psalm in the book of Psalms, each line of each verse starts with the same Hebrew letter, and it goes, there's 22 clusters of these for the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

And so, Psalm 119 is not only a very interesting psalm for lots of reasons, every verse deals with the Word of God itself as a subject, but it also happens to be very tightly organized around the Hebrew alphabet.

And so, it's an acrostic. These other psalms, and there's a number of others too, Proverbs 31, a major chunk of that is an acrostic in the sense that each line deliberately starts with the next letter of the alphabet.

You've seen things like that in English. There are also what are called mnemonic acrostics. They're also called acronyms. We don't say the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, we say NASA. We don't say the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, we say NATO.

And during World War II, they developed a system which is radio detection and ranging. It quickly is called radar. They become labels in their own right. These are called acronyms, also they're a form of acrostic.

By the way, it may surprise you to know they follow mathematical laws. They've discovered, well, a guy by the name of George A. Zipf, Z-I-P-F, he was a lexicographer, and he discovered that if you take any large body of text and you make a list of all the words that appear there and organize them in the frequency of their use, the rank order times the frequency of its use is a constant.

Not exactly, but almost follows that curve. If you take five times the fifth word or three times the third word, it's always a constant. In other words, the number of times the third word on the list occurs, multiply three by that, whatever times it is.

In other words, the rank order times the frequency of use happens to approximate a constant. We also discovered, in thinking about that, if you depart from that, it's less efficient. So they call this the principle of least effort.

In a society, when you start using a new term enough that's complicated, you tend to abbreviate it. It turns out the point at which you do that is when it needs to do that to fit into that frequency formula.

So if you're in a government project and there's some buzzword going around, it isn't long before you use its alphabet or its initials or something else or a slang for it. In phonetic communication, the same thing happens with phonemes.

You will adopt those to follow that. Now it turns out the Old Testament term in Hebrew is the Tanakh, but that's an acrostic or an acronym of the Torah, the Nebim, and the Kethubim, which are the various sections of what you and I would call the Old Testament.

They make an acrostic out of that and call it the Tanakh. It's just another example. Well, in Esther chapter 1, verse 20, we came across a verse which says,. And when the king's decree, which he shall make, shall be published throughout all his empire, for he is great, all the wives shall give to their husbands honor, both great and small.

You may recall that in the introductory portions of the book of Esther. When you look at that in the Hebrew, it looks like this, which of course isn't important to you and I, but we want to call your attention to these letters that I've highlighted in white.

You notice the first letter of these four words, let me just take that to the next slide, if you take those four letters, those four letters happen to spell the Tetragamaton, the unpronounceable, the ineffable name of God.

Now, in this particular case, it's using, remember Hebrew goes from right to left. Remember all languages flow towards Jerusalem. Do you know that? Nations that are west of Jerusalem, their languages go from left to right.

English, French, German, Latin, you name it, right? Nations that are east of Jerusalem, their languages go from right to left. Not only Hebrew, but Aramaic, Arabic, Sanskrit, the Oriental language. So it's kind of interesting.

I don't know what you do with that piece of information, but it's a, but Hebrew goes from right to left and so these four letters are the first letter of those words and it happens to spell Yahweh. Now, it happens to spell it backwards.

It's forward as we would look at it, but that's backward from a Hebrew point of view. Okay? Now, why is it backwards? Well, we're using the initial letters. It's been suggested because the event there described was an initial event, but it's written backwards because God was going to be turning back the counsels of man.

Also, the speaker in this case was a Gentile and they do go from a Hebrew point of view backwards. Follow me? Bear with me. We're just looking at the first of a few of these. In Esther chapter 5, verse 4, your English Bible has something the equivalent of, and Esther answered, if it be good unto the king, let the king and Haman come this day unto the banquet that I have prepared for him.

And again, we find a group of letters that, I'm just extracting that portion. If we take the initial letter of each word, it again spells Yahweh. And this time, it does it forward. The initial letters, again, because in this case, God is initiating an action.

