Once More On Biblical Numerics

ONCE MORE ON “BIBLICAL NUMERICS”

The same sort of phenomena that Panin “discovered” in the biblical texts can be found in any writing. It really is just plain old probability. For example, let’s take the first two lines of the first verse of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, As I nodded nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping As of someone gently rapping, rapping on my chamber door. “T’is some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping on my chamber door. Only this, and nothing more.”

First, assign numeric values to the letters of the English alphabet using the same principle Panin did for the Hebrew:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800

Now, convert the letters into their numeric values, and total up each word:

1 2 3 4 5

O n c e u p o n a m i d n i g h t d r e a r y,

60 50 3 5 300 70 60 50 1 40 9 4 50 9 7 8 200 4 90 5 1 90 700

118 480 1 327 890

6 7 8 9 10 11

w h i l e I p o n d e r e d w e a k a n d w e a r y

500 8 9 30 5 9 70 60 50 4 5 90 5 4 500 5 1 20 1 50 4 500 1 5 90 700

552 9 288 526 55 1296

And here are a few of the phenomena we find:

• All words together have 49 letters (7×7)
• The first 6 words have 28 letters (4×7)
• The last 5 words have 21 letters (3×7)
• The middle 5 words have 28 letters (4×7)
• The 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th and 11th words have 21 letters (3×7)
• The 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, and 10th words have 28 letters (4×7)
• The 1st, middle and last words have 14 letters (2×7)
• The 1st 3 words plus last 3 words have 21 letters (3×7)
• The 1st, 5th and 9th words have 14 letters (2×7)
• The 3rd, 7th and 11th words have 7 letters (1×7)
• The total of the 2nd, 5th, 8th and 11th words is 2954 (422×7)
• Beginning with the 5th letter, every 7th letter totals 413 (59×7)

And so forth. By Panin’s criteria, this proves that “The Raven” was inspired by God.

There are a number of other objections to Panin’s methodology as well, which time does not permit me to go into. For example, the theory presupposes that God not only chose the message contained in Scripture, but also the exact words used, the order of the words, their spellings et cetera and so forth. In short, it espouses the dictation theory of inspiration, which has been rejected by normative Christianity for nearly 2000 years.

Calvin Culver

Computers for Christ – Chicago