Colors proof of Divine origin of Bible?

Actually, the fourth color in the palate for the four color process would be black, which does appear in the Bible but cannot be made to support Shore's numerology.As white, gray, gold and purple are also mentioned in the Bible, the only "interesting" conclusion that we can draw from its selection of colors is that God hates orange. Perhaps this explains why he's so down on lobster.Curiously, I can't find the passage mentioning magenta, nor any other shade of pink, but perhaps I'm looking at the wrong translation. A color as broadly defined as "yellow" doesn't have one specific wave frequency, it covers a broad range. This gives Shore an awful lot of wiggle room.Magenta doesn't correspond to any wave frequency --- it is purely an artifact of our trichromatic vision system and appears nowhere in the spectrum of visible light. So that's definitely bullshit.Also, I want to see the data.Finally, the claims about gematria, if true, have nothing to do with the Bible as such, just the Hebrew language. If some Israeli atheist wrote a book on the non-existence of God in Hebrew it would also be a work in a language having the stated property. What of it?

Some of them have synonyms, in particular there are various words for "blue".I have listed them in ascending order of their gematric values (left column).55 red אדימ64 blue כחול71 blue מדוכא99 purple סגול103 yellow צהוב246 red מסומק270 purple ארגוני316 green ירוק456 blue תכול546 purple מתולע653 blue פורנוגרפי850 blue תכלת994 purple ארגמן1026 yellow/orange כתום

In order to get his data to fit his hypothesis, he has to claim that magenta lies between yellow and green on the spectrum of visible light!BWAHAHAHAHA!I am not sure on what basis he is calculating the values of words, but he doesn't seem to be using standard gematria, which gives different results.For example, he gives a "color numerical value" for the word אדום of 51. In standard gematria, it's 611.I think I see his mistake in that particular case. In Hebrew, the initial/medial letter mem is written as מ and has the value 40 in gematria. But the final letter mem is written as ם and has the value 600. I haven't looked to see if that accounts for all of his errors. (I notice that my table above has a similar problem, presumably because I was using a crappy English-Hebrew dictionary which didn't use the correct final letter forms. My apologies.)Applying the actual gematric values to the word list in his book, we get (in ascending gematric value):Yellow 97 צהבRed 611 אדוםBlue 850 תכלת"Magenta" 944 ארגמןGreen 1016 ירקוןHis claims are therefore evidence not so much of divine wisdom as of human stupidity.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I looked at some more of his claims. He correlates the gematric values of the words for "day", "month" and "year" with (deep breath) the natural logarithm of the reciprocal of the length of the period measured in seconds.First, we should note that he has again ignored the distinction between intial/medial and final consonants. To be fair to him, this is sometimes done by others. It would be interesting to know if he has consistently used this convention.Second, of the two words used in the Bible for "month", he has chosen far and away the most uncommon one (ירח ) ignoring the more common חודש either out of ignorance of its existence or because it failed to fit his scheme.Third, in a further act of cherry-picking, he has ignored other definite periods of time in the Bible such as the word for "week".Here is a table of the gematric values of the various time words in the Bible, in ascending numerical order:night 75 לילהmonth 218 ירחmonth 318 חודשyear 355 שנהweek 378 שבועday 616 יוםUsing Shore's preferred system^* of gematria, we get:day 68 יוםnight 75 לילהmonth 218 ירחmonth 318 חודשyear 355 שנהweek 378 שבוע * I say "Shore's preferred system", but I haven't been able to find out whether he uses the same system consistently.---Some general remarks on what we've seen so far.* Firstly, he is free to relate gematric values with numbers taken from nature in any way he chooses. Taking g(s) to represent the gematric value of the Hebrew value of a preiod of time expressed in seconds, his equation for Hebrew time words is -10.33 - 0.0197 g(s) = ln(s^-1). If one is allowed to use functions that abstruse, it is not hard to relate any two small data sets to the degree of accuracy that satisfies Professor Shore.* Secondly, he is free to select the rules of gematria to bring the data in line with his conclusions.* Thirdly, he is free to change the facts to bring the data in line with his conclusions, as when he decides that magenta has a wave frequency of 546 THz.* Fourthly, he is free to pick among synonyms to find the ones that best fit his conclusions, as when he decides to use the less common synonym for "month".* Fifthly, he is free to pick among words in a given category to find the ones that best fit his conclusions, as when in his survey of periods of time he omits "week".* Sixthly, he is free to cherry-pick reality: for example, if he had found that the duration of a solar year better suited his purposes than the duration of twelve lunar months, he could have used that as the value for the length of a year and aroused little (indeed less) comment.* Seventhly, although for obvious reasons this is not made explicit, like every numerologist he is free to abandon any line of enquiry that fails to fit his scheme. If, to take a simple example, he found that the Hebrew words for "small", "medium" and "large" did not have ascending gematric values, he could pass over this fact in silence. We have no way of knowing the number of his failures, because like all numerologists he does not list them.* Finally, he does not require that his formulae should be exact, only that they should be close. For example, even after all the liberties he allows himself, he declares a 94% correlation in the case of his five color words to be a success.And so like all numerologists, he commits the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. He ends up pointing to the correlation that he himself has contrived, and proudly asks: "what are the odds of that"? But given the great liberties he allows himself, it is absolutely certain that he will be able to manufacture such correlations.What would be astonishing is if the rules he used in each case were chosen in advance. If, with no trial and error, he started off by saying: "I'm going to conduct gematria on Hebrew color words found in the Bible, excluding black, white, brown, gray and gold, and I'm going to use a method of gematria in which the final forms of letters are assigned the values of the corresponding initial/medial forms, and I'm going to translate the word everyone else translates as "purple" as "magenta" instead, and I'm going to assign to magenta a wave frequency of 546 THz, which is actually green, and then I'm going to take each gematric value, multiply it by 0.22114, and add 471.43, and then compare the result to the wave frequency of each color rather than the more usual measure of the wavelength ..." --- if, as I say, he had said all this in advance, then we might find a 93% correlation remarkable. As it is, we have to wonder if that was really the best he can do. A man who can blithely decide that purple is magenta and has a wave frequency of 546 THz could surely have done even better than that by similar abuses of reality.