It's going forward because God is ruling and causing Esther to act. That's one rabbinical view of it. It also happens that in this case, a Hebrew was speaking. Queen Esther was Jewish. So, we notice this construction is there, but we also notice, I'm going to summarize this later, you'll see this is a part of a rather elegant design.

But in any case, we have an acrostic tucked away in the text that again, pronounces the ineffable name of God. Now, let's just get to more and then we'll try to summarize this. Another form of acrostic is the last letter of each word.

In this case, we have the last letter in Esther 5 .13. It again spells the name of God, Yahweh. It uses the final letters of each word. In this case, in this verse, Haman's end is approaching. The letters are backwards because God was overruling Haman's gladness in this verse and turning back Haman's counsel.

Now, Esther 7 .7, again, we have, I won't take you through all the details, but again, you have final letters spelling Yahweh because by the time you get to Esther 7, you've got the end of, Haman's end had finally come.

And these letters are, the name is spelled forward because God is ruling and bringing about the end that he determined. Now, what's interesting is the first verse we looked at was a verse pronounced by a Gentile, Menuhkin.

Then Esther said the second one, Haman the third one, and the writer of the book wrote the seventh one. And so, it's interesting, if we look at the pairings of these, the first two used initial letters, the last two used the final letters.

And it's been conjectured or observed that the, in the first two cases, the facts involved were the initial, initiating facts, and in the last two, the facts are final. They're also paired another way.

In the first case, we saw that it was spelling the name of God backwards. In the second one, it was forward. The third one was backward. The fourth one is forward. Those places where it is spelled backwards, Gentiles were speaking.

Those cases where they are forward, Israelites were speaking. Now, the question that this sort of raises, was this just an accident of circumstance? See, some would argue that these kinds of things could just happen by accident.

God's Hidden Providence and Israel's Destiny

But see, the whole story of Esther is a story of coincidences. Why was Esther picked to be queen? You can go through chapter by chapter, we did that, and notice again and again, it's one coincidence after another, and it's always, it ends up ironically, turned against.

And one of the teachings, I believe, in the book of Esther, is that God's hand was upon His people. Because of the whole episode of the book of Esther, the nation Israel was spared. The decree had gone out to wipe them all out.

All out. God did not openly intervene. There's lots of reasons for that. To understand that, you've got to study the book of Hosea, where God instructs through Hosea, that they are not my people for a while.

They're set aside. That doesn't mean He's abandoned them, He's just set them aside. The church has been teaching for 1 ,900 years that Israel is over. They rejected their Messiah, so all the promises devolved upon the church.

That's commonly taught in many denominations. It happens to be very non-biblical, because the promises in the Old Testament are unconditional. And Paul, in his definitive statement of Christian doctrine, hammers away for three chapters in the book of Romans.

Chapters 9, 10, 11, that God is not through with Israel. They have a destiny. They have a critical destiny. One reason so many churches are confused about eschatology, or study the end times, is they haven't understood where Israel fits in.

The book of Revelation, most of it, all but two chapters, have to do with the period in which God is dealing with the planet Earth through Israel. Yet future. The only chapters that really directly affect you and I are chapters 2 and 3.

Chapter 4 on, it goes weird. It's a different thing altogether. And I will start on that lat here. But the point is, in the book of Esther, God is not openly protecting Israel. He's doing it invisibly, through circumstances.

Someone is very cleverly quipped that coincidence is when God is working undercover. Are there coincidences in your life? Examine them carefully and see if God's fingerprints are not all over those things, for your instruction or your correction or whatever.

Now, it's interesting to me that we see, even hidden under the text, God's fingerprints. His name. And we're just getting started. But here are four classic acrostics. You'll find this in the ancient rabbinical literature.

There's some other things here. There's also, the structure demonstrates, we've shown how it showed pairings and how it showed alternation. It also has what they call introversion. The first words were spoken concerning a queen.

The second one was words spoken by a queen. The third one is words spoken by Haman. And the last words are words concerning Haman. So there's a, if you study rhetoric, you can see what they call introversion going on here.

