Perhaps the most striking attribute of a legend is to assign human-like behaviors to other “things”. These can be animals, plants, and of course silent objects (where does Bugs Bunny fit in this classification?). Some call it ‘personification’, and others would use the term ‘anthropomorphism’ (look up Google for the difference).

The most interesting usage of personification stories involves fooling around with the personification issue itself. Take Pinocchio for example: He (it?) started his (its?) way as a wooden puppet being assembled by a skilled carpenter. In the end… well, we all know what happened. Want another example? How about The Sorcerer’s Apprentice? That is a fine example of splitting one conscious mind into several. Who Framed Roger Rabbit set the standard for a mixed human-cartoon plot. And the list grows on and on.

The ancient Greek mythology, and for that matter, many ancient mythologies, made use of their own Pinocchios, building, destroying, bringing to life, and shutting down each other. Some of these mythologies really made it to the top with Pinocchio making Geppetto, as in God making man in his workshop: First version from earth, second version from a rib.

Many legends have managed to remain under the ‘legend’ tag. Some have managed to escape.

This method is most popular among Jewish players of the game, some of whom have turned it into a real art. Rabbi Zamir Cohen, for instance, has produced a booklet named Bible and Science, where he masters this game and allegedly exposes certain mysterious knowledge found in the Bible and in the Jewish Talmud.

In general, these so-called findings are nothing more than simple manipulations of old contents, combined with lack of knowledge and aimed at the young and the bewildered. Want an example? Sure you do!

The tractate of ‘Rosh Hashanah’ (in the Talmud) tells us of Rabban Gamliel, who is explaining to the other sages about the synodic month – the time between two consecutive conjunctions of the Moon and the Sun. In other words: The exact length of the Jewish (and also the Muslim) traditional month. Apparently Rabban Gamliel is quoted as specifying this period of time with precision that is equivalent to five decimal digits after the decimal point (i.e., 29.53059 days). Does it mean we should all start eating kosher and keeping the Sabbath?

An old Russian joke tells about a peasant named Ivan from the region of Smolensk. According to the news he won a prize for producing the largest amount of wheat during the last year. A commission of inquiry was established and found out that his real name was not Ivan, but rather it was Vladimir. He did not live in Smolensk, but in Moscow. It wasn’t wheat what he was growing, but rather it was corn, and the prize was for actually producing the smallest amount of it.

In our case, the story is similar. Research of the text and other related passages in ancient Jewish literature, demonstrates that some of Rabban Gamliel’s words were put there at a later time, and were probably associated with his name retroactively. Rabban Gamliel is himself quoted as saying some contradicting things later. Moreover, this amount of precision is nothing to be proud of, since it is the result of a simple calculation, which was known to the ancient Greeks as well as to the Babylonians. Similar results were found, in fact, in archaeological excavations such as those associated with the ancient astronomer Nabu-Rimanni, and dated more than half a millennium before Rabban Gamliel’s time.

Part of “The sages knew it all” game indeed tends to retroactively associate later masterpieces with earlier alleged authors. For example, we are used to link The Zohar book (that deals with the Jewish Kabbalah) with the name of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, from the Roman times, while in practice it was published in the 13th century in Spain, by a Jewish author named Moses De Leon.

(iv) Prophecy – a good example is the ‘She’ar Yashuv’ case mentioned above. There have been many similar attempts by followers of various religions to find clues in the Biblical text for their being on the right side. Muslim preachers, for example, may quote various uses of words similar to ‘Muhammad’, ignoring the fact that they simply mean “precious things” in Hebrew. Of-course, enthusiastic Christians find traces of Jesus there. Certain fragments of text from the book of Psalms were associated with names of Zionist leaders from the middle of the 20th century. The list of ridiculous manipulations does not seem to end.

Give yourself a task: Try and search for some current event of your choice in the text of the Bible. Given enough time and resources, you’ll be sure to find something. Some ancient clues (in the right state of mind) can easily be interpreted to predict your chosen event. Cute game!

