O Fim? - As Previsões de Nostradamus

Info On Nostradamus:

Michel de Nostredame[1] (14 or 21 December 1503[2] – 2 July 1566), usually Latinised to Nostradamus, was a French apothecary and reputed seer who published collections of prophecies that have since become famous worldwide. He is best known for his book Les Propheties (The Prophecies), the first edition of which appeared in 1555. Since the publication of this book, which has rarely been out of print since his death, Nostradamus has attracted a following that, along with the popular press, credits him with predicting many major world events.

Most academic sources maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus's quatrains are largely the result of misinterpretations or mistranslations (sometimes deliberate) or else are so tenuous as to render them useless as evidence of any genuine predictive power.[3] Nevertheless, occasional commentators have successfully used a process of free interpretation and determined 'twisting' of their words to predict an apparently imminent event. In 1867, three years before it happened, for example, Le Pelletier did so to anticipate either the triumph or the defeat of Napoleon III in a war that, in the event, begged to be identified as the Franco-Prussian war, while admitting that he could not specify either which or when.[4]

Works

In The Prophecies he compiled his collection of major, long-term predictions. The first installment was published in 1555. The second, with 289 further prophetic verses, was printed in 1557. The third edition, with three hundred new quatrains, was reportedly printed in 1558, but now only survives as part of the omnibus edition that was published after his death in 1568. This version contains one unrhymed and 941 rhymed quatrains, grouped into nine sets of 100 and one of 42, called "Centuries".

Given printing practices at the time (which included type-setting from dictation), no two editions turned out to be identical, and it is relatively rare to find even two copies that are exactly the same. Certainly there is no warrant for assuming—as would-be "code-breakers" are prone to do—that either the spellings or the punctuation of any edition are Nostradamus' originals.[8]

The Almanacs: by far the most popular of his works, these were published annually from 1550 until his death. He often published two or three in a year, entitled either Almanachs (detailed predictions), Prognostications or Presages (more generalized predictions).

Nostradamus was not only a diviner, but a professional healer. It is known that he wrote at least two books on medical science. One was an extremely free translation (i.e. a "paraphrase") of The Protreptic of Galen (Paraphrase de C. GALIEN, sus l'Exhortation de Menodote aux estudes des bonnes Artz, mesmement Medicine), and in his so-called Traité des fardemens (basically a medical cookbook containing, once again, materials borrowed mainly from others) he included a description of the methods he used to treat the plague – none of which, not even the bloodletting, apparently worked. The same book also describes the preparation of cosmetics.

A manuscript normally known as the Orus Apollo also exists in the Lyon municipal library, where upwards of 2,000 original documents relating to Nostradamus are stored under the aegis of Michel Chomarat. It is a purported translation of an ancient Greek work on Egyptian hieroglyphs based on later Latin versions, all of them unfortunately ignorant of the true meanings of the ancient Egyptian script, which was not correctly deciphered until Champollion in the 19th century.

Since his death only the Prophecies have continued to be popular, but in this case they have been quite extraordinarily so. Over two hundred editions of them have appeared in that time, together with over 2,000 commentaries. Their popularity seems to be partly due to the fact that their vagueness and lack of dating make it easy to quote them selectively after every major dramatic event and retrospectively claim them as "hits" (see Nostradamus in popular culture).

Origins of The Prophecies

Nostradamus claimed to base his published predictions on judicial astrology—the astrological 'judgement', or assessment, of the 'quality' (and thus potential) of events such as births, weddings, coronations etc.—but was heavily criticized by professional astrologers of the day such as Laurens Videl[3] for incompetence and for assuming that "comparative horoscopy" (the comparison of future planetary configurations with those accompanying known past events) could actually predict what would happen in the future.[8]

Recent research suggests that much of his prophetic work paraphrases collections of ancient end-of-the-world prophecies (mainly Bible-based), supplemented with references to historical events and anthologies of omen reports, and then projects those into the future in part with the aid of comparative horoscopy. Hence the many predictions involving ancient figures such as Sulla, Gaius Marius, Nero, and others, as well as his descriptions of "battles in the clouds" and "frogs falling from the sky." Astrology itself is mentioned only twice in Nostradamus's Preface and 41 times in the Centuries themselves, but more frequently in his dedicatory Letter to King Henri II. In the last quatrain of his sixth century he specifically attacks astrologers.

His historical sources include easily identifiable passages from Livy, Suetonius, Plutarch and other classical historians, as well as from medieval chroniclers such as Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Jean Froissart. Many of his astrological references are taken almost word for word from Richard Roussat's Livre de l'estat et mutations des temps of 1549–50.

One of his major prophetic sources was evidently the Mirabilis Liber of 1522, which contained a range of prophecies by Pseudo-Methodius, the Tiburtine Sibyl, Joachim of Fiore, Savonarola and others (his Preface contains 24 biblical quotations, all but two in the order used by Savonarola).[19] This book had enjoyed considerable success in the 1520s, when it went through half a dozen editions (see External links below for facsimiles and translations) but did not sustain its influence, perhaps owing to its mostly Latin text, Gothic script and many difficult abbreviations. Nostradamus was one of the first to re-paraphrase these prophecies in French, which may explain why they are credited to him. It should be noted that modern views of plagiarism did not apply in the 16th century. Authors frequently copied and paraphrased passages without acknowledgement, especially from the classics.The latest research suggests that he may in fact have used bibliomancy for this—randomly selecting a book of history or prophecy and taking his cue from whatever page it happened to fall open at.[9]

Further material was gleaned from the De honesta disciplina of 1504 by Petrus Crinitus,[8] which included extracts from Michael Psellos's De daemonibus, and the De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum (Concerning the mysteries of Egypt...), a book on Chaldean and Assyrian magic by Iamblichus, a 4th century Neo-Platonist. Latin versions of both had recently been published in Lyon, and extracts from both are paraphrased (in the second case almost literally) in his first two verses, the first of which is appended to this article. While it is true that Nostradamus claimed in 1555 to have burned all of the occult works in his library, no one can say exactly what books were destroyed in this fire. The fact that they reportedly burned with an unnaturally brilliant flame suggests, however, that some of them were manuscripts on vellum, which was routinely treated with saltpeter.

Only in the 17th century did people start to notice his reliance on earlier, mainly classical sources.[20] This may help explain the fact that, during the same period, The Prophecies reportedly came into use in France as a classroom reader.[21]

Nostradamus's reliance on historical precedent is reflected in the fact that he explicitly rejected the label prophet (i.e. a person having prophetic powers of his own) on several occasions:[3][8]

Although, my son, I have used the word prophet, I would not attribute to myself a title of such lofty sublimity – Preface to César, 1555 (see caption to illustration above)[22]

Not that I would attribute to myself either the name or the role of a prophet – Preface to César, 1555[22]

[S]ome of [the prophets] predicted great and marvelous things to come: [though] for me, I in no way attribute to myself such a title here. – Letter to King Henri II, 1558[23]

I do but make bold to predict (not that I guarantee the slightest thing at all), thanks to my researches and the consideration of what judicial Astrology promises me and sometimes gives me to know, principally in the form of warnings, so that folk may know that with which the celestial stars do threaten them. Not that I am foolish enough to pretend to be a prophet. Open letter to Privy Councillor (later Chancellor) Birague, 15 June 1566[3]

Given this reliance on literary sources, it is doubtful[3] whether Nostradamus used any particular methods for entering a trance state, other than contemplation, meditation and incubation. His sole description of this process is contained in letter 41[24] of his collected Latin correspondence.[3] The popular legend that he attempted the ancient methods of flame gazing, water gazing or both simultaneously is based on a naive reading of his first two verses, which merely liken his efforts to those of the Delphic and Branchidic oracles. The first of these is reproduced at the bottom of this article and the second can be seen by visiting the relevant facsimile site (see External Links). In his dedication to King Henri II, Nostradamus describes "emptying my soul, mind and heart of all care, worry and unease through mental calm and tranquility", but his frequent references to the "bronze tripod" of the Delphic rite are usually preceded by the words "as though" (compare, once again, External References to the original texts).

