Verification of ELS in Isaiah 53

Introduction

In this post I am going to show a method to verify short-distance ELS codes. You only need to run a couple of standard GNU/Linux commands to verify ELS over an input text. From a computational point of view this is an inefficient method, so it cannot be used to search for ELS codes, nor executed over large distances of ELS code and/or over very large amounts of text. However, it has the advantage that you do not need to install any specialized ELS software on your computer.

Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS)

A formal definition found in TorahBibleCodes:

Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg (WRR) define an Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS) as a sequence of letters in the text whose positions - not counting spaces - form an arithmetic progression. That is to say the letters are found at the positions

n, (n + d), (n + 2d), (n + 3d),... (n + (k - 1)d)

WRR define n as the start, d as the skip between letters in the search-term, and k as the length of the ELS. These three parameters uniquely identify the ELS which is denoted (n, d, k).

Here is an example found in Isaiah 53:8 to 54:1, with two ELS on the same section of text:

Regular expressions

Regular expressions are patterns used to match character combinations in strings. They’re like a special language that helps you find patterns in text.

The method

An ELS is nothing more than a pattern of letters separated by the same distance within a text (not counting blank spaces), so it can be found by means of a regular expression that could be described as follows:

The beginning of the text, followed by any letter any number of times, followed by the first letter of the sequence of letters that form the ELS, followed by any d - 1 letters, followed by the second letter, followed by any d - 1 letters … and so on.

Where d is the skip between letters from the definition above.

Matching the two Isaiah 53:8 to 54:1 ELS

The GNU sed commands to test the two ELS (see image above) are:

  sed -E -n "s/^.+(\xD7\x99).{19}(\xD7\x9E).{19}(\xD7\xA9).{19}(\xD7\xA2).{19}(\xD7\x95).{19}(\xD7\xA9).{19}(\xD7\x99).+$/\7\6\5\4\3\2\1/p" isaiah.txt

  sed -E -n "s/^.+(\xD7\x9F).{51}(\xD7\xA5).{51}(\xD7\x9C).{51}(\xD7\x91).{51}(\xD7\xAA).{51}(\xD7\x99).+$/\1\2\3\4\5\6/p" isaiah.txt

The input file isaiah.txt must contain a single line of text consisting solely of characters from the classic Hebrew alphabet (Unicode character encoding U+05D0 to U+05EA). The command to obtain an input file of this type is:

grep -oP '[\x{05D0}-\x{05EA}]+' input | tr -d '\n' > output

sed is a GNU command line program for filtering and transform text. It works with regular expressions

• -E: this argument tells the program to use Extended regular expressions
• -n: this argument tells the program to suppress automatic printing of pattern space (the input text)
• The pattern for the first command is: ^.+(\xD7\x99).{19}(\xD7\x9E).{19}(\xD7\xA9).{19}(\xD7\xA2).{19}(\xD7\x95).{19}(\xD7\xA9).{19}(\xD7\x99).+$, where
  1. ^: Start of text
  2. .+: Any letter one or more times
  3. (\xD7\x99): Yod letter in UTF-8
  4. .{19}: any letter 19 times (Equivalent to an ELS with with skip 20)
  5. (\xD7\x9E): Mem letter in UTF-8
  6. Same with the rest of the letters
  7. $: end of text
• The replacement (\7\6\5\4\3\2\1) is each one of the groups captured in the pattern, presented in reverse order: \7 for the group number 7 and so on… This is used to show the captured letters in the patterns.

• If the pattern is found, the command prints the characters
• If the pattern is NOT found, the command prints nothing

I made a bash script to test for both ELS, obtaining the text from two different Hebrew Bibles:

• Miqra According to the Masorah (MAM): only Jesus is my name ELS found.
• Leningrad Codex: Jesus is my name and I was crucified ELS found.

Download here (sha256: c32bbfcff809e89b684de43acd2da309c6336c08dbc1fc5ff15e355ebab1c1bc)

sha256sum isaiah-53-esl.sh
chmod u+x isaiah-53-esl.sh
sh isaiah-53-esl.sh

It may take more than 30 seconds to execute in old machines (more than 10 years old) and about 5 seconds on newer ones. The script could be improved executing the sed command only over the affected verses instead of the full Isaiah book, but there is not a straightforward method to do this with bash due how the source Leningrad text is formatted.

If this method is used over large amounts of text (eg: more than one Bible book) or to perform long ELS searches (distance or lenght), the proccess might allocate a lot of resources. It might take a long time to complete and/or your OS might freeze.

If you are interested in searching for new ELS codes, I recommend the TorahBibleCodes software. You can find more ELS codes in the website Behold The Stone.