It would be a bit odd to write nun sofit at the start of a "word", wouldn't it? The question is how it should be interpreted when it occurs naturally at the end of one.However, as I acknowledged in my last post, there are variants in gematric methods; but Shore is still open to the criticism that he has chosen one that suits him and could have chosen another if it suited him better. Orange isn't mentioned in the Bible, so he has an excuse. One points out that magenta isn't green; a fact which is known to atheists but apparently not to Professor Shore.

Orange, as I say, does not occur, but in Exodus, Numbers and 1 Lamentations we have תולע (scarlet, i.e. orangish-red) with a value of 506, putting it between green and blue.---One probably-not-final thought: even if we ignore scarlet and pretend that purple is magenta is green, the graph is still a pretty poor fit. I could have done better myself, had I designed Hebrew. Professor Shore compares it to what might be achieved by chance --- but we might also compare it to what would be achieved by God Almighty. By choosing a few consonants different, he could have achieved a much closer fit to a straight line.

Yes. You're looking at wavelengths in nanometers while Shore's figures are for wave frequencies in terahertz.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

If Shore was red-green color-blind, would that explain why he thinks magenta is green?

His stuff about cosmology is too vague to analyze. But if it's up to his usual standard ...

I've assembled the arguments against Shore into a SkepticWiki article. Haim Shore's Gematria.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Thanks to Theodoric and Catholic Scientist for pointing out typos.

I was using a not-very-good online dictionary. I'm not sure the people who made it knew any more Hebrew than I do.If you find any errors in the SW article, I should be grateful; also if you can think of any more Biblical color words I should have included.