Interpretations

Most of the quatrains deal with disasters, such as plagues, earthquakes, wars, floods, invasions, murders, droughts, and battles—all undated and based on foreshadowings by the Mirabilis Liber. Some quatrains cover these disasters in overall terms; others concern a single person or small group of people. Some cover a single town, others several towns in several countries. A major, underlying theme is an impending invasion of Europe by Muslim forces from further east and south headed by the expected Antichrist, directly reflecting the then-current Ottoman invasions and the earlier Saracen (that is, Arab) equivalents, as well as the prior expectations of the Mirabilis Liber.[3] All of this is presented in the context of the supposedly imminent end of the world—even though this is not in fact mentioned[25] – a conviction that sparked numerous collections of end-time prophecies at the time, not least an unpublished collection by Christopher Columbus.[26]

Nostradamus has been credited, for the most part in hindsight (see under 'Alternative views' below), with predicting numerous events in world history, from the Great Fire of London, and the rise of Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, to the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Center.[15] In 1992 one commentator who claimed to be able to contact Nostradamus under hypnosis even had him 'interpreting' his own verse X.6 (a prediction specifically about floods in southern France around the city of Nîmes and people taking refuge in its collosse, or Colosseum, a Roman amphitheatre now known as the Arènes) as a prediction of an undated attack on the Pentagon, despite the historical seer's clear statement in his dedicatory letter to King Henri II[27] that his prophecies were about Europe, North Africa and part of Asia Minor.[28] Skeptics such as James Randi suggest that his reputation as a prophet is largely manufactured by modern-day supporters who fit his words to events that have either already occurred or are so imminent as to be inevitable, a process sometimes known as "retroactive clairvoyance" (postdiction). Thus, no Nostradamus quatrain is known to have been interpreted as predicting a specific event before it occurred, other than in vague, general terms that could equally apply to any number of other events.[29] This even applies to quatrains that contain specific dates, such as III.77, which predicts 'in 1727, in October, the king of Persia [shall be] captured by those of Egypt' — a prophecy that has, as ever, been interpreted retrospectively in the light of later events, in this case as though it presaged the known peace treaty between the Ottoman Empire and Persia of that year.[30] Moreover no quatrain suggests, as is often claimed by books and films on the alleged Mayan Prophecy, that the world will end in December 2012.[31] In his preface to the Prophecies, Nostradamus himself stated that his prophecies extend 'from now to the year 3797'[32]—an extraordinary date which, given that the preface was written in 1555, may have more than a little to do with the fact that 2242 (3797-1555) had recently been proposed by his major astrological source Richard Roussat as a possible date for the end of the world.[33]

Alternative views

A range of quite different views are expressed in printed literature and on the Internet. At one end of the spectrum, there are extreme academic views such as those of Jacques Halbronn, suggesting at great length and with great complexity that Nostradamus's Prophecies are antedated forgeries written by later hands with a political axe to grind. Most other specialists in the field reject this view.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are numerous fairly recent popular books, and thousands of private websites, suggesting not only that the Prophecies are genuine but that Nostradamus was a true prophet. Due to the subjective nature of these interpretations, however, no two of them agree on exactly what he predicted, whether for the past or for the future.[6] Many of these do agree, though, that particular predictions refer, for example, to the French Revolution, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler,[3][34] both world wars, and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is also an evident consensus among popular authors that he predicted whatever major event had just happened at the time of each book's publication, from the Apollo moon landings, through the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986,[35] to the events of 9/11: this 'movable feast' aspect appears to be characteristic of the genre.[6]

Possibly the first of these books to become popular in English was Henry C. Roberts' The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus of 1947, reprinted at least seven times during the next forty years, which contained both transcriptions and translations, with brief commentaries. This was followed in 1961 (reprinted in 1982) by Edgar Leoni's Nostradamus and His Prophecies. After that came Erika Cheetham's The Prophecies of Nostradamus, incorporating a reprint of the posthumous 1568 edition, which was reprinted, revised and republished several times from 1973 onwards, latterly as The Final Prophecies of Nostradamus. This served as the basis for the documentary The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. and both did indeed mention possible generalised future attacks on New York, though not specifically on the World Trade Center or on any particular date. A two-part translation of Jean-Charles de Fontbrune's Nostradamus: historien et prophète was published in 1980, and John Hogue has published a number of books on Nostradamus from about 1994 onwards, including Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies (1999) and Nostradamus: A Life and Myth (2003).

With the exception of Roberts, these books and their many popular imitators were almost unanimous not merely about Nostradamus's powers of prophecy, but also about various aspects of his biography. He had been a descendant of the Israelite tribe of Issachar; he had been educated by his grandfathers, who had both been physicians to the court of Good King René of Provence; he had attended Montpellier University in 1525 to gain his first degree: after returning there in 1529 he had successfully taken his medical doctorate; he had gone on to lecture in the Medical Faculty there until his views became too unpopular; he had supported the heliocentric view of the universe; he had travelled to the north-east of France, where he had composed prophecies at the abbey of Orval; in the course of his travels he had performed a variety of prodigies, including identifying a future Pope; he had successfully cured the Plague at Aix-en-Provence and elsewhere; he had engaged in scrying using either a magic mirror or a bowl of water; he had been joined by his secretary Chavigny at Easter 1554; having published the first installment of his Propheties, he had been summoned by Queen Catherine de' Medici to Paris in 1556 to discuss with her his prophecy at quatrain I.35 that her husband King Henri II would be killed in a duel; he had examined the royal children at Blois; he had bequeathed to his son a 'lost book' of his own prophetic paintings;[36] he had been buried standing up; and he had been found, when dug up at the French Revolution, to be wearing a medallion bearing the exact date of his disinterment.

Curiously, this particular story seems to have been first recorded by Samuel Pepys as early as 1667, long before the French Revolution. Pepys records in his celebrated diary a legend that, before his death, Nostradamus made the townsfolk swear that his grave would never be disturbed; but that 60 years later his body was exhumed, whereupon a brass plaque was found on his chest correctly stating the date and time when his grave would be opened and cursing the exhumers.[37]

From the 1980s onwards, however, an academic reaction set in, especially in France. The publication in 1983 of Nostradamus's private correspondence[38] and, during succeeding years, of the original editions of 1555 and 1557 discovered by Chomarat and Benazra, together with the unearthing of much original archival material[5][8] revealed that much that was claimed about Nostradamus did not fit the documented facts. The academics[5][6][8][39] revealed that not one of the claims just listed was backed up by any known contemporary documentary evidence. Most of them had evidently been based on unsourced rumours relayed as fact by much later commentators, such as Jaubert (1656), Guynaud (1693) and Bareste (1840), on modern misunderstandings of the 16th century French texts, or on pure invention. Even the often-advanced suggestion that quatrain I.35 had successfully prophesied King Henri II's death did not actually appear in print for the first time until 1614, 55 years after the event.[3][8]

Additionally, the academics,[6][39][40] who themselves tend to eschew any attempt at interpretation, complained that the English translations were usually of poor quality, seemed to display little or no knowledge of 16th-century French, were tendentious and, at worst, were sometimes twisted to fit the events to which they were supposed to refer (or vice versa). None of them were based on the original editions: Roberts had based his writings on that of 1672, Cheetham and Hogue on the posthumous edition of 1568. Even Leoni accepted on page 115 that he had never seen an original edition, and on earlier pages he indicated that much of his biographical material was unsourced.

However, none of this research and criticism was originally known to most of the English-language commentators, by function of the dates when they were writing and, to some extent, of the language in which it was written. Hogue was in a position to take advantage of it, but it was only in 2003 that he accepted that some of his earlier biographical material had in fact been apocryphal. Meanwhile some of the more recent sources listed (Lemesurier, Gruber, Wilson) have been particularly scathing about later attempts by some lesser-known authors and Internet enthusiasts to extract alleged hidden meanings from the texts, whether with the aid of anagrams, numerical codes, graphs or otherwise.

Extracts Taken From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostradamus

More Info: http://www.nostradamus.org/ ; http://www.sacred-texts.com/nos/index.htm & http://www.history.com/shows/nostradamus-effect ( http://www.canaldehistoria.pt/minisites/1004nostradamus/ )

Nostradamus - A Magia Branca e a Magia Negra

Michel de Nostredame ou Miquèl de Nostradama,[1] mais conhecido sob o nome de Nostradamus (Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 14 de dezembro de 1503 ou 21 de dezembro de 1503[2] — Salon-de-Provence, 2 de julho de 1566), foi um apotecário e médico da Renascença que praticava a alquimia (como muitos dos médicos do século XVI). Ficou famoso por sua suposta capacidade de vidência. Sua obra mais famosa, As Profecias, é composta de versos agrupados em quatro linhas (quatrains), organizados em blocos de cem (centuries); algumas pessoas acreditam que estes versos contém previsões codificadas do futuro[3].


Sofria de epilepsia psíquica, de gota e de insuficiência cardíaca. Morreu em 2 de julho de 1566 em Salon-de-Provence, vítima de um edema cárdio-pulmonar.


Extrato retirado daqui: http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostradamus

O Verdadeiro Livro de São Cipriano

Livro de São Cipriano é um grimório publicado em diversos países, inclusive no Brasil pela Editora Eco, do Rio de Janeiro, que contém diversos rituais de ocultismo, mais especificamente magias (branca e negra), com múltiplas finalidades, inclusive para o quotidiano.


O Livro de São Cipriano hoje é uma verdadeira coleção, todos afirmando que são os verdadeiros livros de São Cipriano, mas, na verdade, São Cipriano só escreveu um: Livro de São Cipriano de Capa Preta. [carece de fontes?]

A lenda de São Cipriano, o feiticeiro, confunde-se com São Cipriano de Cartago, santificado pela Igreja Católica, conhecido como o Papa Africano. Apesar do abismo histórico que os afasta, as lendas combinam-se e os Ciprianos, muitas vezes, tornam-se um só na cultura popular. É comum encontrarmos fatos e características pessoais atribuídas equivocadamente. Além dos mesmos nomes, os mártires coexistiram, mas em regiões distintas.

