Copyright © Lyuben Piperov February 2006

From Genesis to Genetics and Back

Part 1: From Atbash through DNA to 666

Lyuben Piperov

Introduction

As a chemist, I have always wondered how substances of similar composition could differ so much in their physical and/or chemical properties. Here is an example with two organic liquids of identical composition:

            H         H

 |          |

H  ―   C  ―   C  ―  O  ―  H

             |          |

            H         H

and

            H                    H

 |                      |

H  ―   C  ―   O  ―  C  ―  H

             |                      |

            H                    H

The first compound is the well-known ethyl alcohol or ethanol. The second one is called dimethyl ether. Both compounds have the same molecular mass: 46.07. It is immediately seen that the only difference is the position of the oxygen atom coloured in red, which in the ethanol is situated between a carbon and a hydrogen atom, while in the dimethyl ether it is between two carbon atoms. But this change in the position leads to tremendous changes in the properties. For instance, while ethanol freezes at -114.1 °C (-237.4 F) and boils at 78.3 °C (173 F), ether freezes at -138.5 °C (-281.3 F) and boils at -23.6 °C (-74.5 F). This low boiling point makes it impractical for use. Ethanol, on the other hand, is one of the mostly used organic solvents and chemical reagents.[1]

As a pharmacist, I have always wondered why the active drug substances we synthesize are always of inferior overall healing quality compared to the naturally synthesized substances in plants. We use the same elements to form the compounds, which are products of our intellect. The drugs we create possess high activities, of course, but at the same time, they usually display numerous adverse effects. Why? We study the human body and find the targets. We understand the mechanism of the action and prepare the means to carry out the function. We take into account all factors known to us. But do we take all factors indeed? Moreover, is it possible to consider all factors? Evolutionists believe that the human intellect is a result, even though the highest achievement, of the billions-of-years evolution. But in the treatment of the ill body and soul, the ‘crown of the evolution’ is won by the evolution itself, history, reality, nature, or whatever name we give to what comprises life. The ‘body’ knows better than the ‘head’?

As a believer and researcher of Bible codes and prophecies, I have always wondered about the dream king Nebuchadnezzar dreamt in the second year of his reign (Daniel 2). He could not recall his dream. According to Daniel’s interpretation, he dreamt the whole ‘body’ of the human history from his own time to the establishment of the Kingdom of God. He was to be the head of this ‘body’. The head is where the brain is enclosed in. Therefore, symbolically, king Nebuchadnezzar or rather his empire had to contain the human ‘mind’, which rules the history down to its prophesied end. Yet, not less symbolically, he managed to forget this most important information sent divinely to him. It had to be recovered divinely again but through another human mind - through the mind of a God’s chosen man. This is the strangest case of amnesia I know.

I have contemplated on the significance of this event. Is it a hint at the subconscious awareness of the humankind that there is important information, which is hidden and will be revealed in the end? This information somehow controls the history, defines the major events but at the same time it is elusive for statement of its full meaning. It remains indistinctive and hazy in the same way as Nebuchadnezzar could only remember the significance of his dream but not the details. He was scared without apparent reason on the level of consciousness.

The first phenomenon observed with chemical compounds has an illustrative equivalent in the Bible code. It is clear to everyone that a change in the place of a single letter in a plain text can lead to the disappearance of a code. The second one is also clear in relation to literature. As atoms build up chemical substances, letters are the building blocks of words and hence the written languages. It is a well-known fact that languages are characterized by certain frequency typical for each letter. It is possible to find two or more texts consisting of the same number of letters and the same proportions of the letters. Nevertheless, these texts could contain very different and even contradictory information. The author is who defines the information, not the letters themselves.

