All things are become slippery

God only knows, God makes his plan

The information's unavailable to the mortal man

. . .

Slip slidin' away, slip slidin' away

You know the nearer your destination

The more you're slip slidin' away

-- Paul Simon

⁂

Genesis 1:1

Back in 2006, I read a series of online articles (qv) by one Vernon Jenkins about the mathematical properties of the first verse of the Bible.

Genesis 1:1 -- translated as "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth" -- consists of 28 Hebrew letters, and 28 is a triangular number.

Genesis 1:1 as a triangle

What are the chances of that? Not particularly low. If we want to express the odds numerically, it all depends on what set of integers we look at, since triangular numbers become progressively less frequent as the numbers get larger. To get a rough idea of how likely it is for something about as long as Genesis 1:1 to have a triangular number of letters, lets look at the range of integers from 14 to 42, inclusive -- that is, 28 plus or minus 50%. Of these 29 integers, four -- about 1 in 7 -- are triangular.

Now it happens that each letter in the Hebrew alphabet does double duty as a numeral, and it is this that forms the basis of the Kabbalistic practice of gematria, in which a Hebrew word or text can be interpreted by translating it into a number (adding up the values of its constituent letters) and then looking either at the properties of that number itself or at other Hebrew words that add up to the same value. For example, the Hebrew phrase translated as "And lo, three men" in Genesis 18:2 adds up to the number 701 -- which "proves" that the three men mentioned are the archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, because the Hebrew phrase "These are Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael" also adds up to 701. (A corresponding practice, called isopsephia, exists for the Greek language and is presumably what is being alluded to by the famous New Testament statement that the "number of the name" of the apocalyptic beast is 666.)

The gematria value of Genesis 1:1 is 2701 -- another triangular number. This is a much larger number than 28, so its being triangular is a somewhat more impressive coincidence. Calculating the odds the same way we did before, we look at the range of numbers from 1350 to 4052 and find that 38 of these 2703 numbers are triangular -- about 1 in 71. Taking the product of these two probabilities, we can say that the chance of a verse like Genesis 1:1 having both a triangular number of letters and a triangular gematria value is about 1 in 500 -- fairly improbable, but not astonishingly so.

But 2701 isn't just any triangular number. It also happens to be the product of 37 and 73 -- the 4th hex number an the 4th star number, respectively. (The product of the nth hex and the nth star is always triangular, so that's not an additional coincidence.) Such numbers are extremely rare; the first six numbers in the series (products of the nth hex and the nth star; let's call them starhex numbers) are 1,  91, 703, 2701, 7381, and 16471.

The fourth starhex number, 37 × 73 = 2701

The figure above demonstrates what a starhex number is. The figure consists of 73 little hexagons arranged in the shape of a six-pointed star. The center of this star is itself a larger hexagon, made up of 37 of the little hexagons. Each of the 73 little hexagons is itself made up of 37 tiny circles, duplicating on a smaller scale that central hexagon. The total number of  tiny circles is 37 × 73 = 2701 -- the starhex number which is the gematria value of Genesis 1:1.

Of the 31,102 verses in the Bible, how many have a gematria (or isopsephia) value which is a starhex number? Eleven. How many of those 11 verses also have a triangular number of letters in the original language? Only two. The other one is Leviticus 20:27: "A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them" -- 55 letters, with a gematria value of 2701. I find it quite humorous that the only Bible verse to share these unusual properties of Genesis 1:1 should be what is surely one of the most embarrassing verses in the whole Bible! (To any atheists looking for ammo to use against the likes of Vernon Jenkins, you're welcome.)

(By the way, a tip of the hat to Richard Amiel McCough, whose searchable gematria database of every word and verse in the Bible is what has made it so easy for me to discover the information in the previous paragraph. I especially appreciate Mr. McCough's willingness to continue to host this and other Bible resources, created when he was a believing Christian, even though he has since become a standard-issue atheist and "debunked himself.")

⁂

Texas sharpshooting

All things considered, how impressed should we be with these mathematical properties of Genesis 1:1? Not very. While it is obviously extremely unlikely for any particular verse to have those particular properties, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is pretty obviously at work here. (The sharpshooter, you will recall, fired some shots into the side of a barn and then painted a target around the largest cluster of bullet holes.) When you consider the virtually infinite number of mathematically interesting properties a given number could possess, it becomes clear that any number you care to analyze will turn out to have some extremely unusual combination of those properties. Is there any reason at all to expect that a particularly significant Bible verse would add up to the product of the nth star and the nth hex -- rather than being, say, a large prime, or a perfect number, or the product of three consecutive Fibonacci numbers, or whatever? Of course not. Jenkins is painting the target after the shots have been fired.

