BAMBINO (BRIT-AM BIBLICAL ISRAEL NEWS ONLINE)
Discussion of the Bible, Biblical History, Lost Israelite Tribes Identity in the Light of the Bible and other matters relating to Scripture.

BAMBINO no. 28
26 Kislev 5769, 13 December 2009
Contents:
1. Crossing the Red Sea:
A Naturalistic Explanation from Observed Phenomenon
2. New Archaeological Findings!!
The Cave of the Patriarchs, King Herod, and the Tabernacle
3. Jerusalem Post.  The Hebrew Language and Secrets of Creation?
  Mere coincidence or divine truth?
By YOCHEVED MIRIAM RUSSO



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1. Crossing the Red Sea: A Naturalistic Explanation from Observed Phenomenon
nineteenth century account by one Major Palmer.
"Strong north-easterly gales, on reaching Suez, would, by its action on an ebb tide, make it abnormally low, and prevent while it lasted, at least for a time, the return of the usual flood tide. In this way a good passage across the channel might soon be laid bare and remain so for several hours. In the morning, a shaft of wind to the south, probably of cyclonic nature, takes place. The pent-up flood tide, now freed from restraint, and urged on by the south gale, returns to its wonted flow".
(Reading the Old Testament, Prof. Lawrence Boadt, 1984, p.169.)
See also:
http://www.bibleorigins.net/RedSeaCrossing
ExodusIsraelBallahLakes.html


2. New Archaeological Findings!!
The Cave of the Patriarchs, King Herod, and the Tabernacle
In the Hebrew-language weekly "BeSheva" (3.1.2.09 p.30 ff) is an article about the Tabernacle and the Cave of the Patriarchs (Maarat HaMachpela) in Hevron.
The Cave of the Patriarchs was first purchased by Abraham as a burial place for his wife Sarah (Genesis chapter 23).

At present Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Leah, and others are buried there. It consists of what was originally a group of caves at ground level leading down through subterranean passages to a group of underground hallways in which burial crypts are to be found. These caves were roofed over.
King Herod built an edifice over them, then came the Byzantines and made it into a church. After that the Muslims added a couple of minarets and turned it into a mosque. Now the Jews have returned and have managed to make part of it into a synagogue. The overwhelming bulk of the structure however remains the building of Herod. This is a massive structure built along the same principles as the Western Wall of the Temple and using hewn stones that are even larger! The outside wall of this building is marked by a series of protuberations (see photo below).

According to some (the article quotes from Itamar Shienivits [?]) the design of the Building is based on that of the Tabernacle. The Tabernacle is the structure created by order of the Almighty in the Wilderness. It preceded the Temple and the design of the Temple was based upon it. The Children of Israel in the Wilderness placed their encampment according to Tribal groups around the Tabernacle.
The parallel of Wall of the Cave of the Patriarchs to that of Tabernacle is proven by the dimensions of the walls around it and the spacing of the protuberations that correspond with the beams of the Tabernacle.
These protuberations, if they do represent those of the Tabernacle, suggest that the Tabernacle walls had the beams facing outside and not inside as commonly represented.
This corresponds with the opinion of others based on architectural principles.
Not only do the outside protuberations echo the Tabernacle walls but inside the building Itamar Shienivits has found the remains of four large pillars and a fifty-ton hewn rock that marked out a reconstruction in rock of the Inner Tabernacle Sanctuary. Herod built this structure above the Caves as a replica in stone of the Tabernacle itself.

The Tabernacle travelled with the Israelites in the Wilderness. After conquering the Land of Israel the Tabernacle was set up in Shiloh and other centers.
When Solomon built the Temple he buried the Tabernacle materials under the Temple foundations. The Temple was destroyed by Nebuchanessar. Later Ezra returned and built a Temple that was considered a very poor replacement for the original one. King Herod replaced this with new buildings that made the Temple to be considered the finest and most beautiful building in existence at that time. Itamar Shienivits suggests that in the course of restructuring the materials of the original Tabernacle had been uncovered. This caused an arousal of interest amongst the populace. Ultimately Herod reburied the Taberancle remains but based his design of the edifice over the Cave of the Patriarchs as a reminder of what had been found.

