The Tenth Cycle: A Thriller (A Rossler Foundation Mystery Book 1) by JC Ryan Page B

story about all the things that can’t be true about how it was constructed, right?”
    “Yeah, so?”
    “Dr. Zacharias’ lecture got me thinking about it maybe being a message somehow. You just made it clear, that’s what it has to be – nothing else makes sense.”
    Now it was Owen’s turn to be a little confused, but he sensed Daniel was on the right track. His agile mind seized on the name Zacharias now, and the biblical name triggered something else he thought might be helpful.
    “Have you ever heard of the Bible code, or the Torah code?”
    “No, what’s that?”
    “People have been playing around with possible codes in the holy books for a long time, and they’ve found some things that could be messages. They even made a movie about it, The Omega Code.”
    “Oh, I saw that, now I remember.”
    “Yeah, so some scholars have written about it in peer-reviewed journals, and they claim it couldn’t have happened by chance.”
    “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than you could ever find even with the help of a super-computer.”
    “Oh, man! Not Shakespeare! Twist anything else around, but leave the bard alone, man, that’s sacred ground.”
    Daniel just grinned. He had a lot to research this afternoon, so he could tell Sarah during their regular Skype session. What a wonderful invention, Skype. He didn’t miss her as much as he would have if he couldn’t see that sweet face any time he wanted. But before any of that could happen, he needed to finish his article.
    “Are you through stuffing your face?” Daniel asked Owen. “I need to get back.”
    ~~~
    Back at the office, Daniel pounded out the remainder of his story about Zacharias. Satisfied that he had turned in an honest day’s work, he Googled ‘bible code’ and spent the rest of the afternoon chasing down every hint he could find about secret messages, whether from reliable sources or the fringe lunatics. He’d sort it out later.
    What he learned was fascinating, beginning with the long tradition of seeking coded messages in the Bible, or the Torah. Even Sir Isaac Newton had believed that such a code existed, but in fact, Jewish priests and Bible scholars from the more distant past had a tradition of seeking interpretation of their world in the holy books. There were even a couple of words to describe the results; exegesis and eisegesis, meaning, respectively, insightful and false interpretations. The thought crossed his mind that it might not be possible to determine for sure which was which, except perhaps with hindsight.
    Then there were the factual data, for example, that by selecting every fiftieth letter from the Book of Genesis, you could spell the word Torah. What meaning to attach to such a message was open to interpretation, but many people agreed that it could not have happened by chance, especially in view of the fact that the same exercise practiced in the Book of Exodus produces the same result.
    Seeking further enlightenment, Daniel read of the history of such studies, culminating in the 1980s, when a mathematician at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem became interested in the discoveries of an Israeli schoolteacher and brought the power of a computer to bear on the subject. After writing a software program for it, the equidistant letter sequence, or ELS, was employed to find many messages. A group of religious scholars including the mathematician later published findings in the scientific journal Statistical Science with an article that gave strong statistical evidence that information about certain rabbis was coded in the Torah years before those rabbis lived.
    Some proponents of the discoveries held that it was extremely unlikely such evidence could have happened by chance, like the word Torah appearing in two separate books of the Bible; others said of course it could, and served up example after example of similar sequences from both Hebrew and English texts.
    After that, Daniel learned, controversy arose