A few additional remarks are worth mentioning:

First (and not very surprisingly), none of this funny hocus-pocus stuff has ever been used to actually predict the future. It has always been used to explain past events. As the famous saying of Niels Bohr (also quoted in the above mentioned Michael Shermer’s article): “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”

Second, the only real prophet we know about is the scientific approach. It can predict vast amount of things: Future weather, volcanic eruptions, the sex of an unborn child, the next lunar eclipse, and the odds of a sick person healing. None of our past mystical prophets ever came close to such ability.

Finally, even if we prove with high probability (which we didn’t) that some person in the 2nd century came to possess certain specific knowledge of our universe – why should we start praying to God or Jesus? Does this imply there’s a god who constantly keeps an eye on the deeds of our specific species on our specific planet?

It appears that once we really want to believe in something, nothing will stop us, including the truth.

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“Fools never die, they are merely replaced by others.” – Unknown

In February 1997, the Israeli Air Force suffered its worst disaster ever. Two transport helicopters carrying troops collided in mid-air over the village of She’ar Yashuv in northern Galilee, resulting in the death of 73 soldiers. The small country mourned, and a commission of inquiry was established to determine the cause of the disaster.

During the days that followed the disaster, several religious radio stations quoted Isaiah, chapter 7, verses 3-4:

“Then said the Lord unto Isaiah: ‘Go forth now to meet Ahaz, thou, and Shear-jashub thy son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool, in the highway of the fullers’ field; and say unto him: Keep calm, and be quiet; fear not, neither let thy heart be faint, because of these two tails of smoking firebrands …”

The phrase ‘Shear-jashub’ (pronounced She’ar Yashuv) is mentioned several times in the book of Isaiah – sometimes as the name of Isaiah’s son. In fact, the northern Israeli village was named after this reference. Still, it was easy for some to make the association between the name ‘She’ar Yashuv’, the two burnt helicopters, the phrase ‘two tails of smoking firebrands’ and the fact that Isaiah is considered a prophet.

Six years later, in February 2003, the world watched in horror as the space shuttle Columbia broke into burning pieces high in the sky. During the week after, the righteous were busy again rummaging the Bible for clues. It eventually came out in the shape of some other claptrap called Bible code sometimes also referred to as letter skips. It appears that if you take the current Hebrew version of the Bible, start somewhere in the middle of the 7th verse of Genesis (that talks about the sky), and skip 1822 letters at a time, you reveal the phrase ‘Death to Columbia’. Of-course, the discovery is made with computers, courtesy of simple software that you can write at home over night.

In this game of hocus-pocus there are typically two sides – the instructor and the audience. They share the enthusiasm of finding mystical clues in allegedly God-given texts. They typically also share the lack of basic knowledge in statistics, or at least have the will to ignore it.

The game is most effective when the instructor possesses good presentation skills, and the student is a teenager at the age of “asking yourself questions” about important stuff, such as life in general and the world around us. The game is even more effective when there is a large and efficient organization or system backing up and supporting the instructor, perhaps even with some public funding. The background and environment of the students have strong relation to the expected outcome of the game. In a Jewish environment, the student may become an Orthodox Jewish believer. In a Christian atmosphere, he or she may eventually become a good Christian. In an Islamic environment, the game has been known to produce faithful Muslims.

The game itself has various flavors. They may be used separately or together. Let’s examine some of the most common approaches to this mind-blunting game:

(i) Bible Code (also known as Letter Skips or ‘Dilugim’ in Hebrew) – in this version of the game, we use a trick similar to the one explained above with the Columbia disaster. We scan the Biblical text and locate combinations of letters (that have a fixed distance from one another) which make some sense. Then (this is the tricky part) we tune our mind to believe that it cannot be a coincidence. It must be some secret message coded into the text by the Almighty – how else did it get there?

In practice, fooling around with the text enough time – with any sufficiently long text – will yield almost any desired result. You can probably locate your own name (if it’s not too long or complicated) as well as obvious hints to most famous disasters in human history. Just ask Michael Drosnin, the author of The Bible Code. If you proceed to read the Skeptic column of the Scientific American, June 2003 issue – you’ll find an outstanding article named Codified Claptrap by Michael Shermer. There you can discover in other masterpieces, such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, some interesting messages coded using this method. You can also read about the discovery of messages denying the method of the Bible Code, found in the book Bible Code II itself.

