Possible Signature of Extraordinary Intervention

There seem to be quite a lot of problems here.For instance in "word selection" you describe as "neutral" a choice of terminology clearly chosen to favour your argument:

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For the purposes of this research, traditional renderings in translation for earth and heavens are given a more neutral mater and space. Also, firmament, a spread-out, roundish, hollowish piece of metal, is taken as a protoplanetary disk with sufficient metal content to spawn a more or less solid planet.

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I think that "tendentious" would before accurate than "neutral" here.Likewise your choice of dating for the beginning of the universe seems to be based solely on modern scientific sources and not from the text at all. Or if it does there is no clue as to how you derived it.The complex and apparently arbitrary formula for the "Adam-Seth" timeline is another issue which needs to be addressed. Where did it come from ?Finally - for now - if the dating of events appearing on multiple timelines shows a disagreement, simply discarding the "worse" date as you say that you do is not the correct answer. Inaccuracies and inconsistencies are serious problems for your hypothesis and need to be taken seriously.

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If the text wanted to be unambiguous about the creation of the actual Planet Earth, the word would have been "olam." "Aretz" means many things, including dirt and country. I choose to reject the editorial choice of translating it "The Earth" in favor just plain stuff. Similarly, "Shemayim" really just means sky. When you look up at the sky, you are looking at space.

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Unfortunately your choice of terms is no better - and arguably worse. The text does not contain any notion of a planet or space as we recognise them. In fact Genesis 1 seems to be in many ways a typical Middle Eastern creation myth where the universe begins as an empty and unbounded ocean from which land is raised. Any translation that works against this view is already departing from at least the surface reading of the text.

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The point of the exercise is that knowledge of what we understand to be the "scientific" chronology of the Universe is contained in Genesis. We believe we observe that the Universe started from nothing and from that emerged stuff and space and energy. I'm far from the first person to point that out.

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But Genesis 1 doesn't have the Universe emerging from nothing. The primordial ocean is there at verse 1, before the creation of the day-night cycle.

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Incidentally, my dating of the God line begins at exactly the same place as the text does, at zero. We just observe that today is +13.8 billion years.

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In other words any claim that there is an accurate dating of creation in the text is nonsense.

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As for the Seth line, this is the way codes are cracked. In a substitution code, you try out the most frequently used letters in the text with the most frequently used letters in the language, then poke and tweak until you get a coherent message. Clothes, Neanderthals, wine, bricks, circumcision, etc, all line up coherently. It's a single rule which accurately (well, at least according to scientific observation) these events. In the full work, I justify the decrypting of the text using examples within the Bible itself; the clearest one being Sheshek, a rotation code for Babel.

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The formula you gave - Age^2/120 - is not a substitution cipher. So I am going to ask how you derived it again.I am also aware of substitution ciphers and frequency analysis. What body of text did you analyse to create your frequency counts ?

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As for the multiple time line events, you raise a valid point. But I'm not discarding the worst, my algorithm rule is to choose the best.

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Which is exactly the same thing.

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However, you say it doesn't say anything about space, but I say that the best translation for Shemayim is sky, and sky is space.
This has nothing to do with my algorithm, really, it's a note for people married to the KJV that aretz does not necessarily refer to our specific planet and that Shemayim is not Heaven as in the place we go when we die.

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Aretz does not directly refer to any planet - the visible planets would have been included as stars, with no idea that the Earth itself was a planet. Likewise the sky is seen as a solid dome holding back the waters, which is unlike our concept of space at all.

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The Hebrew creation myth has a critical difference from the cousins from which it appears to be syncretic. Most creation myths have order being wrested from chaos and that the chaos had been around forever. The Genesis text clear has a zero point, a beginning, which includes the chaotic waters. Organization has to be added to the system to get entropy flowing.

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I disagree. The waters clearly exist at Genesis 1:1 and there is no origin given for them

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My claim about dating on the God line is that it is a ratio scale. Most of the events have yet to have a scientific consensus. Light on day one, the first solid-ish planet on day 2 (that's early for mainstream science, but no one would be really surprised if it could be modeled or if it were determined. Either way, it's subject to falsification or confirmation in principle) first macroscopic life in the universe on day 3 (3 billion years, or parts of 2 creation days, are what we observe to be the time scale for this) our own solar system oh-so-very-close to day 4 (so close that i might argue that the creation of our solar system starts with the protoplanetay disk, putting it square in day 4) the universe achieves a metalicity sufficient for enough calcium to be around to make large fauna, which of course start i the sea, on day 5. And we show up on day 6.

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In other words, all the actual dates come from science and not the text, just as I said. In fact - since you don't know how much of day seven has passed from the text you must have chosen the dates of your "days" so that humans show up on day six, too.And there are still problems with the text. The day/night cycle seems to be established on day 1 which is not possible in your scheme. Day four includes the stars outside our solar system - including many far older than the Sun. Birds show up on day four, before land life.Even the science looks pretty dodgy. Where's this macroscopic life that shows up when the universe is only 3 billion years old ? If there was too little calcium for large land life until your day 5, what about all the invertebrates using it to make shells ?