The fact that chemical substances contain and - what is more important - copy, store and deliver genetic information, had been hinted at in the famous experiments carried out by the Austrian-Czech Gregor Mendel on peas in the course of seven years. He published the results in 1865. His experiments turned out to be so much ahead of his time that they remained unnoticed and soon sank into oblivion for about thirty-five years. This is another example of very strange amnesia. The strangeness of this amnesia is even more accentuated because the laws discovered by Mendel were defined precisely and expressed clearly in mathematical form. As a matter of curiosity, they remained unknown to Charles Darwin. Three scientists working independently rediscovered the laws of inheritance in 1900: Hugo De Vries in Holland, Carl Correns in Germany and Erich von Tschermak in Austria. They were surprised to see that their results had been obtained decades earlier in experiments carried out brilliantly and immediately recognized Mendel’s priority.

What I find most amazing in this story is the fact that Mendel applied statistics in his research. He observed traits in plants visible with naked eye and hypothesized that the carriers of the traits are well-defined chemical substances. However, what I find most brilliant in his work is that he managed to define the quantum characteristics of each trait. By the word ‘quantum’, I mean the wholeness and indivisibility of the carrier of the trait. Mendel called these carriers factors. Decades later, these factors were called genes.

Scientists using most advanced microscopes confirmed his hypothesis. They discovered that the substances are contained in bodies within the cell nuclei, called chromosomes. Their number is constant and characteristic for each species. In the ‘ordinary’ cells, that is, in all cells save sex cells and some types of cells, which do not contain nuclei and therefore do not cave chromosomes, their number is even. In humans, there are 46 chromosomes. Every human being inherits 23 chromosomes from his or her father and mother, respectively. Twenty-three is the number of the chromosomes in the human sex cells: sperm and ovum.

Soon after the discovery of the chromosomes, it became obvious that the entire hereditary information is contained in them. So as early as the beginning of the 20th century it was clear that the development of all organisms is a result of combination of chemical compounds specific for each parent. The conjecture that all the information is contained in certain chemical substance(s) was on the top of the agenda of the early 20th century biologists and biochemists. Nevertheless, as it turned out, scientists needed more than half a century to reveal which is this substance and how it works. Why did it take so long? The technical means for the discovery were available as early as in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The relatively rare occurrences of mutations, that is, errors in copying of the genes, showed that they are stable and that the modus operandi of their doubling is reliable. In addition, it was clear that the chromosomes consist mainly of a substance called DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). Yet for a reason, biologists were not inclined to believe that DNA is the stuff capable to contain and copy the vast amount of information required for the obtaining of the enormous variety of the traits within a species.

DNA consists of a large number of the following components: phosphate, the sugar deoxyribose and four distinctive chemical compounds containing nitrogen, called bases. The phosphate units and the sugar units, respectively, are indistinguishable and therefore they cannot take part in a process of encoding information. In relation to structure, they can be only supporting carriers. However, they also have a specific importance for information purposes, as we will see below.

It was the low number of the bases in DNA, which puzzled the scientists who decided that the key to the code is hidden elsewhere. Therefore, they had tried for several decades to discover the genetic code in the proteins, consisting of about five times as many different alpha-amino acids. The-more-the-better principle led the researchers astray. Nevertheless, we should not criticize them. There had hardly been anyone among the scientists trying to solve the mystery of the heredity up to the 1940’s who had been aware of what type of knowledge is required for breaking codes. Just a handful of specialized mathematicians dealt with encoding and deciphering top-secret information for military purposes. Intense preparations for the World War II were going on…

The State-of-the-Art of the Science of Code Breaking

At the same time, in the small Slovak town of Nitra, some 80 miles away from Brno, where Mendel had lived and worked, Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl believed not only that there is hidden information in the Torah. According to an old tradition, the Torah contains hidden information; that is why it had to be copied with extreme caution. He believed that this information could be retrieved! The conviction that there is hidden information in the Bible, especially in the Torah, is an old rabbinic traditional belief. What makes Rabbi Weissmandl’s role crucial is the fact that he set the foundations of the equidistant letter sequence (ELS), or skip, approach to breaking the Bible codes. Jeffrey Satinover brilliantly describes the story of his life and his contribution in his book The Truth behind the Bible Code [1]. Although there were many Jewish sages and Christian scholars (one of the most prominent among the latter is Sir Isaac Newton) who were convinced that there is hidden information in the Bible, the way this information could be retrieved had remained unclear. There are examples of constructing assumed encoded words by taking each first letter of consecutive words in a text, or every second letter, and so on. Rabbi Weissmandl was the first to establish the general rules for what is today Bible code research. He elaborated the method based on the text as a continuous string of letters, dropping out spaces and punctuations and using the 22 primary letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The string is then arranged in two-dimensional tables or matrices, well known from the numerous books and articles devoted to the Bible codes. What is less familiar is the fact that these tables are two-dimensional projections of three-dimensional helices. It is very easy to see this: each line in the two-dimensional matrices is a cut of the text of defined length equal to the skip. In reality, however, what we do is rather coiling the text string around a cylinder, whose loop length, in letters, is equal to the skip, thus forming a helix.