There's one that, those four, the first four we looked at, the name of God that is tucked away in the text. I would say encrypted in the text. Now, I didn't get into this, but you should understand that in cryptography, there are two basic forms of cryptography.

Cryptography and Divine Structure

One is substitution and one is transposition. We're looking at really a mixture of those, where you embed a secret message in another message that looks innocuous. It's shocking to discover that that seems to be very, very evident in our holy scriptures.

There are several forms of encryption, other forms of encryption, I won't take you through all that tonight, that are well known if you're a student of cryptography. If you employed at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, or if you're in cryptography as a professional and you've studied the history of cryptography, what's called to attention is that there are two classic forms of transposition in the scripture.

Now, to someone who is a student of cryptography, that's just a historical oddity. But to someone who has the insight to realize the Bible is supernatural in structure, the fact that the Holy Spirit has encryption there, I believe is a signpost to look further.

Further Acrostics in Esther

But getting back to Esther, in Esther chapter 7, verse 5, there's an interesting verse. This is where we have that big scene, it's the second banquet that Esther's organized, and this is the scene where she announces that she's Jewish, she's going to confront the whole situation and try to undo this malicious plot of Haman.

And when the king learns about this, he is so incensed, he said, then the king Ahasuerus answered and said unto Esther the queen, who is he, where is he, that there's presume in his heart to do so. And so he's looking for an identity.

And of course the identity that he's begging, in effect, is Haman, because of her accusation. But it's interesting to notice that we take final letters here in this passage, namely these four, and they spell IHYAH, which is the famous I AM statement, when Moses was before the burning bush.

And he says, who shall I say sent me? And God, from the burning bush, says the IHYAH I am that I am. This is the same identity of God that is used here. It's the same identity that Jesus Christ uses seven times in the Gospel of John.

Gospel of John is organized around seven specific miracles, which give rise to seven discourses, and also include seven I AM statements. I am the bread of life. I am the living water. I am the door. Anyone that comes through me as a thief and a robber, those statements.

The Gospel of John is structured. John wrote the Gospel. He also wrote the Book of Revelation. The Book of Revelation is clearly heptatically structured, structured around sevens, and it's clearly mystical in many ways.

The same writer did the Gospel of John. You don't pick it up in the Gospel of John, because it reads such a narrative, until you start putting the pieces together, and you study he is just as structured as the Book of Revelation is.

Anyway, we published some of this in our news journal some years ago, just as a little tidbit about Esther and Crodes and so forth. And in March of that year, 96 I think it was, I got a letter from a person who later became a very dear friend, from San Antonio, Texas, a Rabbi Yaakov Ramsel.

Dropped me a little note. He says, enjoyed your article, Chuck. That's well known. You're absolutely right on target, but let me give you a few more you'll find interesting. Since then, of course, and I might mention, the technique he was calling my attention to isn't the usual form of acrostic, where you take the first letter of each word or the last letter.

He introduced me to a thing called equidistant letter sequences. Now, they have become very controversial in our society for reasons I'll come to. But it's interesting if you go back into the Renaissance period, in the peak of the Talmudic era, the so-called Hebrew sages, their golden era, you'll find that there's a long history of conviction on the part of the Rabbis that the secrets of the Torah are hidden in the skipping of letters.

Cote d 'Ivoire in the 16th century is one that's often quoted, there are others. The secrets of the Torah are revealed in the skipping of letters. Now, I want to introduce you, if you haven't seen this before, to a technique called an equidistant letter sequence.

It's a form of encryption. It's the simplest form of encryption you can find. Now, let me just take a sentence here, and the sentence I'm using is one that Elihu Rips uses to explain equidistant. It just works out so well, I've decided to use it.

Rips explained that each code is a case of adding every fourth letter to form a word. Really? Well, let's take the R and count three over, and then the next one is an E, the fourth letter from there is an A, the next letter is a D, the fourth one over is a T, then an H, then an E, and then a C, and then an O, and then a D, and then an E.