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About the code example, now you're just arguing to argue.

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No, I'm asking about your methods.

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It was an example. SHESHEK is a rotation code, another example I gave to justify decrypting the text.

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I'm pretty sure it isn't a rotation code. All you've got is two three letter words where the second letter is doubled. To be a rotation code the letter shift would have to be constant and by my reading it isn't.Interesting though that you claim to have done a frequency analysis but won't even say what body of text you used to perform the analysis.

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out 20 years ago, anthropologists were moving the dating for the Great Leap Forward, and, since I always thought that so much of Genesis pointed to real events, that the dates would be in there somewhere.

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So you start off with the assumption that Genesis points to real events.

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So the first thing I considered was that nobody really lived to be 900; the age of a man in Genesis is given as 120 (and no one then could have known that that really is an upper age limit, BTW) and so i wanted to see what happened if the ages were inverted.

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In fact we've discussed that verse and in context it seems to indicate the number of years before the Flood rather than natural lifespan.

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hat was my first 75 KYA scale, and AFTER that, the head lice / body lice data came out dating clothing to 75 KYA. So really, my answer to you is that I was trying different things, i got a partial message that told me something no one knew that turned out to be true, then I just spun the wheels until the safe opened

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In other words you chose the code to fit the data.

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The real question I want answered is ASSUMING my Seth line dates are correct and my Genesis event to real world event mapping is reasonable, what is the probability of that happening by chance?

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I don't think that that is a useful question. The first question is whether your method really does produce accurate results other than those that you have "fitted". So far it seems that your results are often wrong.

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as for choosing the best fit, haven't you ever put a jigsaw puzzle together? The only time it comes into play in the Seth line is for clothing.

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If you have pieces that don't fit then either you've made a mistake putting the puzzle together or you have pieced that don't belong. Either is a problem for you that shouldn't be swept under the carpet.

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And I have also have a reasonable justification: Adam and Eve made their own clothes, putting grass skirts squarely in the Adam-Seth line; God made the leather jackets, but that was after the grass skirts. Mt. Tobu, a volcano causing 300 years of global cooling, erupted shortly after the head/body lice divergence.

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I don't see any justification for ignoring a discrepancy with any of your other lines here. In fact I don't see any justification for the text supplying a date rather than a simple order of events at all. There's no time given for the period between the point where Adam and Eve made clothes of leaves and when they were given clothes made out of skin in the text.As for the science, apparently you mean Mount Toba. Unfortunately for you the date I've seen for the divergence of head and body lice comes in before that, more than 100,000 years ago, and only indicates the first use of clothing, not a transition in the type of clothing worn.So it seems that your initial point was chosen by misinterpreting an early estimate for the first clothing, so even that is wrong.So, at present we see that at least some of your dates are chosen to match events (as you understand them) rather than being derived from the text. Some of the events rely on questionable interpretations of the text. Some of the dates you get are unverifiable or even wrong. This really isn't looking very impressive.

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I should have been more specific with SHESHEK, it's actually a backwards rotation code called the Atbash Cipher.

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The Atbash Cipher is NOT a rotation cipher. It's a substitution cipher, but it isn't based on a constant shift (the cipher alphabet is the original alphabet written backwards).And it doesn't seem to be an example of the Atbash cipher, either - while the double Shin maps correctly to a double Bet, the initial Lamed should map into Kaf, not Resh.

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Day one, universe starts at a zero point in space-time with matter, space and energy; matter gets organized into recognizable stuff and cools sufficiently for light to exist. I consider Mayim to be any fluid, at this point it would be gas.
Day 2 a firmament appears somewhere in the universe, a protoplanetary disk with sufficient metalacity to form a solid-ish planet.
Day 3 autotrophic life appears somewhere in the universe.
Day 4 our particular solar system begins to take shape, although apparently our actual sun doesn't light up until a few minutes into day 5.
Day 5 the metalicity of the universe is sufficient to have enough calcium available for fauna to appear in an ocean somewhere.
Day 6, here we are. Humans start as frugiverous, upright, small-headed ape-like creatures with a Broca's region, allowing our progenitors to control the environment by means of symbolic communication.

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So you've come up with your cosmology, but it's based more heavily on what you know than it is on Genesis.

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All the dates are from "science" (wherever that is) because the project maps Genesis events to known datable events. Not a single cosmologist would be surprised if that's the way it played out, and not a single anthropologist would be surprised, either.

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In other words the dates come from your knowledge rather than any "code". THat pretty much eliminates the possibility of there being a "signal" revealing the dates. (Of course, your idea that we could only find things we already knew in the code was a very strong indicator that that was the case).

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I believe that Genesis points to real events because, in fact, it does. Our best understanding of the Universe today is a formation from nothing at a single point establishing space, time, and matter. Fauna did start in the sea. Manure does help fallow field agriculture. Monocrop agriculture does fail.

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Then why is your cosmology so different from that in Genesis 1 ?

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I have no idea what you mean about the 120 years verse.

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The verse means that 120 years was the time remaining before God wiped out humanity (except Noah and his immediate family) in the Flood.