While Rabbi Weissmandl prepared his tables and made his first findings, cryptologists were busy to define the fundamentals of the science of encryption and deciphering enemy’s codes. The time was running out and the task was urgent. WWII was going on and the victory hinged on the effectiveness of the corresponding teams. Initially, the work of deciphering had been assigned to linguists. Yet even in the pre-war years, it became clear that basic algebra and statistics are not sufficient to do the job. The device, which made the researchers use their minds, was the German cipher machine Enigma. Finally, Enigma was cracked by applying the latest achievements in mathematics and statistics. However, what is not widely known about the deciphering of the intercepted encoded messages is that the cryptanalyst had to enter a guessed word or a phrase likely to appear in messages. Then, as what Alan Turing did, the cryptanalyst had to find non-contradictory links between assumed plaintext and assumed keys [2].

Enigma appeared not only to raise the state-of-the-art of the code breaking. It, together with the nuclear bomb, contributed indirectly to the development of the first computers in the 1940’s and their perfection to what we use today. What I find most astonishing with Enigma is that it employs very old principles, principles, which lead us ages back to the Bible and to Jeremiah the prophet in particular.

A member of the British team occupied with the cracking of Enigma, Gordon Welchman, noticed the reciprocal nature of the Enigma cipher. The practical significance of this observation was that it speeded up the process of decoding. Yet there is even deeper significance in this fact. It is that Enigma was the quintessence of the millennial experience of cryptography. Which, in its turn, uses as a starting point an encoding principle called atbash.

The Overlooked Code in the Bible

Ever since the first publication of the Bible code in a scientific journal in 1994, a fierce dispute started between adepts and skeptics. Surprisingly, there were many Christians and Jews claiming themselves as religious, who took the side of the skeptics. Even more surprisingly, there are many adepts claimed to be atheists, who believe that there are codes in the Bible, but they had been created by alien extraterrestrial superior race. Among them is the famous author Michael Drosnin, who spread the news in most captivating way through his best-seller The Bible Code.

However, there is an undisputable code, or rather a method of encoding, in the Bible. This code is known for ages. It is outside the Torah and probably this is the reason why both adepts at and critics of the Bible codes have neglected it. Jeremiah the prophet uses it in his book. In chapter 25:26 and 51:41 the Lord gives a strange name to the king of Babylon (בבל, pronounced Bavel in Hebrew) calling him king of Sheshach (ששכ). (For the sake of clarity, I sometimes will not use finals deliberately!) So easily and so long ago had been deciphered this riddle that many regard it more or less as a pseudo-code. This elementary secret message discloses, on the other hand, two very important facts:

1.                  Since very early times the Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 letters.

2.                  The order of the letters in the alphabet has always been of great significance.

These two parameters are of great importance because encoding and decoding depend entirely on them. Let us see how Babylon has been encoded. For this purpose, we need to have the ordered Hebrew alphabet, which is presented in the table below. The table contains the serial number of each letter in the alphabet, its name and phonetic (mostly consonant) equivalent(s). Notice that two of the letters: aleph (א) and ayin (ע) do not have phonetic equivalents. They may acquire any vowel sounding.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

א

ב

ג

ד

ה

ו

ז

ח

ט

י

כ

Aleph

Beit

Gimmel

Dalet

Hei

Vav

Zayin

Chet

Tet

Yud

Kaf

 