See also:
Cave of the Patriarchs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs

3. Jerusalem Post.  The Hebrew Language and Secrets of Creation?
  Mere coincidence or divine truth?
By YOCHEVED MIRIAM RUSSO
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?
apage=1&cid=1259831450363&pagename=
JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
 
Extracts:
A niggling curiosity about colors started the whole thing. "For many years, I found myself idly wondering if the name value of colors mentioned in the Bible had any relationship to their wave frequency," says Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Professor Haim Shore.
 
"In the scheme of things, that's an outrageous suggestion - why would anyone think that the Hebrew name for colors mentioned in the Bible - red, green, yellow - would bear any relationship to the wave frequency of the color itself?" he asks. "Finally, just for fun, I checked it out. When I saw the results, I was stunned. It was a heck of a coincidence, but the two were linearly related."

"The Hebrew word for the color actually matched the color's wave frequency," Shore says. "How could that be?"

Shore's methodology was relatively simple. He took the Hebrew names of five colors that appear in the Bible - red (adom), yellow (tzahov), green (yerakon), blue (tchelet) and purple or magenta (argaman) - and calculated a numerical value for each word by adding the total values of the letters, with aleph as one, bet as two, etc. Then he plotted them on a graph. The vertical axis charted the colors' wave frequencies, which are scientifically established, while along the horizontal axis, the 'CNV', Color Name Value, appeared. When it was complete, "I was astonished," Shore recalls.

"The five points on the graph formed a straight line - which means that the names of the colors related directly to their established wave frequencies." It was a straight-out statistical analysis, Shore says. "I didn't manipulate a single number in doing the analysis."

"I didn't plot anything at all until I had all the data," he says. "But when I saw it, I was like a lion in a cage, pacing around. I couldn't believe it. Then I went on to other words in the Hebrew Bible, plotting the value of the letters against known scientific data. The whole thing blew me away."

"What I found is that there's an astonishing number of 'coincidences' in which the Hebrew name for some 'entity' in the Bible relates directly to that entity's scientifically established physical property," Shore continues. "I began recording it all, and finally published it in a book which contains about 20 different analyses - statistical, scientifically verifiable findings."

"I have no intention of trying to tell anyone what this means, or how this information should be interpreted. All I did was publish what I found," he says. "As a scientist, as a matter of integrity, I felt compelled to offer what I'd found for discussion."

Shore's book Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrew offers dozens of incidents in which the Hebrew words in the Bible offer hidden information about the objects or people they represent, information which, in many cases, couldn't have been known or measured until modern times.

...the Hebrew word, 'heraion' (pregnancy) has the same numerical value as the duration of human pregnancy, 271 days."

"...What I have attempted to do, with as plain and non-technical means as possible, was to offer several quantitative analyses that demonstrate that major physical properties are probably reflected in the numerical values of Hebrew words."

"Could there be a linkage between numerical values of biblical words and certain physical properties, as demonstrated by the heraion example?" Shore asks. "In Hebrew, yareach is moon, eretz is earth, and shemesh is sun. One thing that distinguishes the three bodies is their size, expressed by the diameters. I used their diameters as listed by NASA, and plotted them on a graph, just as I did with the colors.

"On the horizontal axis is the numerical value of the Hebrew word, on the vertical axis is the planetary diameters from NASA (on a log scale)," he continues. "To my astonishment, the phenomenon repeated itself. The three points aligned themselves on a straight line - an exact mathematical relationship would have given a linear correlation of '1,' whereas these three points had a linear correlation of 0.999. Again I thought, 'What an amazing coincidence!'"

IT'S NOT as though the Tiberias-born Shore was intellectually primed to believe what he was seeing. "My research has been in the areas of statistical modeling and quality and reliability engineering," he says. "I graduated from the Technion in Industrial Engineering and Management, received a Masters in Operations Research, plus a BA in Philosophy and Psychology, then a PhD in Statistics from Bar Ilan. I've worked as a management consultant, taught at Tel Aviv University, then came to BGU in 1996. But beyond that, I'm an engineer. I don't accept anything as true unless there is quantitative analysis - without that, everything is debatable."