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The code predicted that clothing would be invented 75 KYA, and then sure enough, that turned out to be the case.

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It didn't predict any such thing by your own admission. And clothing seems to have been invented more than 100,000 years ago.

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The code predicted small head with brain folding, and sure enough, Australopithicus Sediba showed up.

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I bet that it didn't.

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The code predicts communication over tools as what makes us us, that's up in the air and goes back and forth. Let's see where it lands.

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I very much doubt that your "code" can be said to meaningfully predict anything. And the evidence of this thread supports me.

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Sheshach:
it's spelled with a caph not a koph.

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That's different spellings of the name of the same letter.

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The lice dates move around, but I'm sticking with the original.

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If the date is uncertain, then you can't just stick with the one you like and claim to be right. Especially as the dates in your code depend on getting it right.

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At the end of Day 6, we eat fruit, we can manipulate the environment by means of communication, and we copulate without regard to personal relationships.

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How do you determine the "end of day 6" ?

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Two things determine intelligence -- brain weight to body weight ratio, and surface area to volume ratio of the brain. Edenic people had small heads with complex brains, QED. A. sediba appears to have a Broca's reason. You bet that the A. sediba discovery came before my analysis, and I say it didn't. Nyah.

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That doesn't matter. It still doesn't mean that your code predicted it.

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I can certainly pick the study I like for sentimental reasons;

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OK, so to claim that your dates are correct you need only one study that you like, no matter if it is wrong. This will certainly help increase the probability of getting things "right".

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ALL of the studies have wide margins of error, no one has found any actual fossilized clothing dating back that far, and the important point about this event is that it is so far away from the other events on the Seth line.

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That hardly seems an important point. The more important point is that your algorithm is based on an assumption that is at best questionable and very likely incorrect - in fact quite possibly out by more than 50%, which is a pretty big margin of error.

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Have we talked about milk and camels yet? You'd have a field day roasting me on those dates. All of the scientific dates have imprecision and all could be impeached but taken together they provide confidence in the algorithm.

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No, you haven't bothered to explain how you got those dates yet.

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The end of Day 6 -- our ancestors well and truly on the path to becoming us -- is when "Adam" grunts or gestures to "Eve" that the bananas are too ripe and she grunts or gestures back you know, try leaning on your elbows. That's from my beloved anthropology professor and I have had o reason to doubt her these past 35 years.

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So, as I suspected, your date for the end of day six comes from your knowledge of prehistory and not from the text. Well that simplifies things since we can ignore everything you put in about day 6 now.

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I beg to differ. The plain text is clearly referencing head size, estrus, and the move from foraging to agriculture;

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It isn't directly referencing head size, merely the consequences. And that's the best of the three. There's no clear reference to estrus at all, and since Adam was supposedly created to work as a gardner I hardly think that we can see a clear move from foraging to agriculture.

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the blessing to Adam and Eve upon their expulsion from Eden was said by God, and so it is on the God line. When I was a kid, people were theorizing large-brained apes. A little later it changed to pin-headed people. Now it looks like smart pin-headed people. The science is catching up to the plain text, just like Hoyle's last stand for the steady-state universe gave way to EST from a zero-point, as in Gen 1.

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This seems to be rather at odds with reality.

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And now a question for you, Paul... How many data points would satisfy you? The work as a whole also includes Cain and cain's Lamech sub-lines which may or may not properly date tents, the marginalization of nomads, beginning of cities, orchestral music, and the Iron and Bronze ages.

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You're going to need at least three GOOD data points. So far you haven't even managed one.

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And another question: what would it mean to you personally if it was evident that somebody knew what time it was for real 3,500 years ago?

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Well there's no danger of that since Genesis isn't that old. However, I'd be very interested in it if the evidence was solid. But given how often it turns out that the dates come from you and not the text it's not looking like I'll see anything like that.

You're still not revealing the important stuff - your dates and you you associate them with the events.I'm not sure what you mean by Deuterogenesis. Adam is specifically placed as a gardener in Eden in Genesis 2:15 - no need for Higher Criticism, just a plain reading of the text.

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I'm not sure what you mean by at odds with reality. I can spend some library time, but I'm quite certain I recall that the path to us used to be thought of as starting with a large-brained ape.

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I mean that I can't think of any evidence of or pausible reasons for major revisions in the cranial capacity of early hominids that could have happened in recent years. "Large-brained" is a relative term anyway. Even the Australopithecines average larger than a chimpanzee or orang-utan - surely that counts as"large-brained" for an ape.

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As for the age of Genesis, the syncretic parts comprising it are certainly older; the plain text would have it being delivered between about 1500 and 1200 BC. It definitely would have been in recognizable shape around the time of Josiah.

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However, much of your dating seems strongly dependent on the lifespans assigned to various figures in Genesis. There is every possibility that one or more could change through revision or scribal error, regardless of the general outline of the text. And Genesis 1 which escapes this criticism is one if the latest parts, likely Exilic. So even if you are right that parts of Genesis existed 3500 years ago, it is certainly not clear that your "codes" were there.