B, V

G

D

H

V

Z

Ch

T

Y

K, Ch

22

21

20

19

18

17

16

15

14

13

12

ת

ש

ר

ק

צ

פ

ע

ס

נ

מ

ל

Tav

Sin/Shin

Reish

Quf

Tsadik

Pei

Ayin

Samech

Nun

Mem

Lamed

T, Th

S, Sh

R

Q

Ts

P, F

 

S

N

M

L

The alphabet is arranged in the following way. The upper row of letters goes from left to right. The bottom row of letters goes in the opposite direction. Each row is a mirror image of the other one in relation to the middle of the alphabet: the empty space between kaf and lamed, which is a center of this mirror symmetry. The farther a letter of the upper row is from this center – the right end of the rows – the same distance away from the center is the letter in the bottom row. Notice that the sum of the numbers of the letters standing in one column is constant in all columns. It is 1 + 22 = 2 + 21 = 3 + 20 . . . = 23. The number 23 immediately intrigued me. Indeed, it matches exactly the number of the chromosomes in the human sex cells!

There is more in this. In the table above, number 23 is a result of adding unit to the number of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet, 22. Now the set of 23 chromosomes in a human sex cell consists of 22 non-sex chromosomes, which are identical in both male and female cells, and one sex chromosome. These are the famous X and Y-chromosomes, characteristic for the female and male, respectively. In the somatic, that is non-sex cells, males have an X and a Y-chromosome, while females have two X-chromosomes. This fact has a peculiar relation to the Biblical story of the creation of man and woman. Indeed, both sexes posses at least one X-chromosome, so its presence does not define sex essentially. It defines the sex in combination with another X or Y-chromosome. Therefore, males ‘bear’ the feminine in them. On the other hand, females do not contain ‘maleness’ because they do not have a Y-chromosome. Therefore, from genetic point of view, the creation of the first woman entirely out of a man’s body is possible, while the creation of a man out of a woman is genetically impossible unless a Y-chromosome is added from outside.[2] There is also another confirmation of the Bible story obtained recently. In Gen. 3:20, Adam called his wife’s name Eve because she was the mother of all living. Evidently, what Adam meant was that every human being descends in his or her maternal line from a single woman: Eve, the first created woman. DNA exists not in the chromosomes in the cell nuclei only, but also in small organelles called mitochondria. They are inherited exclusively from the mother. Now scientists have proved that all humans descend from one woman. On the other hand, the collected data are not enough for conclusive evidence that all humans descend from one man. [3]

Although the odds for the match of the numbers found so far are not extremely low, they could hint at some correlations, so I felt the need to search for deeper significance. The above description is an outline of the core of the code. A word or a text of any length is encoded in the following way. Each letter is replaced with its complementary letter in the same column. Thus, aleph (א) turns into tav (ת), beit turns into shin (ש),  . . , kaf (כ) turns into lamed (ל) and vice versa. This alteration of letters gave the name of the code in Hebrew: ATBASH (אתבש) – from Aleph → Tav and Beit → Shin.

What is characteristic of atbash is that the word (or the expression of any length) in the plain text and its code consist of the same number of letters. Each letter in the plain text uniquely defines the corresponding reciprocal letter in the code. The key to the code is the position of the letter to-be-encoded in the alphabet, that is, the order of the letters in the alphabet. Now it is very easy to see the simple way of the turning of בבל into ששכ. What is less evident is that plain and cipher texts form a unit consisting of two complementary parts.

Three aspects impressed me with this particular code. First, it appears twice, which is a sign of determination and great importance. Second, it consists of three letters. Most of the Hebrew words either are 3-letter long or derive from such 3-letter roots. Surely, it is significant that the word used in the Scripture for the introduction of this type of code is a three-letter one. Finally, one of the letters occurs twice. As a result, the overall number of letters used in these two complementary words turns out to be four.