Cipriano, o feiticeiro, é celebrado no dia 2 de outubro. Foi um homem que dedicou boa parte de sua vida ao estudo das ciências ocultas. Após deparar-se com a jovem Justina, converteu-se ao cristianismo. Martirizado e canonizado, sua popularidade cresceu devido ao famoso Livro de São Cipriano, um compilado de rituais de magia.


Extrato retirado daqui: http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livro_de_S%C3%A3o_Cipriano

As Profecias Do Apocalipse (Cracking the Apocalypse Code)

Info About The Book Subject & Related:

The Book of Revelation is the final book of the New Testament. The title came into usage from the first word of the book in Koine Greek: apokalypsis, meaning "unveiling" or "revelation" (the author himself not having provided a title). It is also known as the Book of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine or the Apocalypse of John, (both in reference to its author) or the Book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ (in reference to its opening line) or simply Revelation, (often dubbed "Revelations" in contrast to the singular in the original Koine) or the Apocalypse. The word "apocalypse" is also used for other works of a similar nature in the literary genre of apocalyptic literature. Such literature is "marked by distinctive literary features, particularly prediction of future events and accounts of visionary experiences or journeys to heaven, often involving vivid symbolism."[1] The Book of Revelation is the only apocalyptic document in the New Testament canon, though there are short apocalyptic passages in various places in the Gospels and the Epistles.[2]

Contents

1 Authorship
1.1 Early theories
1.2 Traditional theory
1.3 Modern theories
1.4 Dating
1.5 Canonical history
2 Content
2.1 Text reconstruction
2.2 Literary structure
2.3 Narrative criticism
2.4 Figures in Revelation
3 Outline
4 Interpretations
4.1 Religious interpretations
4.1.1 Eastern Orthodox interpretation
4.1.2 Paschal liturgical interpretation
4.1.3 Seventh-day Adventist interpretation
4.1.4 Esoteric interpretation
4.1.5 Radical discipleship interpretation
4.1.6 Paschal spiritual interpretation
4.2 Aesthetic and literary interpretations
4.3 Academic interpretations
4.4 Criticism
5 Old Testament origins
6 See also
7 Notes
8 References
9 External links

( extract source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Revelation )

Apocalypticism is the religious belief that there will be an apocalypse, a term which originally referred to a revelation of God's will, but now usually refers to belief that the world will come to an end time very soon, even within one's own lifetime. This belief is usually accompanied by the idea that civilization, as we know it, will soon come to a tumultuous end with some sort of catastrophic global event such as war. Apocalypticism is often conjoined with esoteric knowledge that will likely be revealed in a major confrontation between good and evil forces, destined to change the course of history. Apocalypses can be viewed as good, evil, ambiguous or neutral, depending on the particular religion or belief system promoting them. They can appear as a personal or group tendency, an outlook or a perceptual frame of reference, or merely as expressions in a speaker's rhetorical style.

Contents
 
1 Jewish apocalypticism
2 Christian apocalypticism
2.1 Jesus' apocalypticism
2.2 Year 1000
2.3 Domesday Book
2.4 Fifth Monarchy Men
2.5 Isaac Newton and the end of the world in 2060
2.6 Millerites and Seventh-day Adventists
3 Apocalypticism in Islam
4 Apocalypticism in contemporary culture
4.1 UFO Religions
4.2 Y2K
4.3 Harold Camping and his 2011 end times prediction
4.4 Mayan calendar 2012
5 See also
5.1 General
5.2 Christian premillennial apocalyptic writers
5.3 Apocalyptic movements
5.4 Millenarian cults
6 Further reading (chronological)
7 References

( extract source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypticism )

( http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Apocalypse-Code-Gerard-Bodson/dp/1862047308 )

O Código Da Bíblia (The Bible Code)

Info About The Book & Related (in english):

I

The Bible Code is a best-selling book by Michael Drosnin, first published in 1997. A sequel, The Bible Code II, was published in 2002 and also reached best-seller status.

Drosnin describes an alleged "Bible code", in which messages are encoded in the Hebrew bible. The messages are purported to be hidden in the Torah, and can be deciphered by placing the letters of various Torah passages at equal intervals in a text that has been formatted to fit inside a graph.

Drosnin suggests that the Code was written by extraterrestrial life (which he claims also brought the DNA of the human genetic code to Earth). Drosnin elaborates on this theory in The Bible Code II, suggesting that the alien who brought the code left the key to the code in a steel obelisk. Drosnin attempted to find this obelisk, which he believes is buried near the Dead Sea.

Drosnin's book is based on the technique described in the paper "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis" by Professor Eliyahu Rips of the Hebrew University in Israel with Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg. The Bible Code makes numerous predictions and post-diction, such as the coming (not having come to pass) of the apocalypse in 2006, and a claim of "proof" that Lee Harvey Oswald was destined to assassinate John F. Kennedy.

( source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_Code_(book) )

II

The Bible code (Hebrew: צפנים בתנ"ך‎), also known as the Torah code, is a purported set of secret messages encoded within the text Hebrew Bible and describing prophesies and other guidance regarding the future. This hidden code has been described as a method by which specific letters from the text can be selected to reveal an otherwise obscured message. Though Bible codes have been postulated and studied for centuries, the subject has been popularized in modern times by Michael Drosnin's book The Bible Code.

Many examples have been documented in the past. One cited example is that by taking every 50th letter of the Book of Genesis starting with the first taw, the Hebrew word "torah" is spelled out. The same happens in the Book of Exodus. Modern computers have been used to search for similar patterns and more complex variants, and published in a peer-reviewed academic journal in 1994. Proponents hold that it is exceedingly unlikely such sequences could arise by chance, while skeptics and opponents hold that such sequences do often arise by chance, as demonstrated on other Hebrew and English texts.[citation needed]

Overview

Contemporary discussion and controversy around one specific encryption method became widespread in 1994 when Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg published a paper, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis", in the scientific journal Statistical Science.[1] The paper, which was presented by the journal as a "challenging puzzle", presented strong statistical evidence that biographical information about famous rabbis was encoded in the text of the Book of Genesis, centuries before those rabbis lived.

Since then the term "Bible codes" has been popularly used to refer specifically to information encrypted via this ELS method.

Since the Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg (WRR) paper was published, two conflicting schools of thought regarding the "codes" have emerged among proponents. The traditional (WRR) view of the codes is based strictly on their applicability to the Torah, and asserts that any attempt to study the codes outside of this context is invalid. This is based on a belief that the Torah is unique among biblical texts in that it was given directly to mankind (via Moses) in exact letter-by-letter sequence and in the original Hebrew language.

Equidistant Letter Sequence method

The primary method by which purportedly meaningful messages have been extracted is the Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS). To obtain an ELS from a text, choose a starting point (in principle, any letter) and a skip number, also freely and possibly negative. Then, beginning at the starting point, select letters from the text at equal spacing as given by the skip number. For example, the bold letters in this sentence form an ELS. With a skip of -4, and ignoring the spaces and punctuation, the word safest is spelled out.

Often more than one ELS related to some topic can be displayed simultaneously in an ELS letter array. This is produced by writing out the text in a regular grid, with exactly the same number of letters in each line, then cutting out a rectangle. In the example below, part of the King James Version of Genesis (26:5–10) is shown with 33 letters per line. ELSs for BIBLE and CODE are shown. Normally only a smaller rectangle would be displayed, such as the rectangle drawn in the figure. In that case there would be letters missing between adjacent lines in the picture, but it is essential that the number of missing letters be the same for each line.

Although the above examples are in English texts, Bible codes proponents usually use a Hebrew Bible text. For religious reasons, most Jewish proponents use only the Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy).

[edit] ELS extensionsOnce a specific word has been found as an ELS, it is natural to see if that word is part of a longer ELS consisting of multiple words.[2] For example, in the middle of the rightmost column of the boxed matrix above is the ELS "he". After searching immediately above and below this ELS, we see another ELS ("toe") that is right below the "he" ELS. Code pioneers Haralick and Rips have published an example of a longer, extended ELS, which reads, "Destruction I will call you; cursed is Bin Laden and revenge is to the Messiah."[3]

ELS extensions that form phrases or sentences are of interest. Bible code proponents claim that the longer the extended ELS, the less likely it is to be the result of chance.[4]

ELS extensions

Once a specific word has been found as an ELS, it is natural to see if that word is part of a longer ELS consisting of multiple words.[2] For example, in the middle of the rightmost column of the boxed matrix above is the ELS "he". After searching immediately above and below this ELS, we see another ELS ("toe") that is right below the "he" ELS. Code pioneers Haralick and Rips have published an example of a longer, extended ELS, which reads, "Destruction I will call you; cursed is Bin Laden and revenge is to the Messiah."[3]

ELS extensions that form phrases or sentences are of interest. Bible code proponents claim that the longer the extended ELS, the less likely it is to be the result of chance.[4]

History

Jewish culture has a long tradition of interpretation, annotation, and commentary regarding the Bible, leading to both exegesis and eisegesis (insightful and false interpretations). The Bible code can be viewed as a part of this tradition, albeit one of the more controversial parts. Throughout history, many Jewish, and later Christian, scholars have attempted to find hidden or coded messages within the Bible's text, notably including Isaac Newton.[5][6]

The 13th-century Spanish Rabbi Bachya ben Asher may have been the first[citation needed] to describe an ELS in the Bible. His four-letter example related to the traditional zero-point of the Hebrew calendar. Over the following centuries there are some hints that the ELS technique was known, but few definite examples have been found from before the middle of the 20th century. At this point many examples were found by the Slovak Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl and published by his students after his death in 1957. Nevertheless, the practice remained known only to a few until the early 1980s, when some discoveries of an Israeli school teacher Avraham Oren came to the attention of the mathematician Eliyahu Rips at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Rips then took up the study together with his religious studies partners Doron Witztum and Alexander Rotenberg, and several others.

