Uncut Gematria
The title I chose for this article reflects the title of the movie “Uncut Gems” which is essentially an analogy about Jacob (Howard) using deceit and manipulation to control the randomness and chaos of the universe. Ever since humanity was ejected from the idylic state of ignorance (the garden) and realized his utter vulnerability (nakedness) he has sought to control his environment. The price of Illumination was existential angst. If chaos cannot be controlled it can be used as an agent of rapid change and this is reflected by the motto Ordro ab Chao of secret societies and authoritarian institutes who use chaos as an instrument of social change.
That the ancient texts contain deep intertextual meaning is already known in scholarly circles. Intertextuality is the shaping of a text’s structure and meaning by another text, either through deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche or parody and can be extended to semiotics (the study of how signs derive their meaning within the structure of a text) and dialogism (which suggests a continual dialogue with other works of literature and other authors). Gematria adds another complex layer of infomatics that cannot be dismissed out of hand.
In the book, The History and Heritage of Scientific and Technological Information Systems, Bella Hass Weinberg examines how The Masoretes standardized the text of the Hebrew Bible and in the course of their work created alphabetical lists of words and phrases. These tenth-century lists may be viewed as the predecessors of thirteenth-century Latin biblical concordances.
Structurally, Masoretic lists and biblical concordances are analogous to KWOC (keyword out of context) indexes. Masoretic lists anticipated search features, including truncation and adjacency, developed in the latter half of the twentieth century. The Masoretes also created permuted indexes and produced frequency counts of biblical words. The first complete Hebrew biblical concordance, compiled in the fifteenth century, contains a “stoplist” or list of words not indexed that is similar to contemporary English stoplists. She comments; “One scholar, Jordan Penkower, believes that the Masoretes must have had an indexing system because their lists include function words, such as prepositions which, are often placed on “stoplists” (lists of words not to be indexed). How could anyone remember all the occurrences of the word on, for example, in twenty-four books?
The Masoretes did not exclude function words because every word in the Bible counted, and the standardizers of the text wanted to be sure that even non-content words were copied correctly. They prepared lists of the occurrences of similar-sounding function words, such as el (to) and ‘al (on)…….. Masoretic notes on the Bible often include frequency counts, which one might think could have been produced only with the aid of a computer. Keep in mind the scope of the Masoretic frequency counts: they cover all occurrences of a word or phrase in the twenty -four books of the Hebrew Bible. Scholars I have consulted are divided as to whether the Masoretes had the entire Bible memorized or used an indexing system (Weinberg. 2001. pp. 183 —185)”.
***Bella Hass Weinberg, “Predecessors of Scientific Indexing Structures in the Domain of Religion” in The History and Heritage of Scientific and Technological Information Systems, (eds. W. Boyd Rayward, Mary Ellen Bowden, Information Today, Inc., 2004:126-136), 127-128
Stop words are the words in a stop list (or stoplist or negative dictionary) which are filtered out (i.e. stopped) before or after processing of natural language data (text) because they are insignificant predecessor concept was used in creating some concordances. For example, the first Hebrew concordance, Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus’s Me’ir Nativ, contained a one-page list of unindexed words, with nonsubstantive prepositions and conjunctions which are similar to modern stop words.
The use of stop words is interesting and I suggest that a DOM (Differential Object Marker or Direct Object Marker) might well have a stop word or infomatics function as well as a syntactical role in Hebrew. In my preliminary examination of Exodus 20:7 it was discovered that the cumulative standard word value of the three words preceding the first DOM divided by six (31+70+401)/6 =188.883) ends in the same fractional digits as the second DOM marker when the three preceding word values are summed and divided by six (166+26+401/6) =98.8333. Moreover, when both these solutions are summed the (188.833+98.833) the value 287.666 emerges which can be reduced to 8666 which when further reduced is the value of the tetragammaton (26).
This and other considerations led me to believe that the number 6 and patterns thereof are foundational to the infomatics layer of the text and led me to the article by David Buckle the Sexagesamial Babylonian system found in the Babylonian tablet catalogued as YBC 7289 which is thought to be from c. 1800 – 1600 BCE.
That there is a Sexagesimal pattern in the alphanumeric data is in my view undeniable but I suspect that the enneadic matrix that I presented (which was an actual hybrid of the Babylonian Sexagesimal system) may be an artifact of the methodology or a byproduct of the number theory that I employed. This still needs further analysis (but I am extremely time poor). Nevertheless, there is a deeper layer of complexity and this has opened up a whole new avenue of research that I believe will provide fruitful insights and may ultimately answer the question as to the criteria that were used by the sages to consider certain texts inspired and sacred and others as non-canonical.
As an aside I am trying to use ChatGTP to produce the formulas that I need to process and convert numbers automatically. The first formula it produced was only partially correct as the first digits of Pi 3.141592 in base 10 should be 3:08,29,44,00,47 according to the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Solutions. The first instances of the Excel formula which included truncation were too complex for Excel which kept posting error pop-ups and did not deliver anything beyond the first digit pairs 08,29 so the AI suggested using VBA which after several code adjustments still did not achieve the necessary accuracy so the AI suggest using Python Math (lolz). All I can say is those bronze age scribblers must have been pretty good at math. I will continue to analyze the data when I find time.
My hypothesis is linked to cyclical catastrophe (The Great Precession Year) and what Dr McCairn refers to as boundary conditions and it seems to me that certain groups are using the knowledge of such events to leverage advantage beyond the event horizon. The Story of Genesis has a complex cosmogony couched in terms of universal mythology with archaeoastronomy demonstrating that all the ancients regarded phenomena in the sky as important and may explain why the Hebrews have twelve tribes and a tabernacle/temple patterned after the heavens. They also have a schematized calendar (Seder Olam) in which they deliberately compressed the Persian era omitting 167 years to fit the period between temple destruction. Accordingly it is the year AM 5784 (+167=5951?) in 2023 which would fit an interlude of approx 6,000 years between catastrophe cycles. My understanding is that the Genesis story and the Abrahamic revelation is a direct counter against an ancient hermetic (Gnostic) system in the previous catastrophe cycle that believed that scientific knowledge (alchemy) is the answer (the illumination promised by the serpent) to avoid and survive the catastrophe. In the words of Matt Damon in the movie The Martian, “I am going to have to science the shit out of this”.
Many ancient myths recount the story of man aspiring to god-like knowledge and control of his environment and every time it fails. What we are experiencing now is the emergence of this ancient behavior at the end of our cycle. The bible calls this idea “the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan” (Rev 20:2). The Abrahamic Revelation gives an alternative, namely that, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov 1:7) but fear should mature to perfect love (1 John 4:18). I believe that scripture is inspired and that the layer of complex infomatics that we can barely discern is not fully explained by the ancients being math geniuses because it presupposes the simultaneous development of language,alphabet,numerical values and inter-textual meaning.
Christianity is under attack as never before and it is my belief that the attack is not organic, it orchestrated and coordinated. So many people have no understanding of the complexity of the issues and are not bothered to find out and thus they are vulnerable.