As if to validate atbash, the Encoder uses this method of encoding again in Jeremiah 51:1: Thus saith the Lord: Behold, I will rise up against Babylon and against them that dwell in Leb-Kamai a destroying wind. The strange word Leb-Kamai (קמי לב) has been knotty for translation. However, if decoded through atbash it turns into Cashdim (כשדימ), which, according to ancient tradition is a cipher for Chaldea, that is, Babylon.

These are the (known) examples of atbash encoding in the whole Bible. All three instances refer to one name: Babylon...

Reciprocity, complementarity, number four... These new clues provoked my professional desire for solving the riddle. I had an important clue already: number 23. It signified a strange relationship between the number of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet and the number of the chromosomes in the human sex cells.

Between Stalin and Gorbachev

By 1944, the outcome of WWII was clear. The end of the war was a matter of time. Time, however, was crucially important for the nation chosen by God to keep His Word and spread it among the nations. A sinister plan for the extermination of the entire Jewish nation had started several years earlier and has been carried out with horrifying efficiency. Rabbi Weissmandl lost all his family in the Holocaust. He managed to escape from the train carrying his family to a concentration camp and hide until the end of the war. He lost all his discoveries. With only a few books in his possession, he arrived in America, where he conveyed his knowledge and experience to dedicated students. He died in 1957. About three decades later, his legacy reemerged and developed to what we know today as the Bible Code.

By 1944, scientists still believed that DNA could not be the molecule having the capacity for the storage of and processing the hereditary information in the living cells. They had suggested different models of the molecule, in which a pattern containing a certain number of all constituents had to repeat itself like beads in a necklace or tiles on a roof. Scientists believed that all four nucleotides[3] take part in a unit, which somehow reiterates many times to form the DNA molecule. Then, in 1944, a breakthrough changed the situation. First, Oswald Avery, Colin McLeod and M. McCarty proved unequivocally in experiments carried out with bacteria causing pneumonia, that a hereditary factor is DNA. However, even with their results in hand, scientists were still reluctant to recognize DNA as universal chemical basis of the genes. Apart from the reason mentioned above - the supposed simplicity of the DNA molecule - research of heredity in bacteria started in this year and it was not clear that their genes are built on the same principles as these of the higher organisms. However, something appeared to be common in all organisms from viruses to humans: DNA consists of the same nucleotides in every living creature!

Then, another discovery made by Erwin Chargaff and published in the same year showed that DNA possesses enough chemical complexity required for the genetic material. Firstly, he found that the DNA base composition varies among the species. This meant that there is no basic unit of the same composition containing more than two nitrogen bases, which is common in all organisms. Therefore, each species has its own characteristic composition. Chargaff discovered also a specific relation between the molar quantities of the nitrogen base types.

 

Figure 1. Correlation between the nitrogen bases. A specific spatial complementarity determines the coupling. Coupling takes place through formation of hydrogen bonds (shown as thin black lines), the weakest known in chemistry, in unique way to fix the bases from each strand in a pair with the corresponding base of the complementary strand.

The four nitrogen bases and the sites of the binding with the sugar are shown in Figure 1. The core structure, that is, the system of two rings on the left as well as the rings on the right, is plane. Two of the bases, shown on the left, are derivates of purine and the other two, on the right, are derivates of another compound, pyrimidine (right). Chargaff found that in each DNA molecule, the molar quantity of adenine is equal to that of thymine and the molar quantity of guanine is equal to that of cytosine. In a word, in every DNA molecule, the number of the red units in the left matches the number of the red units in the right. The same is valid for the blue units. Therefore, each nitrogen base can form a couple with one specific nitrogen base out of four.

This result was a very important clue but scientists needed eight years more to be convinced conclusively that DNA (and, in some viruses and very rarely in other organisms, RNA) contains the genetic information. This happened in 1952 when Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase compared the role of nucleic acids and proteins in experiments carried out with viruses. I am inclined to believe that it was due not as much to the proof that nucleic acids are carriers of genetic information as to the evidence that proteins are not.