Rips and Witztum designed computer software for the ELS technique and subsequently found many examples. About 1985, they decided to carry out a formal test, and the "Great rabbis experiment" was born. This experiment tested the hypothesis that ELS's of the names of famous rabbinic personalities and their respective birth and death dates form a more compact arrangement than could be explained by chance. Their definition of "compact" was complex but, roughly, two ELSs were compactly arranged if they can be displayed together in a small window. When Rips et al carried out the experiment, the data was measured and found to be statistically significant, supporting their hypothesis.

The "great rabbis experiment" went through several iterations, and was eventually published in 1994, in the peer-reviewed journal Statistical Science. Prior to publication, the journal's editor, Robert Kass, subjected the paper to three successive peer reviews by the journal's referees, who according to Kass were "baffled". Though still skeptical,[7] none of the reviewers had found any flaws. Understanding that the paper was certain to generate controversy, it was presented to readers in the context of a "challenging puzzle."

Witztum and Rips also performed other experiments, most of them successful, though none were published in journals. Another experiment, in which the names of the famous rabbis were matched against the places of their births and deaths (rather than the dates), was conducted in 1997 by Harold Gans, former Senior Cryptologic Mathematician for the United States National Security Agency.[8] Again, the results were interpreted as being meaningful and thus suggestive of a more than chance result.[9] These Bible codes became known to the public primarily due to the American journalist Michael Drosnin, whose book The Bible Code (Simon and Schuster, 1997) was a best-seller in many countries. Rips issued a public statement that he did not support Drosnin's work or conclusions;[10] even Gans has said that although the book states that the codes in the Torah can be used to predict future events: This is absolutely unfounded. There is no scientific or mathematical basis for such a statement, and the reasoning used to come to such a conclusion in the book is logically flawed.[11] In 2002, Drosnin published a second book on the same subject, called Bible Code II: the Countdown. The Jewish outreach group Aish-HaTorah employs Bible Codes in their Discovery Seminars to persuade secular Jews of the divinity of the Torah, and to encourage them to trust in its traditional Orthodox teachings. Use of Bible code techniques also spread into certain Christian circles, especially in the United States. The main early proponents were Yakov Rambsel, who is a Messianic Jew, and Grant Jeffrey. Another Bible code technique was developed in 1997 by Dean Coombs (also Christian). Various pictograms are claimed to be formed by words and sentences using ELS.[12]

Since 2000, physicist Nathan Jacobi, an agnostic Jew, and engineer Moshe Aharon Shak, an orthodox Jew, claim to have discovered hundreds of examples of lengthy, extended ELSs.[13] The number of extended ELSs at different lengths is compared with those expected from a non-encoded text, as determined by a formula from Markov chain theory.[14]

Criticism

The primary objection advanced against Bible codes is that information theory does not prohibit "noise" from appearing to be sometimes meaningful. Thus, if data chosen for ELS experiments are intentionally or unintentionally "cooked" before the experiment is defined, similar patterns can be found in texts other than the Torah. Although the probability of an ELS in a random place being a meaningful word is small, there are so many possible starting points and skip patterns that many such words can be expected to appear, depending on the details chosen for the experiment, and that it is possible to "tune" an ELS experiment to achieve a result which appears to exhibit patterns that overcome the level of noise.

Criticism of the original paper

In 1999, four authors, the Australian mathematician Brendan McKay, the Israeli mathematicians Dror Bar-Natan and Gil Kalai, and the Israeli psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel (collectively known as "MBBK") published a paper in Statistical Science, in which they argue that the case of Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg (WRR) is "fatally defective, indeed that their result merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it."[15] The MBBK paper was reviewed anonymously by four professional statisticians prior to publication. In the introduction to the paper, Robert Kass, the Editor of the Journal who previously had described the WRR paper as a "challenging puzzle" wrote that "considering the work of McKay, Bar-Natan, Kalai and Bar-Hillel as a whole it indeed appears, as they conclude, that the puzzle has been solved".[7]

In the MBBK paper, the authors present the following arguments:

- that because of problems in WRR's test method, the results of WRR's 1994 paper "may reflect (at least to some extent) uninteresting properties of the word list [the appellation-date word pairs] rather than an extraordinary property of Genesis,"[16] and that the test method used by WRR has properties that make it "exceptionally susceptible to systematic bias."[17]

- that WRR had many choices available when selecting the appellations, the dates, and the date forms.[18]

- that, despite the claims by WRR and S. Z. Havlin that Havlin prepared the appellations independently, the earliest available documents on the experiments do not state that the lists of appellations were prepared by an independent expert. Similarly, the authors quote a 1985 lecture by Eliyahu Rips, in which he describes the appellation selection process as taking "every possible variant that we considered reasonable", and makes no mention of Havlin or an independent expert.[19]

- that, by adding some appellations and removing some appellations from WRR's list 2, and then repeating the test on the initial 78,064 letters (the length of Genesis) of a Hebrew translation of War and Peace, they achieved a significance level of one in a million. The authors say this shows that "the freedom provided just in the selection of appellations is sufficient to explain the strong result" in WRR's 1994 paper.[20]

- The authors present a "study of variations", in which they repeated the experiments many times, each time making one or more minimal changes to the test method, the dates, or the date forms.[21] The authors conclude that "only a small fraction of variations made WRR's result stronger and then usually by only a small amount ... we believe that these observations are strong evidence for tuning ... "[22]

- The authors present experiments they conducted which they say show that some results of experiments by WRR and Harold Gans are "too good to be true." That is, some of the results are statistically improbable even if one accepts that WRR's hypothesis is true. The authors say that these studies "give support to the theory that WRR's experiments were tuned toward an overly idealized result consistent with the common expectations of statistically naïve researchers."[23]

- The authors present multiple experiments they conducted in which they attempted to replicate WRR's experiments. The authors used an independent expert to prepare the appellations and dates for each of these experiments. The authors report that the results of these attempted replications were negative.[24]

- that the available evidence indicates that the text of Genesis used by WRR is substantially different from its original form, and that ELSs with large skips (which WRR's experiments rely on) could not survive such changes.[25]

From these observations, MBBK created an alternative hypothesis to explain the "puzzle" of how the codes were discovered. MBBK's claim, in essence, was that the WRR authors had cheated[26][27] MBBK went on to describe the means by which the cheating might have occurred, and demonstrate the tactic as presumed.

MBBK's refutation was not strictly mathematical in nature, rather it asserted that the WRR authors and contributors had intentionally or unintentionally (a) selected the names and/or dates in advance and (b) designed their experiments to match their selection and thereby achieved their "desired" result. The MBBK paper argued that the ELS experiment is extraordinarily sensitive to very small changes in the spellings of appellations, and that the WRR result "merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it."