Here's another of Jenkins's "amazing" properties of Genesis 1:1. If you take the product of the gematria values of every letter in the verse, divided by the product of the gematria values of every word in the verse, and then multiply that by the number of letters over the number of words -- you get 3.141554509... × 10¹⁷. Ignore the 10¹⁷ bit, and you have the approximate value of pi, correct to 5 significant figures.

Which is not impressive at all, when you consider the infinite number of possible (and completely arbitrary) mathematical operations that could be performed on something in order to derive a number fairly close to pi, you realize that it means nothing at all.

Returning to our friend the Texas sharpshooter, though, suppose he were to fire his shots, paint his target -- and then fire another round of shots and hit this freshly painted target again? Wouldn't that mean he was a real sharpshooter after all?

Well, Vernon Jenkins has done that. Remember that completely arbitrary set of mathematical operations he performed on Genesis 1:1 to derive pi, correct to 5 significant figures? Well, if you apply the exact same arbitrary set of mathematical operations to John 1:1 (the Bible's other "In the beginning..." verse), you get  2.718312812... × 10⁴⁰. Again ignoring the powers of ten, this is the value of e, also correct to 5 significant figures. That is impressive!

⁂

S:E:G:

Could there be an English gematria?

Hebrew and Greek numerals work basically the same way: The first nine letters correspond to the numbers from 1 to 9, the next nine correspond to 10 to 90, and then 100 to 900. (Hebrew only has 22 letters, not 27 like archaic Greek, so the Hebrew system is defective.) But applying the same system to the English alphabet is arbitrary, since the Roman letters have never had those numerical values. When the alphabet is used numerically (in lists or outlines, for example), it's always in a straightforward ordinal manner, where Z represents 26, not 800.

I call this straightforward system -- A = 1, Z = 26 -- Simple English Gematria. By a singularly appropriate coincidence, the words simple, English, and gematria all add up to the same value, 74, in this system, so the total value for Simple English Gematria is 222. I used to abbreviate this as S∴E∴G∴, ironically imitating the Masonic-style punctuation used by Aleister Crowley and other would-be English kabbalists, which I jokingly referred to as "magickal puncktuation" (spelling magick with a k being another Crowleyism). Later I discovered that this phrase, magickal puncktuation, adds up to 222, the same value as Simple English Gematria. This bizarre coincidence made me modify said puncktuation, changing the therefore-signs to colons, so as to represent the number 222.

Because the highest letter value in S:E:G: is 26 -- as opposed to to 400 in Hebrew gematria or 900 in Greek isopsephia -- S:E:G: tends to yield much lower word values than those languages. Still, though, there are some surprising cross-language coincidences. For example, the gematria value of the Tetragrammaton -- the Hebrew name of God, usually rendered Jehovah or Yahweh in English -- is 26, which is also the S:E:G: value of the English word God. In Greek isopsephia, Jesus and Christ add up to 888 and 1480, respectively. Obviously no single word can have such a high value in S:E:G:, but the S:E:G: value of Jesus (and also of cross, Messiah, and gospel) is 74, and both 888 and 1480 are multiples of 74.

Anyway, it crossed my mind to see if I could find an English passage that would somehow be the S:E:G equivalent of Jenkins's Genesis 1:1, with similar properties. Of course there are no searchable S:E:G: databases, so I wouldn't be able to rely on the infinite monkey theorem to guarantee success. Instead I would have to do some bona fide Texas sharpshooting if I was going to hit the tiny target Jenkins had painted. I looked at the English translation of Genesis 1:1, and at the first verses of the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants (books of scripture revealed in English rather than in Hebrew or Greek, and so in some sense the English equivalents of the Bible) but found nothing mathematically interesting. So much for that idea.

⁂

Helaman 13

Some months after my failed attempt to find an English answer to Genesis 1:1, I was reading a novel and brooding. This was near the beginning of my relationship with the woman who would later become my wife. We had just had some minor dustup about something, but I was still a novice in these matters, had not yet learned to take feminine drama in my stride, and was pretty sure I had lost her forever. As I contemplated the fragility of everything, how anything can be taken from you at any time and for no particularly intelligible reason, I suddenly thought of a line from the Book of Mormon: "All things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them." I had been an atheist for four or five years at that time, and hadn't read the Book of Mormon in about as long, but into my mind it popped regardless, and I thought it was a nice turn of phrase. (I also thought of Waterus, a blue plush walrus owned by a family friend when we were kids; Waterus's catchphrase was "I'm slipp'ier'n water! I'm slipp'ier'n water!").