In other words, we're taking every fourth letter, right? And what does it say? Read the code. Now, one way you can send a secret message to a confederate somewhere is to construct a message so that your message is every nth letter, and then build around it something else that sounds like a love letter or a bill of lading or whatever, and your confederate needs to know how to count and so forth, and you can do that, except it's not a very secure way.

Those things turn out to be easily broken, but that's what we call an equidistant letter sequence. It turns out that this whole thing started, well, it actually started centuries ago, but in the modern era of these things, there was a guy by the name of Weissmandel, when he was 13, got a copy of the Torah, studied it, came across some ancient commentators, some allusions they made, which caused him to rediscover some things that had long been lost, and he wrote a lot of things between the two world wars, but the most interesting thing occurred after the second world war.

He actually was on a train heading for Auschwitz, managed to escape, and spent a good part of his life trying to create Schindler-type rescues of Jews heading for Auschwitz, but his writings, I'll show you some of the things he discovered here in a minute.

Michelson wrote an article in 1987 in a Jewish journal that created quite a stir, but the big, big stir in our society occurred in 1994, when three Hebrew scientists, Doron Whitson, Elihu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg, published an article called equidistant letter sequences in the book of Genesis, but they published it in the journal of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

What makes this so significant, this is what's known as a refereed professional journal. You submit your paper, and a group of peer scientists will examine it to see if it's eligible for production. They studied this for six years, and finally, reluctantly, let it go for production.

Now, Jeffrey Satanova also wrote an article in 1995, so from 1994 to 1995, this whole thing has exploded to be a big controversy. What are we talking about? Well, if you look at the book of Genesis, this is something that surfaced.

Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Torah

Now, this is the first verse of the book of Genesis, and if you go to the first tau, which is sort of like our T, and count 49 letters, and you come to, after 49 letters, the next one is above. It operates here sort of like our O does, and you count 49 letters more, and you count those, and you come to a resh, which is sort of like a R, like R, R, and you count another 49 letters, and you come to a he, which is like, sort of like our H.

Take those four letters, that spells Torah. Now, bear in mind, Hebrew goes backwards, so to speak, from our point of view. There's a tau, a vav, a resh, and a he, which in our, if we were to transliterate that, that is not translated, but try to put it in our alphabet the way approximately it's pronounced, and we're going, of course, from left to right, the tau is like a T, the vav like an O, the resh like an R, and the he like an H.

So this happens to spell the name of the most venerated part of the scriptures, namely the Torah, to a Jew. This is a big deal. So how curious it is that the four letters that spell Torah are distributed, when you go first T in 49 letter intervals, you spell Torah.

You say, well, that's curious, that's interesting, but that could be just coincidence. But what do we learn from the Book of Esther? Coincidence is when God's working undercover, huh? Well, let's go to the Book of Exodus, and we're startled to discover the same thing happens.

This is Exodus. There's the tau, the vav, the resh, and the he, 49 letter intervals, and again it spells Torah. The probability of that also happening by accident starts to go out the window. If you know anything about combinatorial analysis, the probability of that many things concatenated gets more and more extreme.

Well, we go to the Book of Leviticus and nothing happens. Oh, okay, we relax. It doesn't work. But you go to the next book, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and you notice something even stranger.

You find again the he, the resh, the vav, and the tau. You spell Torah, but it spells it backwards. See, from Hebrew terms, that's backwards. It's forward from our point of view, but see, in Hebrew terms, it's the he, resh, vav, tau.

It's like we spell Torah backwards. You follow me? Now, the first question you're probably asking is, how on earth did they find this? Someone must have had time on their hands. You go to the Book of Deuteronomy, and the same thing happens again, backwards.

So where do we stand? Genesis, Exodus, it spells forward. Numbers and Deuteronomy, it spells backwards. Leviticus, it doesn't work. It doesn't have this 49-letter interval, but it has something else.

So we examine Leviticus, and this time, instead of using 49, which is 7 squared, we'll use 7, and we discover here again is the yot, the he, the vav, and the he, which we learned last time spells what?

Yahweh, the unpronounceable name of God. Now, we put this all together, Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Numbers and Deuteronomy backwards. Genesis and Exodus forward. So we find that the Torah always points to the name of God.