The MBBK paper demonstrated that this "tuning", when combined with what MBBK asserted was available "wiggle" room, was capable of generating a result similar to WRR's Genesis result in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace. Psychologist and MBBK co-author Maya Bar-Hillel subsequently summarized the MBBK view that the WRR paper was a hoax, an intentionally and a carefully designed "magic trick".[28]

The Bible codes (together with similar arguments concerning hidden prophecies in the writings of Shakespeare) have been quoted as examples of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

Replies to MBBK's criticisms

Harold Gans has argued that MBBK's hypothesis implies a conspiracy between WRR and their co-contributors to fraudulently tune the appellations in advance. Gans argues that the conspiracy must include Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and S. Z. Havlin, because all of them say that Havlin compiled the appellations independently. Gans argues further that such a conspiracy must include the multiple rabbis who have written a letter confirming the accuracy of Havlin's list. Finally, argues Gans, such a conspiracy must also include the multiple participants of the cities experiment conducted by Gans (which includes Gans himself). Gans concludes that "the number of people necessarily involved in [the conspiracy] will stretch the credulity of any reasonable person."[29]

Brendan McKay has replied that he and his colleagues have never accused Havlin or Gans of participating in a conspiracy. Instead, says McKay, Havlin likely did what WRR's early preprints said he did: he provided "valuable advices". Similarly, McKay accepts Gans' statements that Gans did not prepare the data for his cities experiment himself. McKay concludes that "there is only ONE person who needs to have been involved in knowing fakery, and a handful of his disciples who must be involved in the cover-up (perhaps with good intent)."[30]

The WRR authors issued a series of responses regarding of the claims of MBBK,[31] including the claim that no such tuning did or even could have taken place.[32] An earlier WRR response to a request by MBBK authors presented results from additional experiments that used the specific "alternate" name and date formats which MBBK suggested had been intentionally avoided by WRR.[33] Using MBBK's alternates, the results WRR returned showed equivalent or better support for the existence of the codes, and so challenged the "wiggle room" assertion of MBBK. In the wake of the WRR response, author Bar-Natan issued a formal statement of non-response.[34] After a series of exchanges with McKay and Bar-Hillel, WRR author Witztum responded in a new paper[35] claiming that McKay had used smoke screen tactics in creating several straw man arguments, and thereby avoided the points made by WRR authors refuting MBBK.[36] Witztum also claimed that, upon interviewing a key independent expert contracted by McKay for the MBBK paper, that some experiments performed for MBBK had validated, rather than refuted the original WRR findings, and questioned why MBBK had expunged these results from their paper. McKay replied to these claims.[37]

No publication in a peer reviewed scientific journal has appeared refuting MBBK's paper. In 2006, three new Torah Codes papers were published at the 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR'06).[38] Each of the three works was supported by Yuri Pikover, founder of the company Xylan (acquired in 1999 by Alcatel).

Robert Aumann, a notable game theorist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005, has followed the Bible Code research and controversy for many years. He wrote:[39] "Though the basic thesis of the research seems wildly improbable, for many years I thought that an ironclad case had been made for the codes; I did not see how 'cheating' could have been possible. Then came the work of the 'opponents' (see, for example, McKay, Bar-Natan, Bar-Hillel and Kalai, Statistical Science 14 (1999), 149–173). Though this work did not convince me that the data had been manipulated, it did convince me that it could have been; that manipulation was technically possible. "After a long and interesting analysis of the experiment and the dynamics of the controversy, stating for example that "almost everybody included [in the controversy] made up their mind early in the game" Aumann concluded:

"A priori, the thesis of the Codes research seems wildly improbable... Research conducted under my own supervision failed to confirm the existence of the codes - though it also did not establish their non-existence. So I must return to my a priori estimate, that the Codes phenomenon is improbable". [40]

Criticism of Michael Drosnin

Journalist Drosnin's books have been criticized by some who believe that the Bible Code is real but that it cannot predict the future.[41] On Drosnin's claim of Rabin's death, Drosnin wrote in his book "The Bible Code" (published in 1997) on page 120; "Yigal Amir could not be found in advance". This is very telling in that dangerous period of Israeli politics from the Oslo Accords of 1993 to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995.[42] Critics have noted a huge error in the "code" Drosnin claimed to have found, they note Drosnin used the Biblical verse Deuteronomy 4:42. Scholars note; "For example, citing again the passage intersecting with Rabin: that passage is from Deuteronomy 4:42, but Drosnin ignores the words immediately following "a murderer who will murder." What comes next is the phrase "unwittingly" (biveli da'at). This is because the verse deals with the cities of refuge where accidental killers can find asylum. In this case, then, the message would refer to an accidental killing of (or by) Rabin and it would therefore be wrong. Another message (p. 71) supposedly contains a "complete" description of the terrorist bombing of a bus in Jerusalem on February 25, 1996. It includes the phrase "fire, great noise," but overlooks the fact that the letters which make up those two words are actually part of a larger phrase from Genesis 35:4 which says: "under the terebinth that was near Shechem." If the phrase does tell of a bus bombing, why not take it to indicate that it would be in Nablus, the site of ancient Shechem?" [43]

Drosnin also made a number of claims and alleged predictions that have since failed. Among the most important, Drosnin clearly states in his book "The Bible Code II", published on December 2, 2002, that there was to be a World War involving a "Atomic Holocaust" that would allegedly be the end of the world.[44] Another claim Drosnin makes in "The Bible Code II" is that the nation of Libya would develop weapons of mass destruction that they would then be given to terrorists who would then use them to attack the West (specifically the United States).[45] In reality Libya improved relations with the West in 2003 and gave up all their existing weapons of mass destruction programs.[46] A final claim Drosnin made in "The Bible Code II" was that Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat would allegedly be assassinated by being shot to death by gunmen which Drosnin specifically stated would be from the Palestinian Hamas movement.[47] This prediction by Drosnin also failed, as Yasser Arafat died on November 11, 2004[48] of what was later declared to be natural causes (specifically a stroke brought on by an unknown infection).[49][50] The only conspiracy theories about Yasser Arafat allegedly being murdered have been made by a few Palestinian figures, and have involved alleged poisoning that was supposed to have been on the orders of Israeli officials. The only alleged Palestinian collaboration in this conspiracy theory involve two leading Palestinian figures from the Palestinian Fatah movement; those are current Palestinian Authority and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and Mohammed Dahlan the former head of Fatah in Gaza.[51] Writer Randy Ingermanson criticized Drosnin by stating that; "And that's all they are, even for Drosnin -- possibilities. He believes that the future is not fixed, and that the Bible code predicts all possible outcomes. Which makes it not much of a predictive tool, but again, he seems not to mind this very much. If you are laying bets based on Drosnin, you had better be willing to bet on all possible outcomes." [52]

Some accuse him of factual errors, claiming that he has much support in the scientific community,[53] mistranslating Hebrew words[54] to make his point more convincing, and using the Bible without proving that other books do not have similar codes.[55]

Responding to an explicit challenge from Drosnin, who claimed that other texts such as Moby-Dick would not yield ELS results comparable to the Torah, McKay created a new experiment that was tuned to find many ELS letter arrays in Moby-Dick that relate to modern events, including the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He also found a code relating to the Rabin assassination, containing the assassin's first and last name and the university he attended, as well as the motive ("Oslo", relating to the Oslo accords).[56] Drosnin and others have responded to these claims, saying the tuning tactics employed by McKay were simply "nonsense", and providing analyses[57] to support their argument that the tables, data and methodologies McKay used to produce the Moby Dick results "simply do not qualify as code tables".[58]

Skeptic Dave Thomas claimed to find other examples in many texts. While Thomas' methodology was alleged to have been refuted by Robert Haralick[59] and others, Thomas's criticisms were aimed at Drosnin, whose methodology was actually far worse. (In fact, Drosnin's example of "Clinton" in his first book violated the basic Bible Code concept of "Minimality"; Drosnin's "Clinton" was a completely invalid "code"). In addition, McKay claimed that Drosnin had used the flexibility of Hebrew orthography to his advantage, freely mixing classic (no vowels, Y and W strictly consonant) and modern (Y and W used to indicate i and u vowels) modes, as well as variances in spelling of K and T, to reach the desired meaning. In his television series John Safran vs God, Australian television personality John Safran and McKay again demonstrated the "tuning" technique, demonstrating that these techniques could produce "evidence" of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York in the lyrics of Vanilla Ice's repertoire. Additionally, "coded" references in non-Torah Bible texts, as for instance the famous Number of the Beast, do not use the Bible code technique. And, the influence and consequences of scribal errors (e.g., misspellings, additions, deletions, misreadings, ...) are hard to account for in the context of a Bible coded message left secretly in the text. McKay and others claim that in the absence of an objective measure of quality and an objective way to select test subjects, it is not possible to positively determine whether any particular observation is significant or not. For that reason, most of the serious effort of the skeptics has been focused on the scientific claims of Witztum, Rips and Gans.

Other types of Bible codes

Another example of an alleged prediction coded in the text of the Bible, which is also attributed to Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl (who was mentioned above),[60] concerns the hanging of 10 Nazi leaders on 16 October 1946 following the Nuremberg Trials. Rabbi Weissmandl claimed that this event was predicted by the Biblical story about the hanging of the 10 sons of Haman, also as a final consequence of a (failed) genocidal plan against the Jews. The "coded" aspect of his speculation is that in the Masoretic text of the Bible, three letters within the list of Haman's sons are marked as small letters:[61] the tav ת of Parshandatha, the shin ש of Parmashtha and the zayin ז of Vajezatha. Rabbi Weissmandl pointed out that if you combine the three small letters together they form the word תשז, which in the accepted Hebrew notation for year numbers (using Gimatria) corresponds to the Jewish year [5]707 Anno Mundi,[62] which is the Jewish year that the 10 Nazi leaders were executed (October 16, 1946 corresponds to Tishrei 21, 5707, the day known as Hoshanna Rabba, the day of severe judgments for the nations of the world, according to the Jewish calendar).[63][64] Many people criticize various aspects of this speculation.[65][66][67][68][69][70] They point out that there are several different traditions about what are the small letters in the names of Haman's sons. Also they point out that the proponents only mention the similarities between the cases, but ignore the many differences. More in general they point out that this is not exactly an a priori prediction, but rather a postdiction, and therefore the statistical significance of it, if there is any at all, cannot be reliably calculated.