And then it hit me: a sudden, inexplicable conviction that this was the English Genesis 1:1, that this shot in the dark would hit Jenkins's Texas target. This was a good 11 years before I got my first smartphone so, not having a Book of Mormon or a computer handy, I scribbled this down on the yellow Post-It note I was using as a bookmark: "all things are become slippery -- complete quote -- same properties as Gen 1:1." (What exactly did "complete quote" mean in this context? I didn't know. I just wrote down what came into my head.)

Later, at home, I looked up the passage online and found that it was from a sermon by Samuel the Lamanite in Helaman 13, and that it was in fact a "quote" -- Samuel was saying (quoting) what he predicted that his audience would say at some future date. Here, bracketed by "Yea, in that day ye shall say" and "And this shall be your language in those days," is the complete quote:

This seems like a pretty arbitrary block of text to focus on, nowhere near as obviously significant as the first verse of the Bible. It's not even a complete verse or set of verses, but consists of Helaman 13:34-36 and parts of vv. 33 and 37.

O that we had remembered the Lord our God in the day that he gave us our riches, and then they would not have become slippery that we should lose them; for behold, our riches are gone from us. Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle. Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land. O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them. Behold, we are surrounded by demons, yea, we are encircled about by the angels of him who hath sought to destroy our souls. Behold, our iniquities are great. O Lord, canst thou not turn away thine anger from us?

Despite the arbitrary nature of the passage, I nevertheless felt inexplicably confident that it would turn out to have the same numerical properties as Genesis 1:1. First I counted the number of letters: 630, a triangular number.

The Helaman text arranged in a triangle

Then I calculated the S:E:G: value of the entire passage: 7381, the fifth starhex number.

The fifth starhex number, 61 × 121 = 7381

Later I even went through the laborious calculations whereby Vernon Jenkins had derived pi and e from Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1:, respectively -- just in case it might yield, I don't know, Planck's constant or something, but it didn't. Still, though, a triangular number of letters with a starhex gematria value is pretty darn close to a perfect bull's-eye!

⁂

We're not in Texas anymore

What's impressive about this, and what's not?

It's not impressive at all that somewhere in the Book of Mormon there exists a passage with a triangular number of letters and a starhex gematria value. It's true that such passages are so rare that only two verses in the whole Bible qualify -- but if a "passage" can be any syntactically coherent string of text, without regard for length or for verse boundaries, then obviously the chance of a text as long as the Book of Mormon's containing such a passage must be pretty close to 1.

What is impressive -- extremely impressive -- is not that such a passage exists, but that I found it. And found it on my fourth try: three obvious guesses (Genesis 1:1, 1 Nephi 1:1, D&C 1:1), and then this completely off-the-wall one. "Is your name Kunz? Is your name Heinz? Then is your name perhaps -- Rumpelstiltskin?" There's obviously no way in hell that was just a lucky guess on the queen's part, and Rumpelstiltskin's reaction is perfectly natural: "The devil told you that! The devil told you that!"

So who told me? In the past I have characterized it as a "gematria revelation"; was it?

I think there are only two possibilities. The first is that I revealed it to myself -- that some occult aspect of my mind, the part we file under "the unconscious," had been plugging away, going through the entire Book of Mormon from memory (I had, after all, read the book several times), counting letters and calculating gematria values, until it finally found what it was looking for and presented its discovery to my conscious mind. There is plenty of evidence that the "unconscious mind" enjoys powers of perfect recall and is quite capable of doing something like this.

The other possibility is that it was indeed a revelation -- from God, a Rumpelstiltskinian "devil," or some other such entity. The question then becomes why anyone would take the trouble of revealing such completely random information. I mean, who cares if some random Book of Mormon passage is numerologically akin to Genesis 1:1? What possible significance could that have? Why would God or the devil or anyone else go around telling people that? If it was indeed a revelation, I can only assume that the point had nothing to do with gematria as such but was simply to draw my attention to the passage in question, using something I happened to be interested in at that time as a means of doing so.

It does, after all, seem to be a genuinely prophetic passage, and to relate to our time -- which is what brought the whole thing back to my mind after all these years and made me post on it again.