I have been heard by people everywhere, and I teach nothing in private that I have not said in public.

Jesus, John 18:20b,NLT

There are many reasons we are fascinated by equidistant letter sequences - but it is worth considering that Jesus isn't interested in keeping secrets.  Are there secret messages hiding in the word?  I don't think so - and here is a great source to consider,   "Who Wrote the Bible Code" (http://www.rsingermanson.com/html/bible_code.html).  There you can find out about an exciting book, not to mention free software, to help resolve this question.

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for

reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:

That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.

II Timothy 3:16,17

Scripture may be pushed, prodded in all sorts of ways.  For generations people, meaning good and ill, have done all manner of things with God's word.  Despite their folly or ineptitude - it remains profitable.  Whether or not ELS's prove lasting tools in understanding God's word, it is sure that just looking at them drags us to and through the Word.  I know that whatever I get out of the ELS "hobby", it has surely profited, if only to brush up on my own use and familiarity with Hebrew.

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth:

it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish

that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.

Isaiah 55:11

Here is some PERL code I wrote to look at ELS in Biblical (and other) material

Equidistant Letter Sequences - Some Measurements, A  FewConclusions

I'm not sure what this may add or detract from the study of ELS phenomena within scripture.  Essentially I took a look at several things using Daniel Rice's findstring program, and most of the Tanach books.

Pressed for conclusions, they would be

• Biblical texts contain ELS hits in proportion to the size of the book - i.e. the larger the book, the more ELS hits can be found.
• Hebrew texts, generated using the frequencies as found in the original scriptures  are more likely to include ELS patterns of real words.
• Hebrew texts, generated using the frequencies as found in the original scriptures  are less likely to include ELS patterns of bogus words. (not presented here  - stay tuned, I'll look into adding some of that - but looking for random, non-Hebrew words in generated texts found MORE hits in the flat distribution, than in the Torah based texts).

Program used:	findstring.c (Daniel Rice), lots of perl code to generate the random texts and organize the output.
Max Skip	+/- 50
Books (These were found with the reveal.exe archive; I'm not making any major claims here, so I'm not too worried about which versions I found).	AMOS DEVARIM EZRA NAHUM SEFANYA VAYIKRA YOEL BEMIDBAR DIVYAM1 MALACHI NEHEMYA SHEMOT YEHEZKEL YONA BERESHT DIVYAM2 MICHA OVADYA SHIR YESHAYA ZECHARYA  DANIEL ESTHER MISHLE RUTH TEHILIM YIRMIYA
Generated Texts	Flat  texts based on the books of the Torah - i.e. all 22 characters of the Hebrew alphabet had 1/22 chance of appearing at each "slot". Distributed texts based on the books of the Torah - the probability of each letter was based on its real frequency in the Torah.
Words looked for	Jesus (yeshua), Torah, Messiah, Grace (Hesed), Peace

1) Comparison of ELS hits versus book size:

No surprises here - the size of the book increases the likelihood of the word being found increases.

2) Generated Texts

I generated two sets of random text "Torah" volumes, one based on the letter frequency of the book (Genesis, for example) and the length of that volume, another, based on pure flat distribution of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in volume the length of each book of the Torah.  So I had three "texts":

• Flat:   Random Hebrew text, with even distribution of each letter.
• Distributed: Random Hebrew text, with distribution of each letter based on "natural" frequencies in the Torah
• Real: Real Hebrew text of the books of the Tanach

I found:

• The size of the book increased the likelihood of finding ELS occurences of the target word
• In most cases  Distributed volumes were more likely to contain ELS occurnences

Here is the one case where the "Flat" distribution scored higher than texts based on texts generated using Torah frequencies:

3) Scored versus Raw Searches.

At some point this may be useful for  SUBJECTIVE studies of ELS's - as a means of zeroing in on significant verses.  I scored ELS hits by dividing 1/(absolute value of the Skip size).  Then I graph the occurence of the ELS across the book  In general the graph of raw ELS hits is a flat line, with one or two spikes.  Of more interest (possibly) is looking at the "spikey" line, where I've assigned a score to the ELS found.

.  For example in Psalms Jesus occurs in this pattern :

and Torah in this:

A similar set of graphs was produced for the book of the prophet Isaiah:

For sheer numbers, what I found, using a max ELS skip of +/- 50:

Jesus	Torah
197	138	Psalms
150	175	Isaiah

3) Concluding Questions

• Has anyone done scored graphing like the above?

• Is it useful to anyone in looking at ELS's?

• Do you want to see more?

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, [even] his eternal   power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse  Because that, when they knew God, they glorified [him] not as God,   neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish   heart was darkened.

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

Romans 1:20-23

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