Once scientists had realized that the key to the genetic code is hidden in the nucleic acids and in DNA in particular, a race started for snatching the priority of the discovery of how it works. It was clear that the discoverer(s) would deserve a Nobel Prize… The riddle was solved within months.

Another major step to the finding out the structure of DNA was the discovery that DNA possesses a helical structure. Rosalind Franklin has obtained x-ray photograph of DNA crystal in its so-called B-form, which is the form, in which DNA exists in living organisms. Moreover, what she found was that the number of the helices forming one structure is two.

Then came 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick built their famous model of the double helix. Everyone seeing this model is amazed of its simplicity and elegance. What I find most amazing in this story is that Watson and Crick have scarcely used their own data. They hypothesized using data obtained by others. What paved the road to their success was the diversity of their knowledge. They had to combine four basic ideas required for the explanation of the function of DNA for storage and copying of information. The model could not be constructed if anyone of these was missing [4]. What is more, the construction of the model needed much intuition, not only collected data and calculations. How well they did their job could be seen in the fact that the first decisive proof of the correctness of their conjecture appeared five years later.

The model of DNA Watson and Crick constructed consists of two anti-parallel helices, as if embracing each other. The inner core of the double helix resembles a ladder, whose ‘steps’ are the flat purine-pyrimidine pairs. They are always of the corresponding type: red purine makes a step with its complementary red pyrimidine. The same is valid for the blue pairs. Therefore, each step is either red or blue. What keeps the two helices together are the hydrogen bonds formed between hydrogen atoms bound on one hand to a nitrogen (N) atom from its ‘mother’ nitrogen base and localized close to either nitrogen or oxygen atom from the complementary unit. Hydrogen bonds are shown on Figure 1 as thin black lines. They are much weaker than the ‘normal’, covalent chemical bonds. This fact is of great importance for copying because it allows ‘unzipping’ of the two strands without breaking anyone of them. Simplified, copying takes place as each strand functions as a template for the newly built strand. Copying itself takes place concomitantly on both old strands, which are uncoupled for a while in a short section. The two newly created sections of DNA immediately ‘embrace’ each other, giving way to the next sections. In this way, little by little, a new molecule builds up.

Rosalind Franklin died in 1958. Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins, who, together with Franklin, had major contribution to the elucidation of the structure of DNA through crystallography, received the Nobel Prize in 1962.

The Cold War was going on. For twenty more years, communist East and democratic West were in a tight clutch. Few times, the world was on the brink of the war. In both sides, teams of highly qualified mathematicians and cryptanalysts were trying round-the-clock to create unbreakable codes, at the same time trying to crack the codes of the enemy. In another field, biologists, biochemists, biophysicists, bacteriologists, virologists, physicians and many others developed modern branches of the science of life, taking into account the knowledge obtained on molecular level.

Then, in the mid-1980’s, Reagan and Gorbachev arranged the peaceful crash of the communist system. As a result, the Berlin Wall fell and the world entered a new period. Soon, the public heard about the Bible Code. Skeptics started trying to prove that this ‘so-called-phenomenon’ exists in every long enough text. Disputes have been held mainly in terms of R-factors and overall odds. Even a large proportion of the Bible code researchers, who apply the experience of cryptanalysts, are inclined to regard atbash as the primitive initial step to higher techniques. Meanwhile, evolutionists have hushed up the voices of those seeing the finger of God in the inimitably elegant design of the DNA’s double helix. Today, very few know that the fiercest opponents to the genetic code were the Soviet communist Darwinists…

The Book of Life is One Book!

I wrote this extensive lead-in in order to illustrate two major points. Firstly, it should be clear that the modern approach to the Bible code is not universal. It is a product of the degree of understanding, which, in its turn depends on the technical means available – both tools and methods for evaluation of the data obtained. Secondly, and probably this has been less obvious, I wanted to show that in contrast to what many, both skeptics and believers, accept as true today, the revelation of the hidden information kept for the Time of the End requires not computers and statistical methods only, but universal knowledge as well. I believe that this was what Daniel meant in Dan. 12:4.