And so you look at this and say, wait a minute here. Did these guys design the structure of the letters themselves? And the answer is, I don't think this was done by human ingenuity. If I had only this to look at, I could allow that as a remote possibility.

But the more you get into this, it goes beyond any possibility of human contrivance, as clever as this might seem. It's interesting, and this, of course, is one of the reasons we've tried to collect these things into a book called Cosmic Codes.

Controversy Over Bible Codes

Now, I want to point out something before I forget. There's huge controversies going on about these equidistant letter sequences. And I'll come back to that, but so we don't lose sight of it, I want to point out something.

They, to me, are the least interesting of all the different forms of encryption in the scripture. There are all kinds. We wrote a book of 515 pages that has 25 chapters. Only three of those chapters are on equidistant letter sequences, because they're so controversial.

There are lots of other things which are microcodes, and I won't try to get into all that here. The most exciting ones are macrocodes, codes which you can prove come from outside our time domain. So the ELSs are interesting, very controversial, because the skeptics are really unglued over this thing.

But what's really going on here, the whole field of cryptography, if you study that, has its roots in the ancient Kabbalistic rabbis. When the Hebrew sages copied the scriptures, they didn't have Xerox machines or carbon paper.

When they wanted to make multiple copies of one of their precious books, they did it by hand. And they adopted elaborate schemes to make sure it was done without error. And one of the things they did, every letter in Hebrew and in Greek, only those two languages to my knowledge, are alphanumeric.

That means every letter also has a numerical value. All 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet have a numerical value. You say, well, Roman only has six of them that happen to be used for numbers, not the whole alphabet.

And they don't use it alphanumerically. The Hebrews and the Greeks did, which means that every word has a numerical value. And if you copy a page, you can add up all the letters and get a number. And they did that.

If the number didn't agree, they burned the page and started over. They never corrected. And they didn't have erasers, but that was also, they felt they had such a high view of the text. They felt that if they made an error, it would have catastrophic cosmic results.

Out of these scribal traditions, they developed all kinds of things. And they started, they also discovered all these intricate, hidden techniques behind the text. When you get to the Renaissance period, the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th century, in that region, that's where the field of cryptography blossoms.

Prior to that, the kind of codes you run into in ancient history are pretty simple, pretty primitive. In the Renaissance period, you discover in most of the major courts of the major countries, they had a group of people that were the experts on, that's where cryptography progressed.

What you don't, may not realize as you studied this, most of the innovations came from where? Converted Jews. Some not so converted, but I mean, they were in court, but they were, they had the rabbinical background.

So it's the Kabbalist textual traditions that led to the field of cryptography of the Renaissance. And the field of cryptography, especially as they started going to auto keys and sliding codes, where the key changes at each letter, that sort of thing, they developed mechanical aids, cipher wheels and such.

From those cipher wheels came the Enigma machines of World War II. The so-called unbreakable Nazi codes built by the Enigma machines. It turned out, of course, that during the war, Alan Turing in London and John von Neumann in the United States collaborated to build machines to break the Enigma codes.

So the advent of the computer was motivated by two pressure, high pressure jobs. One of the atomic codes for the atomic bomb, but also to break the codes for Enigma, which they did. The Germans, unknown to us, had broken the American code called Black.

We didn't know they had broken it. When we found out they'd broken it, we took steps and that led to the Battle of Alamein. And prior to Alamein, as Churchill pointed out, we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat.

And the secret are codes. Now the Japanese took the Enigma machines, made their own innovations, and did a thing which we codenamed Purple. The Japanese didn't know that we'd cracked it. And there's great stories.

William Friedman ran through Washington that Sunday morning, having broken the code of the attack of Pearl Harbor. He knew exactly when and where it was going to happen. He couldn't convince his superiors.

He couldn't convince his superiors that he'd cracked the code. But anyway, interesting, interesting thing. But the point is, it's interesting. From the Kabbalists, we get cryptography. From cryptography, we get the Enigma machines.