"But not this," Shore says. "It's a universal principle of engineering that if you have two sets of data, you put them in ascending order, plot one set on a horizontal axis and the other on a vertical axis and they fall on a straight line, that means both data sets are measuring the same thing, only on different scales."

"Initially, I related to these incidents as curiosities, things that had no scientific basis. But over the years, I've come to see these 'coincidences' evolve into something more," he says. "By 2006 I'd reached the conclusion that the number of instances I'd assembled had reached a critical mass, which justified putting some of it into print."

One of the things that fascinates Shore is how modern science and technology reflects or reinforces Biblical terminology. "The word 'year' - in Hebrew shana - is numerically equivalent to 355, which happens to be the average duration of the lunar (moon-based) Hebrew year," Shore explains. "Or ozen which means 'ear' in Hebrew, which comes from the same root as the Hebrew word for 'balance.' That's curious, because it was only at the end of the 19th Century that we discovered that the mechanism responsible for the body balance resides in the ear."

THE BOOK of Genesis, especially the creation story, comes in for special treatment. Together with Prof. Yehuda Radday, Shore analyzed Genesis and published a book in 1985.

"Prof. Radday, who passed away on Sept. 11, 2001, was one of my closest friends. We first met when I was a teaching assistant back in the 1970s and he was affiliated with the Technion doing statistical analysis of Biblical texts," Shore recalls. "At that time, the theories of German-born Julius Wellhausen were in vogue, and we set out to statistically test Wellhausen's theory that there were multiple authors for Genesis."

Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) was a German Bible scholar who argued that the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, were not written by Moses but rather resulted from oral traditions that evolved from a nomadic culture which, relatively recently, had been pieced together. Wellhausen named the four sources "J", "E", "D" and "P" distinguishing individual verses and segments on the basis of terminology and by perceived differences in philosophy. For many decades, Wellhausen's theories enjoyed general acceptance among Biblical scholars.

"Yehuda and I published our research - which statistically affirmed the position that the book of Genesis was homogenous with respect to authorship (namely, a single author) - in several research papers and ultimately in a book published by the Biblical Institute Press in Rome (Romae E Pontificio Instituto Biblico) of the Vatican," he tells. "So when I began looking at the book of Genesis again, I already had considerable background."

Shore now believes he might have used a word other than 'coincidences' in the book title. "The title reflected my attitude towards many of the examples given in the book. But during the short span of about two or three months when I feverishly wrote it all down, something changed. I'd now say it's highly probable that hidden information in biblical words supplements the exposed information submitted."

What did Shore hope to gain by publishing his findings? "I knew very well I was putting my reputation on the line with this book," he says. "What I hoped would happen is that it would start a discussion, that people would begin to talk about it."
"That hasn't happened so far, probably because I've been reluctant to publicize it," Shore admits. "I finally went ahead because the data is significant. Everyone can figure out for himself what it all means - I'm not saying anything here about God or the Bible or biblical Hebrew. But there's something here that should be discussed and analyzed further."

Then, too, Shore was stunned to find that he wasn't the first Shore to write a book on Genesis. "My father's grandfather, Baruch Schorr, was a famous cantor in Lemberg, called Lvov today," he says. "He wrote two books, one about Ecclesiastes and another about Genesis that he named Bechor Schorr. I only learned about Baruch's book of Genesis - which was published in Lemberg in 1873 - long after my book about Genesis, with Prof. Radday, was published."

Brit-Am Note:
The name "Schorr" is a German (Middle European) spelling of the Hebrew "Shor" which means "bull".
Joseph was blessed that his glory should be like the firstborn of his bull [Deuteronomy 33:17] in Hebrew, "Becor Shor".
The surname of the scholar, Baruch Schorr, was also "Schorr" so he named his book Bechor Schorr after the verse in Genesis.
It was and is a common practice amongst Rabbinical scholars to give books they author a title recalling the Biblical verse in which their name is mentioned.

"That's just one more coincidence," Shore adds.


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