( source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code )

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliomancy ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shemhamphorasch


Info About The Book & Related (in portuguese):


Bíblia - Código Secreto


N’«O CÓDIGO DA BÍBLIA», DOSNIN, JORNALISTA AMERICANO, NARRA A DESCOBERTA FEITA POR UM MATEMÁTICO ISRAELITA DA CHAVE QUE PÕE A BÍBLIA A CONTAR O FUTURO

Texto de MICHAEL DOSNIN

BÍBLIA não é apenas um livro - é também um programa computacional. Foi originalmente insculpida na pedra e manuscrita num rolo de pergaminho, por fim impressa em forma de livro, à espera da invenção do computador para poder ser compreendida integralmente. Agora pode ser lida como sempre foi pretendido que fosse lida.

Para descobrir o código, Rips teve de eliminar todos os espaços entre as palavras, transformando a Bíblia original num fio contínuo de letras, com a extensão de 304.805 letras.

Ao fazê-lo estava, na verdade, a restaurar a Tora segundo o que os grandes sábios dizem que ela era na sua forma original. De acordo com a tradição, foi assim que Moisés recebeu a Bíblia de Deus - «contígua, sem divisão de palavras».

O computador pesquisa esse fio de letras em busca de nomes, palavras e frases ocultos pelo código de espaços. Começa na primeira letra da Bíblia e procura todas as possíveis sequências - palavras obtidas com intervalos de 1,2,3, e assim sucessivamente, até vários milhares. Depois repete a busca, começando na segunda letra, e assim, sucessivamente, até chagar à última letra da Bíblia.

Depois de encontrar a palavra-chave, o computador pode então procurar informações afins. Frequentemente encontra nomes, datas e lugares correlacionados codificados em conjunto - Rabin, Amir, Telavive, o ano do assassínio, tudo no mesmo lugar.

O computador regista a correspondência entre palavras, fazendo dois testes: o grau de proximidade com que aparecem juntas e se os saltos gerados pelas palavras procuradas são os mais curtos.

Rips explicou como isto funciona, usando a guerra do Golfo como exemplo.

- Pedimos ao computador que procurasse Saddatn Hussein - disse ele. - Então procurámos palavras aparentadas para vermos se apareciam juntas de maneira matematicamente relevante. Com a guerra do Golfo encontrámos «Scuds» com mísseis russos e, codificada com o nome Hussein, a data em que a guerra começaria.

As palavras formavam um quebra-cabeças. De uma forma consistente, o código da Bíblia aproxima entre si palavras interligadas que revelam informações correlativas. Com Bill Clinton, presidente. Com o desembarque na Lua, nave especial e Apollo 11. Com Hitler, nazi. Com Kennedy, Dallas.

Após inúmeras experiências, as palavras cruzadas foram apenas encontradas na Bíblia. Não foram encontradas em Guerra e Paz, nem em qualquer outro livro, nem em 1 O milhões de testes gerados por computador.

Segundo Rips, há uma infinidade de informações codificadas na Bíblia. Sempre que é descoberto um novo nome, palavra ou frase, formam-se novas palavras cruzadas. As palavras afins aparecem na vertical, na horizontal e na diagonal.

Podemos usar o assassínio de Rabin como exemplo. Primeiro, pedimos ao computador para pesquisar na Bíblia o nome «Yitzhak Rabin». Apareceu uma única vez, com uma sequência de intervalos de 4772.

O computador dividiu a Bíblia inteira - o fio completo de 304.805 letras - em 64 filas de 4772 letras. O quadro anterior é um aspecto do centro dessa matriz. No meio da imagem encontra-se o nome «Yitzhak Rabin», com cada letra rodeada por um círculo.

Se «Yitzhak Rabin» fosse revelado por um código de intervalos de 10, então cada fila teria uma extensão de 10 letras. Se fossem 100 intervalos, então as filas teriam uma extensão de 100 letras. E, sempre que as filas são reordenadas, cria-se um novo conjunto de palavras e frases interligadas.

Cada palavra de código determina a maneira como o computador apresenta o texto da Bíblia e as palavras cruzadas que se formam. Há 3000 anos, a Bíblia foi codificada de forma que a descoberta do nome «Rabin» revelasse automaticamente informações correlativas.

Cruzando o nome «Yitzhak Rabin», descobrimos as palavras «assassino assassinará», que aparecem no quadro que se segue, com cada letra metida num quadrado.

As probabilidades de o nome completo de Rabin aparecer juntamente com a profecia do seu assassínio eram apenas de 1 para 3000. Os matemáticos dizem que 1 para 100 já é improvável. O teste mais rigoroso jamais usado é de 1 para 1000.

Voei para Israel, para avisar Rabin, em 1 de Setembro de 1994. Mas só um ano depois de ele ter sido assassinado encontrámos o nome do assassino. «Amir» estava codificado no mesmo lugar que «Yitzhak Rabin» e «assassino que assassinará».

o nome de Amir estava ali há 3000 anos, à espera de ser detectado. Contudo, o código da Bíblia não é uma bola de cristal - não é possível encontrar seja o que for se não se souber o que se procura.

É claro que isto nada tinha a ver com Nostradamus nem com «uma estrela nascerá a oriente e um grande rei será destituído», palavras que poderiam mais tarde ser lidas por forma a significarem fosse o que fosse que na verdade acontecesse.

Pelo contrário, havia pormenores tão precisos como na história noticiada pela CNN: o nome completo de Rabin, o nome do assassino, o ano em que foi assassinado - tudo isto, com excepção de Amir, descoberto antes de ter acontecido.

HOLOCAUSTO ATÓMICO

O TEXTO corrente, tanto do Antigo como do Novo Testamento, profetiza que a «batalha final» terá início em Israel, com um ataque à Cidade Santa, Jerusalém, acabando por envolver o mundo inteiro.

No Livro do Apocalipse isso surge expresso da seguinte maneira: «Satanás será libertado da prisão e sairá a enganar as nações que se encontram espalhadas pelos quatro cantos da Terra, Gog e Magog, para as ajuntar na batalha. Cercaram o arraial do povo do Senhor e a cidade amada. Mas desceu fogo do céu e devorou-os.»

No código da Bíblia só uma palavra se adapta tanto a «guerra mundial» como a «holocausto atómico» - «Jerusalém».

No dia em que Rabin foi assassinado encontrei as palavras «todo o seu povo à guerra» codificadas na Bíblia. O aviso de guerra total encontrava-se oculto na mesma matriz de código que previa o assassínio.

«Todo o seu povo à guerra» aparecia mesmo por cima de «assassino assassinarás no mesmo sítio que «Yitzhak Rabin».

Apanhei imediatamente um avião de regresso a Israel. O assassínio de Rabin modificou tudo. Foi o primeiro momento em que o código da Bíblia me pareceu totalmente real, o momento em que o que se encontrava codificado se tomou um facto de vida ou de morte. E agora o código avisava que o país inteiro corria perigo.

Enquanto Israel chorava a morte de Rabin, fiquei a trabalhar com Eli Rips na sua casa nos arredores de Jerusalém.

Tentámos descodificar os pormenores do novo vaticínio «todo o seu povo à guerra».

Rips e eu procurámos no código da Bíblia sinais de um conflito catastrófico. Ainda não sabíamos que o código avisava que iria haver um ataque atómico a Jerusalém. Ainda não tínhamos encontrado «guerra mundial».

Porém, na primeira busca do computador encontrámos as palavras «holocausto de Israel». O «holocausto» estava codificado uma vez no versículo do Genesis onde o patriarca Jacob diz aos filhos o que acontecerá a Israel no «fim dos tempos».

- A primeira questão é quando - disse Rips, que verificou imediatamente os cinco anos seguintes, cada ano do resto do século. De súbito empalideceu e mostrou-me os resultados.

O ano hebraico que estava a decorrer, 5756- o final de 1995 e a maior parte de 1996 no calendário moderno -, aparecia no mesmo lugar que o novo «holocausto» vaticinado.

Era um quadro assustador. O ano estava associado a «holocausto de Israel». Tratava-se de uma combinação perfeita. «5756» aparecia no versículo da Bíblia em que se encontrava codificado o «holocausto».

O ano 2000, 5760 do calendário antigo, era também uma boa combinação. Mas o último ano do século parecia distante naquele momento. Na segunda semana de Novembro de 1995, nos dias que se seguiram ao assassínio de Rabin, o facto mais importante foi a nítida modificação do «holocausto» associada ao ano em curso.

- Quais são as probabilidades de isso acontecer por acaso? - perguntei a Rips. 1 em 1000 - respondeu-me.

- Que pode causar um holocausto na Israel moderna? - perguntei-lhe.

- A única coisa que podíamos imaginar era um ataque nuclear. Encontrámo-lo então codificado na Bíblia, uma assustadora afirmação de perigo moderno no antigo texto «holocausto atómico».