Contemplating on the wonderful story of the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, I suddenly realized that what the hydrogen bonds make with the nitrogen bases is exactly what atbash makes with the Hebrew letters! Indeed, adenine (A) in one strand always stands in opposition to thymine (T) in the complementary strand and vice versa. The same is valid for guanine (G) and cytosine (C). If we liken these four bases to letters, we can construct an alphabet consisting of four ordered letters: A, C, G and T. The atbash rule here is obvious: A → T; T → A and C → G; G → C. We could even try to give a name to this key: ATCaG or something of the sort…

What I realized next was even more intriguing. The first, repeated and most obvious example of atbash code in the Bible also consists of four letters! They are beyt (ב), kaf (כ), lamed (ל) and shin (ש). The similarity is so amazing that I can add nothing! What I can do is to illustrate the equivalence in a picture…


This equivalence in every aspect astonished me. Does it mean that the Creator of both genetic and atbash codes is One? I believe that the answer is yes. Then, what is the meaning of all this? The first chapter in Genesis states that God is Creator of everything. The Bible is His own Word. On the other hand, the genetic code is universal. DNA molecules from viruses and bacteria to plants and humans consist of the same building blocks and copy themselves in the same way. All the flesh...

Indeed, the flesh is naturally prone to corruption (Gen. 6:12-13). However, like a scarlet thread through the whole Bible runs another source of corruption – spiritual corruption – of human origin. It is the spirit of rebellion, whose originator was Nimrod. Interestingly, his name, marked by the three consonants MRD, has crept into many modern languages. The Semitic root MRD means ‘to rebel’. The echo of these ancient events reverberates in English as ‘murder’; in the Slavic languages, these three consonants are present in the words for ‘death’ (smrt; d and t frequently turn into each other) [5]. The beginning of Nimrod’s kingdom was ... Babylon, בבל (Gen. 10:10)! Therefore, the choice of the Encoder is more than significant!

Once we have these data and knowing the boundless and everlasting wisdom of the Lord, we would be too naive in believing that He would leave all this on such a superficial level. There should be something hidden deeper. Something, which will be an adequate proof of our hypothesis. The question is where to look for deeper wisdom? We have numbers; we have names; now we need wisdom...

The Number of the Beast

In Search for wisdom

Finding the number of the beast has been a beloved subject of research for many scholars from ancient times to nowadays. I have prepared a review on the subject in the Appendix.

I have disagreed with practically all interpretations of the Number of the Beast for two main reasons:

1.                  They are based entirely on Gematria, or Numerology. However, in these about 19 centuries, there have been many individuals, whose name or part of the name yields the number 666. This fact makes the personalization of the man of the evil, in case the prophecy in the book of Revelation relates to a person, doubtful and indefinite.

2.                  All attempts to define the Beast start with the Romans, usually Emperor Nero. In addition, they are limited to the Greco-Roman and later to the European region.

The first point is clear. If we ascribe a certain number to every human, who has lived on the Earth, at least millions out of billions of humans would certainly match number 666. This is valid even for the humans living now. We should consider here the question of the alphabet used for writing the name. The only alphabet, apart from the Hebrew, which has a definite number assigned to each letter, is the Greek alphabet. Latin alphabet uses several letters only for this purpose. These are firmly established but the remaining letters are without a value. As for Cyrillic alphabets (there are several), there is a real mess. I dare say a Cyrillic alphabet is inapplicable for numerical calculations. In this aspect, a very interesting regularity could be observed. Greek alphabet is a direct derivative of the Hebrew. Latin alphabet has been designed based on the Greek centuries later. The first Cyrillic alphabet was created in Bulgaria in the second half of the 9th century AD. The Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet borrows several letters directly from Hebrew (such as ö for ‘ts’ and ø for ‘sh’). However, the general tendency is clear: the farther an alphabet is from Hebrew, or the later it is created, the more irrelevant it becomes for Numerology. As if there is a perfect original, which is damaged by human intervention?

