Interpreting the phrases!

The detailed process by which we found names and phrases is described here.

A lot of the names and phrases that we extracted result from the grammar and structure of the Hebrew language itself. You could say there is simply something about the Hebrew language that is made to work with this exercise. English and Latin yielded almost nothing in comparison.

The Names of God

The names of God did not involve interpretation. They were simply there.

The phrases

The phrases however, involved some subjectivity, though many things were again dictated by the nature of the Hebrew language itself.

For example, Without the pointings (vowels) present, Hebrew words become much shorter and therefore more likely to show up in a transliterated string of hundreds or thousands of amino acids. It also meant that when three consonants were found together the choice of words available expanded depending on the vowels that could be added. To take an example from English: the adjacent letters "h" and "s" could legitimately, once vowels are added, become "his","house", "hose", or "has". In Hebrew, as in a number of other languages, we don't need a verb "to be." It is implied. So two words juxtaposed, "house" and "large" become in translation into English "a/the house is large". The commonest verb form is the 3rd person singular, i.e. the Hebrew root, (usually three characters) which is also the present participle. It could be, e.g., “he runs” or “he ran” or “running”. The first two could be part of a narrative. The present participle gives a different air, sounding like an abstract statement – it could be part of a phrase “running is good for you”, for example. Phrases with “I” attached to a verb demand the suffix “TY” and this makes them much less common.

Most of the phrases tend to the positive, because to make a word negative, an extra lamed, “L” has to go in front as a prefix.

In classical Hebrew (but not modern), the order in a sentence is Verb, Subject, Object. “Hit captain steward” means a captain hit a steward. Similarly the adjective is mostly after the noun. “Reigned King good” means "A good king ruled". But these orders are not always followed absolutely strictly. In the book of Proverbs, which most resembles the sentences, we find variation. So I allowed other word orders.

To search for phrases, one uses the program output, which searches for all words, prefixes or suffixes it can find. This gives the meaning. It is up to the searcher to check that the sequence makes sense grammatically, and often an apparently promising trail of meaning comes to an abrupt halt with meaningless combinations of grammar.

Subjectivity and Metaphor

To some extent the meaning is read into the phrase. For example the word “foundation” can mean exactly that, but Christians might read “Jesus” into the word, because the New Testament calls him that. "No other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1Co 3:11). There are several other words like that, which can be considered metaphorical.

The word “line” occurred fairly frequently. Because I was dealing with the DNA strand I decided to interpret this word metaphorically as DNA. This is not as fanciful as it appears. Each chromosome is a very long line of 80 to 185 million rungs of chemical bonds, highly folded. If each rung were a step on a ladder it would take you a lifetime to climb it at 2 rungs a second, and at the end you would only have climbed about your own height. That's a very long line. So, it seemed there were messages about the DNA in the DNA!

Someone with a very negative frame of mind might be biased to see negative messages, just as I am biased to see positive ones. To a certain extent you see a reflection of yourself, or find what you want to see. For some people the message of the DNA might be negative or even obscene.

Many of the phrases sounded like proverbs rather than instructions from a supreme being. What they do sound like is the Book of Proverbs in the Bible. However they were a truncated form. Biblical proverbs are mostly in two halves, and the DNA phrases sounded merely like the first half. One rare two part proverb was: "A complaint is a poor song and empty words are lightweight." YHWH speaking directly sounds like the God of the Bible on Biblical themes, and so do the comments about God in the third person.

A lot of the phrases are in the third person. That is, there are many simple 3-letter Hebrew roots, which mean, e.g. “He ran” but rather few which say “I ran”. So it sounds as though most of the comments are perhaps about God but not by him – but who could be saying them? However it is much the same in the Bible, in which many comments about God are by humans. The only extended sections directly intended to be words of God could be the Law, Proverbs and some prophetic material. But in some important sense traditionally the whole book is said to be God speaking. Thus in some sense God could still be speaking through the DNA.

There were many phrases which made no sense, and the ones detailed in this website are only a small minority of what we found. That doesn't worry me, I am comfortable that in this universe we should follow meaning, even if much we find on the way appears to be meaningless. In this business of connecting the dots, we need to connect the important ones.

The amusing, the absurd and randomness

On occasion the combination could be quite funny. “Vehement furniture” did not occur, but from the frequencies, it is probably somewhere in the genome. It conjures up a crazy image. I have not done the detailed statistical analysis to see if there are really unusual phrases which are very, very improbable, but so far have not noticed anything wildly unexpected in the phrases, such as a paragraph from Shakespeare! I will not be surprised however if the results are consistent with the laws of randomness or chance.

I think chance is underrated as a source of inspiration. It has been sometimes used by those with artist’s block. Even Mozart apparently did this sometimes to find something unexpected that he was less likely to think of himself. Poets delight in very unusual chance closeness of words, and gain striking images by doing so. Being forced to find a rhyme similarly can lead to a completely new thought about a subject! So this procedure is using chance to produce fresh ideas and concepts. Does that make sense? Yes, sometimes it can produce an entirely new thought, even a striking one. This is getting a long way from the Hebrew language or its structure, and requires a large input from one’s thoughts and beliefs.

Is randomness of God or the Devil? Are events we think are merely random, God at work? I think the old casting of lots was an effort to take choice out of the hands of participants and hand it over to a purer source – God. In this scenario the random is the utterly pure and closer to godliness than anything humans can do. Even tossing a coin would be worse. Following this idea, random radioactive decay in Physics would be close to Holy – but quite frightening!

So has all this just been a game? Are these phrases anything more than fridge poetry? They are, and you may have experienced that as you read them.

Are they mere chance? Maybe, maybe not! Is it chance that the names of God appear in Hebrew almost 500,000 times in the human genome but hardly at all in English or Latin?

The results are no more a proof of God than the evidences already around us in cosmos and biome, if you want to see them.

This exercise blends statistics, biochemistry, spirituality and mysticism. Those who want to believe will find evidence in them of the existence of God, those who don't might find all this an interesting but irrelevant exercise.