«Holocausto atómico» aparecia uma única vez. Três anos dos cinco seguintes estavam codificados no mesmo sítio - 1996, 1997 e o ano 2000. Mas, mais uma vez, o ano que nos prendeu a atenção foi o ano em curso, 5756. «Em 5756» estava codificado logo acima de «holocausto atómico».

- Quais são as probabilidades de isso acontecer duas vezes por acaso? - perguntei.

- 1 em 1.000.000 - respondeu Rips.

Havia indicações de perigo em todo o resto do século e mais para além. Se o código da Bíblia estivesse certo, Israel correria riscos sem precedentes durante, pelo menos, cinco anos.

Mas só um outro ano estava tão claramente codificado com «holocausto atómico» como 1996 - 1945, o ano de Hiroxima.

Debruçámo-nos novamente sobre a frase «todo o seu povo à guerra» que surgia com o assassínio de Rabin. As mesmas palavras - «todo o seu povo à guerra» - estavam também codificadas com «holocausto atómico». De facto, essas palavras apareciam três vezes no texto da Bíblia e estavam codificadas duas vezes com «holocausto atómico».

Rips calculou de novo as probabilidades. Mais uma vez eram inferiores a 1 para 1000.

Perguntei a Rips que probabilidades havia de cada elemento do perigo profetizado - a guerra, o holocausto, o ataque atómico - não estar codificado.

- Não é possível fazer o cálculo - respondeu Rips. Mas é na ordem de um para muitos milhões.

O código da Bíblia parecia profetizar um novo holocausto, a destruição de todo um país. Se eclodisse uma guerra nuclear no Médio Oriente, isso poderia desencadear um conflito global, talvez uma guerra mundial.

E os acontecimentos profetizados estavam de facto a acontecer como haviam sido vaticinados. Um primeiro-ministro estava já morto. Não podia ficar à espera para ver se a próxima profecia também se realiza.

Tínhamos informação que podia ter salvo Rabin, mas que não conseguiu impedir o assassínio. Agora tínhamos informação que podia impedir uma guerra. Em minha opinião, estávamos perante uma situação bizarra. Casualmente, tinha-se-me deparado um código na Bíblia que revelava acontecimentos futuros. Mas não era religioso, não acreditava em Deus e nada daquilo fazia sentido para mim.

Tinha trabalhado como jornalista par o «Washington Post» e o «Wall Street Journal». Tinha escrito um livro baseado em 10. documentos, estava habituado a factos difíceis nas nossas três dimensões. Não era estudioso da Bíblia. Nem sequer falava hebraico, a língua da Bíblia e do código Tinha de aprender tudo isso desde o início.

Mas encontrara o assassínio de Rabin codificado na Bíblia. Praticamente mais ninguém sabia que esse código existia. Só Rips sabia que ele também parecia prever um ataque atómico, um novo holocausto, talvez uma guerra mundial. E ele era matemático, não era jornalista. Não tinha experiência de lidar com figuras proeminentes de governos. Não se mostrara disposto a avisar Rabin. Não estava preparado para informar o novo primeiro-ministro, Shimon Peres.

Os meus instintos de jornalista diziam-me que este novo perigo não podia ser real. Todos os dirigentes árabes tinham comparecido no funeral de Rabin. A paz parecia mais segura do que no final de 1995.

«Todo o seu povo à guerra» parecia uma ameaça muito remota. Não havia uma verdadeira guerra desde que Israel derrotara o Egipto e a Síria em 1973. Não havia qualquer sublevação interna desde que a Intifada terminara com o aperto de mão Rabin-Arafat em 1993. Não havia ataques terroristas dignos de menção desde a criação do Estado moderno depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Um «holocausto atómico» parecia altamente improvável. Uma «guerra mundial» era algo de inacreditável. Mas também nunca acreditara que Rabin fosse assassinado. Só sabia que o seu assassínio estava codificado. E agora Rabin estava morto. Fora assassinado, exactamente como havia sido profetizado, em 5756, o ano hebraico que teve início em Setembro de 1995.

Olhei de novo para as novas folhas impressas. «A próxima guerra» estava codificada uma vez na Bíblia. «Será depois da morte do primeiro-ministro», afirmava o texto oculto. Os nomes «Yitzhak» e «Rabin» estavam codificados no mesmo versículo.

Agora tinha a certeza de que o código da Bíblia revelava o futuro. Continuava, porém, sem saber se cada profecia se realizaria. E também não sabia se o futuro poderia ser alterado.

Estava eu sem conseguir dormir a perguntar-me como poderia ter acesso a Shimon Peres e que iria dizer-lhe quando de súbito me surgiu a resposta para a pergunta principal.

Em hebraico, cada letra do alfabeto é também um número. As datas e os anos podem ser escritos com letras e no código da Bíblia aparecem sempre desta maneira. As mesmas letras que representavam o ano em curso, 5756, também formavam uma pergunta.

As letras que representavam os algarismos 5756, o ano do holocausto vaticinado, também representavam uma frase que era um desafio para todos nós - «Poderá isso ser alterado?»

Letras a esmo

PARA entender a arbitrariedade de algumas leituras de O Código da Bíblia, é necessário ter uma ideia de como a Bíblia está escrita no original A escrita do hebraico, tal como a do árabe, apenas retém as consoantes, o que, não oferecendo dificuldade aos falantes, torna impossível a pronúncia a quem não conheça a língua. Para palavras estrangeiras, ou em raros casos que podem provocar confusão, podem ainda usar-se três consoantes, o «aleph», o «yod» e o «waw» (para usar os nomes hebraicos) para «a», «i» e «u». ‘St ‘ psvl, perdão, isto é possível devido à estrutura das línguas semitas: em termos grosseiros, podemos dizer que cada esfera de sentido, amar, comer, falar, por exemplo, é dada por um conjunto de três consoantes, a chamada raiz triliteral, enquanto a função gramatical, amado, comida, falador, é dada pelo esquema vocálico, eventualmente com sufixos ou prefixos. O particípio presente, por exemplo, tem sempre a primeira sílaba em «a» e a segunda em «e». Assim, a raiz para a ideia de falar é D-B-R; «aquele que fala» é MDaBer, em que as vogais indicam o particípio presente e o «M» é um prefixo que indica uma nuance do verbo. Pode parecer complicado, mas qualquer estudante, ao fim de cinco lições, começa a achar normal ler as frases que conhece escritas sem vogais. Se repararmos que «talho» e «telha» têm a mesma sequência de consoantes, vemos a diferença de estrutura entre a nossa língua e as línguas semitas.

Se escrevermos um texto hebraico sem separação de palavras, poderemos sempre isolar um razoável grupo de letras seguidas que formem palavras isoladas - embora já seja mais difícil acontecer a possibilidade de encontrar duas frases completas com sentidos diferentes (algumas dúvidas de leitura de poucas passagens da Bíblia tiveram que ver com isto). Quem diz letras seguidas diz letras igualmente espaçadas: potencialmente, cada conjunto de três letras é portador de sentido, mesmo se nem todas as combinações existem efectivamente na língua.

Ora, o que Rips e Dosnin fazem é precisamente terem reunido as letras igualmente espaçadas que formam o nome que procuram, vão em busca de palavras soltas que se relacionem com esse nome: o único limite é que o intervalo entre as letras seja constante; mesmo assim, conseguem sempre qualquer coisa, como se pode calcular pelo que atrás dissemos

Quando não viram a sequência de letras ao contrários Assim o nome do assassino de Rabin, 'Amir, não está lá: o que está é RYM ‘. Na passagem sobre a extinção dos dinossauros, que referimos noutro local (ver «Antes do Mundo»), encontram a palavra «Rahab», nome de um monstro primordial em Isaías, ao pé de «asteróide»: mas, para isso, tornam a inverter a ordem de leitura. Em qualquer dos casos – e há mais – as outras palavras continuam a ser lidas normalmente, isto é, no caso do hebraico, da direita para a esquerda. As palavras lidas na vertical semelhantemente, tanto o são de baixo para cima como de cima para baixo. Nada no modelo permite predizer os casos em que se deve escolher um ou outro sentido de leitura, o mesmo é dizer que estamos no meio do arbitrário total. Com os nomes estrangeiros, passa-se algo de semelhante: ou se retém apenas a estrutura consonântica, ou se tomam em conta as três consoantes auxiliares de leitura. E que dizer do americanismo de Quem se refere a Los Angeles como La Calif?. A mesma liberdade se toma com as variantes ortográficas do hebraico antigo- nuns casos é YeRuSHaLaYM como YeRuSHaLaiM, quando não a designação metafórica Ariel. Encontram-se no texto as duas ortografias e a metáfora: o problema não é esse, é que nada é predizível pelo modelo, e sem predicatabilidade não há método. nem ciência.