The Beast may be not an individual but a system. In the last three or four centuries, however, the attempts for identification of the Beast as a system have been limited to the Catholic Church. It is due mainly to the fact that the exploration of this subject has started with the Reformation. It has been launched by Protestants, who were seeing the enemy and hence the spirit of evil in the papal Rome alone.

It is evident, however, that ascribing all the evil of the world to the Catholic system is unserious. Were all Nazis Catholics? What about Stalin, Mao and their totalitarian regimes? What about the Islamic terrorists? Catholics have not caused destructive harms to my country, Bulgaria. Moreover, in the early 1950’s, Catholic priests were executed in communist Bulgaria along with a large part of the Bulgarian intellectual elite for nothing. They had committed no crimes. Their executions were just the next step in the gigantic plan for depriving of the East European nations from their national identities.

Finally, I have not seen a satisfactory account of the image of the Beast. The image, εικων, that is, icon, is a specific characteristic of the Beast. In the book of Revelation, the word occurs exclusively in connection with him. I was certain that this image should have a role in the process of the identification of the Beast. Now we have four interlinked components: beast, image, man and number. What we need is wisdom, σοφια.

A Long Forgotten Greek Case

Seeing the Greek word for wisdom in the verse containing the number 666, I decided that the search must start from the same verse. I read the Greek text carefully and compared it with the translations into English and Bulgarian. The words αριθμος γαρ ανθρωπου εστι (Rev. 13:18) are translated in both languages in a way implying that the number belongs to a man: because it is the number of a man (AV, RV, ESV). In NIV, the words read for it is a man’s number. In the Today’s English Version, the expression is rendered as because the number stands for a man’s name. I checked the books on Greek grammar. Most of them refer to four cases. The case that fits best in this example is Genitive. Indeed, Genitive implies possession. Therefore, the NIV translation is formally accurate. Since the number 666 is to be possessed by someone, it becomes his (own) number. Now it is clear why the researchers have hunted for a specific human representative of the sin. Little-by-little, ‘the number of a man’ has become ‘the number of the man’…

However, the Greek text does not imply a particular man. There is not a definite article. That is why the words can be rendered as ‘number of man’ implying man in general, or just ‘human number’[4]. I was intrigued and tried with more books. I was surprised to see that there have been more cases in ancient Greek, which became obsolete. Eventually, their usage was abandoned and the peculiarity of the action had to be understood by implication. This was possible because the cases, which were no more in use, had the same suffixes as their substitutes. One of them is Ablative. It was substituted by Genitive. Nevertheless, Ablative has a specific nuance. Although it looks grammatically like Genitive, Ablative denotes separation [6]. This action can be clarified by the use of the preposition εκ = from, out of, away from. In many cases, however, there is no preposition and separation has to be inferred. Sometimes, the difference between possession and separation is subtle…

I checked for occasions where supposed Ablative is used in the book of Revelation. The same grammatical structure appears when there are voices and sounds (5:11; 6:1; 18:22; 19:1,6). But sounds and voices typically characterize the source they are coming from! Therefore, we could approach the number as a number coming out of (a) man. Is there an authentic person matching the characteristics of the man in Rev. 13:18?

Numerology: The Inevitable Start

The failures of the researchers trying to identify the Beast and the man through number 666 have shown that pure numerology is not the right way to cracking the riddle. If the key were there, someone would have already found it. On the other hand, Hebrew alphabet is well defined numerologically. Numerical values have been widely used by Jewish Sages [7]. Therefore, I decided that gematria should be the first step to the solution anyway. The question was where and what to begin with. Keeping in mind that the wisdom orientates to the Word of God, I tried to define the most appropriate name in the Old Testament. I could not imagine a better match than Babylon. In the book of Revelation, the Beast and its number from chapter 13:11-18 unambiguously point out to Babylon in 14:8-12.

The numerical values of the Hebrew letters are as follows:

א

ב

ג

ד

ה

ו

ז

ח

ט

י

כ

ל

מ

נ

ס

ע

פ

צ

ק

ר

ש

ת

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

200

300

400

The numeric value of Babylon, בבל, appeared to be 34. I started trying with different combinations. King of Babylon, בבל מלך