And from that, we get the computer. And now it's the computer that's rediscovering the codes that caused it all in the first place. You see how the loop is closed. I think it's very provocative. As we got computers in Israel, obviously some of the Israeli scholars, drawing upon Weissman Dell's discoveries of the 49 letter thing and some other things in the Torah, they said, gee, he did that by hand.

The device that can look for these things automatically is a computer. You get the text in the computer, the computer can search. Not for every second letter, every third letter. You can make that a variable.

Look from 1 to 100 and see what you find, kind of thing. Well, the first thing they decide to do is let's take the name Israel. That ought to appear in the Torah, huh? And what they did is told the computer, take the first 10 ,000 letters of Genesis and take intervals from minus 100 to plus 100.

When they say a minus interval, they mean backwards. So they treat a word that's spelled backwards as a negative interval. Just an easy way to summarize that. Typical mathematical approach. So they search for the name Israel in the first 10 ,000 letters of Genesis and search all intervals from minus 100 to plus 100.

And they discovered something that startled them. That the name Israel is encrypted only twice. Now you can argue from statistics that it might occur more often than that, but it only occurs twice. But what startled them was the intervals that had occurred.

It occurs once at an interval of seven and another at 50. And furthermore, it turns out that occurs in Genesis chapter one, verse 31, the end of Genesis, the beginning of the second chapter, end of the first chapter, beginning of the second chapter.

Both of these occur at intervals of seven and 50. Now, the reason that shocks a rabbinical scholar is that's the passage that gives you the Kaddush that every Friday night over a glass of wine, they celebrate Shabbat, Sabbath.

Sabbath, of course, seven suggests to a Jew what? The Sabbath, right? And 50 also is linked to the Sabbath because you have not only a Sabbath for man, six days you work, the seventh day is holy. The land, six years you plow it, the seventh year is holy.

When you take seven of those, you've got 49 years. The next year is a jubilee year. And all of this, of course, is in Leviticus 25, and you get into all this. The point is to a Jew, seven and 50 are linked logically.

And so here's the label Israel encrypted in the text these two times and only these two times. So they decide, gee, let's look further. And I'll cut through a lot of the other stuff. But in Genesis at the end of chapter one, and the early part of chapter two, Genesis 129 through chapter two, verse nine, 129 reads as follows.

And God said, behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed, and to you it shall be for meat, and it goes on.

And we get to chapter two, verse nine, continues to the end of the chapter, we get to early part of chapter two, it goes on. He says, out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

That's familiar to you if you've read the book of Genesis, right? Well, here's something that startled the researchers because they discovered between these two verses is encrypted the name of 25 trees that are listed in the Bible.

And here they're listed. These are the names in Hebrew, and some of these are intervals of only two or three, some are a little longer. The tamarisk, the terebinth, there's another thick or dense forest expression, the citron, the acacia, the almond, the wheat, the date palm, the cedar, the aloe, the grape, the box thorn, the bramble, the acacia, the pomegranate, gopher wood or fir, thorn bush, olive, pistachio nut, hazel, the fig, the willow, the oak, the vine, barley, chestnut, poplar.

These are just a list between just a few verses encrypted behind the text in Hebrew, you find these. Now, question, is that accidental? Is that a coincidence? See, and by the way, so you don't misunderstand, there's another issue.

The fact that these words happen to show up is not the point. That may sound strange. You can take Moby Dick, you take a huge corpus of text, and search for a word on this basis, you'll find these words scattered, they occur accidentally, statistically, in any body of text.

What makes this noteworthy is they're clustered behind the relevant passage. You follow me? So there's something that's very elusive, statistically, it's called clustering. The naive critic will say, gee, I can find these same trees in Encyclopedia Britannica or something, you know, I'm using a bad example, but, or some novel.

That's not the point. Are they clustered in ways that are communicating something that is relevant to the plain text, the term for the base text we're talking about. Now, anyway, what these scientists did, that Doran Whitson, Elihu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg, they took a list of rabbis, there's a standard biographical encyclopedia in Israel, and they took the top 32 rabbis, and they defined top by how many column inches they had in the biography.