A falácia e a prova

Texto de RUI ROCHA

RARAS são as vezes em que as ciências humanas têm ocasião de mostrar o seu rigor próprio face às ciências exactas e à matemática. A vertigem provocado pela leitura de O Código da Bíblia, do jornalista americano Michael Drosnin, provém da nossa fé na verdade matemática. Conta-se que Napoleão, visitando o Observatório, perguntou ao astrónomo Laplace, que lhe explicara o seu sistema astronómico: «E Deus?», ao que o cientista lhe respondera: «Senhor, não tive necessidade dessa hipótese.» O método estatístico desenvolvido pelo matemático Eliyahu Rips que Drosnin apresenta traz a questão inversa: desenha matematicamente o dedo de Deus. A questão de saber de Quem exactamente é o dedo - Deus para Rips, talvez um ET para Drosnin - tomasse irrelevante perante a conclusão directa: a Bíblia é um texto revelado. O método de Rips permitiria assim realizar o sonho de todos os apóstolos: um modo seguro e infalível de saber qual a religião verdadeira. O sistema das letras equidistantes aplicado ao Alcorão não prevê a ascensão da casa de Saud, a queda do Muro ou a viagem de Gagarine? Então é porque o Alcorão não é «revelado». E os Veda? O cânone pali? Por razões ligadas à escrita de cada língua (ver «Letras a esmo»), seria interessante aplicar o método, pelo menos, ao Alcorão. As implicações em termos de fanatismo são assustadoras.

Porque tudo se baseia numa falácia. A prova que Rips, Drosnin e os diversos estatísticos citados apresentam é, à primeira vista, perturbante: as co-ocorrências das palavras detectadas têm uma probabilidade baixíssima de ocorrer por acaso, 1 em 2000, por vezes 1 em 5 milhões, quando o critério de fiabilidade científica se situa habitualmente em 1 /1 000. O curioso é que esta impressionante indicação da presença de uma intenção não quer dizer nada. Absolutamente nada. Por razões específicas de que apresentamos à parte dois exemplos, e por uma razão geral: a probabilidade de acertar no totoloto é de 1 para 13 milhões, segundo dizem os jornais. E, no entanto, há quem ganhe; e, no entanto, ninguém considera isso sinal de uma indicação divina. Num diálogo narrado por Drosnin entre ele e Rips, este explica que não há limite para o número de co-ocorrências, apesar do número finito de caracteres da Tora. E é aqui que se revela a falácia básica, não do método, mas da sua utilização: o chamado «wishful thinking», como quem diz, ir à procura do que se quer encontrar. O problema não é a proximidade entre as palavras «Clinton» e «presidente»; é saber se não estão também próximas palavras como «servo» e «Satã», numa agradável confirmação da opinião iraniana sobre a América, ou se as palavras «santo» e «Deus» não andarão por perto do nome de Amir, o assassino de Rabin. É que ' dada a estrutura da escrita hebraica, e as liberdades que com ela são tomadas, a escolha das palavras significativas é totalmente dependente da intenção de sentido daquele que as procura. A probabilidade da co-ocorrência pode ser medida depois, mas o método não permite definir previamente quais as escolhas a reter e quais a eliminar: isto é, não há maneira de determinar as sequências de letras relevantes se não se souber hebraico, como quem diz, se o sentido não preexistir à descoberta. Em resumo: não há método algum e, contra isto, não existe probabilidade estatística que valha.

E quando, nas págs. 176/177, o autor nos apresenta primeiro a profeciado holocausto nuclear, depois a ocorrência da pergunta «Poderá isso ser alterado?» e, em segunda ocorrência, a resposta «Isso pode ser alterado», a conclusão descomprometida só pode ser uma: as três frases em conjunto anulam-se umas às outras, isto não quer dizer nada. Em vez de passar de jornalista a estatístico, Michael Drosnin teria feito bem em tirar um curso básico de epistemologia.

(Michael Dosnin, O Código da Bíblia, Gradiva, 1997,264 págs.)

UM DOS MAIS curiosos pormenores do Código da Bíblia é a datação usada. Mais curioso ainda é que os autores achem normalíssimo que um código que prevê tudo, desde o início à consumação dos tempos, use a era hebraica, também conhecida por «annomundi», ou ano do Mundo: obtém-se somando 3760 anos à era cristã, a que se usa no Ocidente, e provém de eruditos e tardios cálculos feitos por doutores da Lei, já depois da destruição do Terceiro Templo, que a partir da duração das gerações indicados na Bíblia procuraram a data da Criação. Nos tempos bíblicos, aliás, não existia pretensão de cronologia absoluta e usavam o ano ordinal da subida ao trono do soberano, embora se note no Livro de Reis, anterior ao exílio da Babilónia, a tentativa de criar uma datação a partir da fuga do Egipto (embora com uma base puramente convencional, pois tinham já perdido a memória dos séculos passados).

Mas não há, aparentemente, dúvidas: para o misterioso Codificador, a data que vale é a da criação do Mundo, 3760 anos antes da Encarnação de Cristo (que não foi no ano 1, diga-se de passagem). Fica-nos uma terrível dúvida: como os navegadores do Código encontraram também a indicação de que os dinossauros tinham sido destruídos por um asteróide, e sabendo-se que os bichos desapareceram há cerca de 60 milhões de anos, como é que é a data correspondente: 59 milhões Antes do Mundo?

Por outro lado convém notar que as letras em hebraico têm valor numérico, segundo a sucessão alfabética, as primeiras nove de 1 a 9, as nove seguintes de 10 a 90, as quatro restantes de 100 a 400 (usando-se algumas variantes na forma de certas letras para chegar a 900). Qualquer palavra é, pois, também um número; e qualquer número, uma palavra. E aqui tanto é lido da direita para esquerda, como da esquerda para a direita, de cima para baixo, ou de baixo para cima.

A tradicional Cabala é muito mais séria. As regras de substituição e permutação de letras são claramente definidas. O campo de aplicação das equivalências numéricas está claramente delimitado. Existem parâmetros formais de controlo. O que é mais grave nisto tudo é que não parece tratar-se de vigarice voluntária, mas sim de um genuíno convencimento, que só pode sair da mais completa impreparação intelectual. Rips será um grande estatístico e um indiscutível fanático: ignora é tudo de epistemologia e está completamente afastado da tradição viva da religião que professa - ou perceberia imediatamente o dislate formal do seu «código», em vez de ilustrar penosamente essa mistura de tecnologia moderna com ignorância teológica e cegueira espiritual que encontramos na prática dos fundamentalismos modernos. E Dosnin escusava de ilustrar tão descaradamente os piores estereótipos (injustos, como todos) sobre o nível cultural americano

( source - fonte: http://lindoro.no.sapo.pt/bilbia.htm )

Michael Drosnin (born January 31, 1946) is an American journalist and author, best known for his writings on the Bible code.

Drosnin was born in New York City. He worked as a journalist for the Washington Post (1966–1968) and the Wall Street Journal (1969–1970). His first book, "Citizen Hughes", a biography of the American businessman Howard Hughes based on stolen documents, was published in 1985. Drosnin began researching the Bible Code in 1992 after meeting the mathematician Eliyahu Rips in Israel, and with Rip's associate Alexander Rotenberg. At the time Drosnin claims that he was not a religious person and was very skeptical about the Bible Code at first. He became convinced that it was important in 1994 when he found a code relating to the future assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in the Bible. Drosnin sent a warning to Rabin, and claims that he became even more convinced of the ability of the code to predict the future when Rabin was assassinated in 1995. In 1997 Drosnin published his most famous book, Bible Code, which asserts that the Bible Code predicts the future and that events can be affected by our actions. The book also states that many famous assassinations—both past and future—were foretold in the Bible, and that the code can be interpreted with the help of a computer program. The book also implies that extraterrestrials delivered the message of the Bible encoded with these prophesies,[1] and that the code contains predictions of disasters and an apocalypse to occur between 1998 and 2006. Drosnin wrote a second book in 2002 named The Bible Code II:The Countdown.

His new book The Bible Code III: Saving the World (October 2010), is also in the market.

Criticisms

Drosnin has been criticized by some who believe that the Bible Code is real but that it cannot predict the future.[2] Some accuse him of factual errors, incorrectly claiming that he has much support in the scientific community,[3] mistranslating Hebrew words[1] to make his point more convincing, and using the Bible without proving that other books do not have similar codes.[4] Drosnin challenged his critics to find a code similar to the Bible Code in the notable novel Moby Dick. An article published in the "teaching aids" section of the Dartmouth College math department's "Chance" program, claims that Brendan McKay has found equidistant letter sequences (ELS's) in Moby Dick which approximate the alleged prediction of the assassination of Rabin.[5] Drosnin has responded to these claims, saying that the Moby Dick code results are simply "nonsense'; he said codes found in the Bible Code were "truth" and contained real predictions.[6]

( source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Drosnin )

More: http://www.amazon.com/The-Bible-Code-Michael-Drosnin/dp/0684810794 ; http://www.amazon.com/Bible-Code-II-The-Countdown/dp/0670032107 & http://www.amazon.com/Bible-Code-III-Saving-World/dp/0615399630