06-10-2020, 01:24 AM
(06-08-2020, 02:05 PM)searchinmyroots Wrote: That is a matter of opinion and cannot be proven either way.
Cascione thinks they are divine, and along with a Jewish math professor attempts to prove it by showing that Moses apparently had knowledge of the Chinese remainder theorem well before it was discovered in history.
A more secularized Bible scholar he contacted thought the patterns were put into the text by copyists who rewrote the text. But this opinion is questionable because of the sheer number of them in the Torah. There are so many of them it doesn't seem humanly necessary or practical. Also they interlace the entire text, which goes against JEPD theory.
Cascione thinks that some writers of pseudepigrapha must have been aware of the patterns and attempted to copy them so that people would accept their works as Biblical. But their works exhibit a less-intense patterning because it is not practical to add in large numbers of them.
What sort of works did I find weird numerological patterns in?
- Another Kabbalahistic book, from the 17th century
- A 19th century English novelist who was addicted to drugs
- An anti-Jewish work from a 16th century author who had previously studied Kabbalah (ironic), and also in another work in which he may have been using Kabbalah for his spiritual benefit
- An 18th century theologian who often had dreams and visions
- A 19th century poet who was mentally ill
- Various ancient sacred extrabiblical works associated with Christianity, Judaism, or both, and also a secular work in Aramaic
- Also, modern hypnosis literature sometimes repeats things twice, deliberately. This one shouldn't count as weird.
Of these, obviously the last one is deliberate. Additionally it seems reasonable that a poet might purposely add in a word frequency pattern into a poem. Yet the weird thing is that both the novelist and the poet tend towards 12 or 24; which symbolize hours in the day and mortality. Modern life is ruled by clocks in a way that ancient life wasn't. So it makes sense that if the number patterns are some sort of reverse apophenia a modern writer is going to have different numbers on the brain than numbers ancient writers had.
Another possibility is whether the patterns indicate that that the authors were in a trance when writing. Perhaps all of the works I studied were written while in a trance; at least some of them must have been. Once I read a great deal of poetry to a young child who then proceeded to talk in poetry for a while. On a few occasions I visited people who worshiped with the King James Bible--and then entered a mild trance and spoke in King James style English for a while. The patterns were unconsciously imbibed and reproduced. So maybe people who read and memorized works with word and phrase frequency number patterns unconsciously reproduce them. And in the same way that patterns in poetry and music appeal to the soul within, the patterns may have brought out and encouraged a more mystical state.
This could be where varying degrees of divine or angelic inspiration (and hopefully not diabolical) feed into the writing. But this is matter of faith and cannot be proven in the way some might like to prove it. The differences between ancient and modern writings make me wonder how much we are divorced from communing with the divine and with the ancient world due to the differences of modern life.
Or are the patterns a mnemonic device for oral transmission? This would make sense for the ancient ones, but not the modern ones.
Perhaps the patterns are sort of a security seal that means the received text is unaltered. Cascione thinks along these lines, and uses them to resolve textual questions much as chiastic patterns have been used. He comes to different conclusions from the people using chiastic patterns at least sometimes though.