Declaring the End from the Beginning

Part 1

Patterns of Numbers and Hidden Coding in the Tanakh

Chapter 1

Numerical Patterns in the Tanakh

PATTERNS OF NUMBERS AND hidden meanings that no human could duplicate have been discovered beneath the surface of the Tanakh. The Tanakh is like a large complex tapestry. If you look at the back of the tapestry, you see a lot of rough threads going in and out, but when you turn it over, you see the actual picture. We have been looking at the back of the Tanakh. We have not been looking at the right side and therefore have not discerned its hidden meanings and patterns. These hidden codes and patterns woven into the Tanakh have been identified in the last hundred years both with and without the aid of computers.

Running through the Tanakh are patterns of numbers that could not have been made by people. For instance, the number seven occurs in the Tanakh as it is in nature. It is well known that everything in nature runs according to mathematical laws. Nature is particularly marked by the number seven. Light from the sun consists of seven distinct colours—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. The earth is 49 times larger than the moon and 49 is 7 times 7, and the moon goes around the earth in 28 days or seven times four days. When looking at the gestation periods of animals, the number seven is again very prominent. The gestation period of the mouse is 21 (7 × 3) days; the rat’s is 28 (7 × 4) days; the cat’s is 56 (7 × 8) days; the dog’s is 63 (7 × 9) days; the lion’s is 98 (7 × 14) days; the sheep’s is 147 (7 × 21) days; the chicken’s is 21 (7 × 3) days; the common duck’s is 28 (7 × 4) days; the golden eagle’s is 35 (7 × 5) days; the emu’s is 56 (7 × 8) days; the cassowary’s and the kiwi’s are both 42 (7 × 6) days. These are just to mention a few. Similarly, the gestation period for humans is 280 (7 × 40) days and the human body consists of 14 (7 × 2) elements. Our bodies are renewed in every cell every seven years.

Just as it occurs frequently in nature, the number seven runs through the Tanakh. The Sabbath is the seventh day of the week. The Hebrew people walked around Jericho seven times and the walls fell down and they captured the city. The seventh year in Hebrew law is a Shemitah, when the Jewish people were required to leave their fields fallow. It took seven years for the Jewish people to build the Temple in Jerusalem.

The number seven also occurs underneath the surface of the Tanakh, as discovered by Ivan Panin, a Russian scientist born in 1855. Take the first book of the Torah, Genesis, and look at Genesis 1:1. It reads, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. It contains seven Hebrew words, and the number of Hebrew letters in the seven words is 28 (7 × 4). In the beginning God created has 14 letters (7 × 2). And the heavens and the earth also contains 14 letters (7 × 2). God is a subject of this verse and heavens and earth are its objects. The number of letters in the three Hebrew words is 14 (7 × 2). These are just a few of the patterns of sevens in Genesis 1:1. Panin (1934) lists fourteen instances of sevens in this first passage of the Tanakh and estimates that the probability of these occurring by chance is one in seven billion. Similarly, he found that all of the first five verses of Genesis 1 had many instances of sevens.

The number seven is also coded in the gematria of the words in Genesis 1. The gematria is the numerical equivalent of a letter, word, sentence, or passage. For instance, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet is aleph, which is also the number one. The gematria of a word, sentence, or passage is the numerical value of the letters making up the text. In Genesis1:1, God, "heaven, and earth are the significant nouns. God has a gematria of 86; heaven has a gematria of 395, and earth has a gematria of 296. If you add the gematria of these three words it comes to 777. The gematria of the word created" in this verse is also a multiple of seven, being 203 (29 × 7). The value of the first, middle, and last words is 133 (19 × 7). If you take the first word in the verse and the last word and add the numeric value of their last letters, it comes to 490 (70 × 7) (Panin 1934).

The number seven also occurs in patterns of association, or chains, throughout the Tanakh. For instance, the number of writers of the Tanakh is 21 (3 × 7). If you add the gematria of these 21 names it totals 3,808 (544 × 7). The name David occurs in the Tanakh 1,134 (162 × 7) times (Sabiers 1941). Jeremiah’s name occurs in seven books of the Tanakh, and the number of times it occurs is 147 (21 × 7). In Hebrew, Jeremiah’s name occurs in seven different forms, the sum of the gematria of these forms being 1953, or 279 sevens. The first form of the name used has 273, or 39 sevens, and the last form of the name has 301, or 43 sevens. Of the 147 times that Jeremiah’s name occurs, 14 (2 × 7) belong to its shortest form, and 126 (18 × 7) is the number of times the other six forms appear (Panin 1934).

An analysis of the numeric features of Genesis 5, the chapter of genealogies of the ten patriarchs before the flood, also gives evidence of patterns of sevens. Each patriarch is given three numbers: how old he was at the birth of his son, how long he lived after the birth of his son, and total years lived. The only number given for Noah is his age at his son’s birth, so the genealogy includes just 28 (7 × 4) age numbers. The 28 numbers multiply to 15,750 (7 x 2 x 3 x 3 x 5 x 5 x 5), which is a multiple of seven with seven factors. Of the 28 numbers, seven are multiples of seven, and the sum of the seven numbers is also a multiple of seven. Panin (1934) identifies nineteen instances of sevens in the genealogy with impossible odds of this occurring by chance.

Panin found that many passages in the Tanakh had inexplicable numeric features often occurring on more than ten occasions. According to the law of probability, the possibility of the number seven being encoded in a passage on ten separate occasions is almost 1 in 3 million. Therefore, the possibility of humans writing these texts without supernatural inspiration is virtually nil. It seems reasonable that the numerical features of the Tanakh had been planned in advance. In the text of the Tanakh, it is many times written that God inspired the messages. For instance, ADONAI said to Jeremiah, Behold, I have put My words in your mouth (Jeremiah 1:9), and ADONAI said to Ezekiel, You will speak My words to them (Ezekiel 2:7).

Chapter 2

Hidden Meanings in the Tanakh

AN OBSERVATION WAS MADE by the scholar Michael Dov Weissmandl during the Second World War that there was mathematical coding or sequencing in the Torah (the first five books of the Tanakh). By selecting sequences of letters in the Torah, he found that a large number of meaningful words were hidden in the text. He found that