By the way, if you continue with the Columbia trick above and count two additional letters, you’ll get ‘No death to Columbia’. It’s also interesting to note that opposing religious trends have been known to find conflicting messages in the Bible. Jesus seems to be a major star of this scheme, for example, unless of-course you’re an Orthodox Jew. The other interesting thing to note is that the Biblical text itself – according to recent research – has changed quite a lot, especially (but not only) during the first millennium BC.

(ii) Numerology and Gimatria – these are other tricks to fool around with letters and numbers. Gimatria is a Hebrew version of numerology, where each letter is assigned a numeric value, based on the decimal method of counting.

The trick here is to sum up the values of all the letters in a certain word, name or phrase. Then to sum up the values of some other word, name or phrase. If by some coincidence the result is the same, it means, of-course, that God meant it to be that way. So – there must be some relationship between the two.

Example: During the first Gulf War in 1991, some wise guy found that Saddam Hussein is equal to Amalek in Gimatria. ‘Amalek’ is the ancient enemy nation that was allegedly defeated by the ancient Israelites with some help from God (see Exodus, chapter 17). Apparently, this brilliant finding did not help at the time with the total defeat of Saddam Hussein. It also did not help to defeat the use of this funny method by Israeli spiritual leaders, such as Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who discovered that Evil Haman (book of Esther) is equal to Yosef Sarid (a left-wing Israeli parliament member, hated by ultra-Orthodox Jews). Ovadia Yosef himself, by the way, is equal to Talks of Nonsense, using this same trick.

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In a previous chapter, we already mentioned the wonderful logical statement “There’s no proof that there’s no God”. Perhaps this is the proper time to complement that statement with a well-known joke:

A couple went on vacation to a fishing resort up north. The husband liked to fish at the crack of dawn. The wife liked to read. One morning the husband returned after several hours of fishing and decided to take a short nap. Although she wasn’t familiar with the lake, the wife decided to take the boat. She rowed out a short distance, anchored, and returned to reading her book.

Along came the sheriff in his boat. He pulled up alongside her and said, “Good morning, Ma’am. What are you doing?”

“Reading my book,” she replied …as she thought to herself, “isn’t it obvious?”

“You’re in a restricted fishing area,” he informed her.

“But officer, I’m not fishing. Can’t you see that?”

“Yes, but you have all the equipment. I’ll have to take you in and write you up.”

“If you do that, I’ll have to charge you with rape,” snapped the irate woman.

“But, I haven’t even touched you,” groused the sheriff.

“Yes, that’s true,” she replied, “but you have all the equipment.”

And then, perhaps the most disturbing and truly amazing logical conflict is the one that deals with democracy and pluralism. It’s best described as “Help us to make you unable to help!”

1991-1992 was a rather tempestuous election time in Algeria. The Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), an Islamic fundamentalist organization intent on governing by Koranic law, made huge gains in the elections. The elections were considered fair, but still the fundamentalist victory made people think that future elections were not going to be so democratic. Eventually, the regime cancelled the elections that would have created a Muslim state.

In 1997, Mr. Israel Eichler (who later became an Israeli parliament member, in an Orthodox Jewish religious political party) was a regular guest on Israeli TV talk shows. On one particular show one of the discussions focused on a case of a large Orthodox Jewish family, which – for some reason – wanted to live within a closed secular community.

“You must accept them,” said Mr. Eichler, “you believe in pluralism!”

“Would you accept me and my family in your ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood?” asked one of the secular participants.

“Of-course not,” said Mr. Eichler, “we do not believe in pluralism!”

There’s no worse method of abusing the term “freedom of speech” than using it to promote religious ideas that encourage control of speech and thought. Similarly, there’s no worse method of abusing the term “democracy” than using it to promote a religious anti-democratic regime. It’s as fair as using your feet in a basketball game. Either you take part in the pluralistic game and obey its rules, or you don’t, but please choose your arena clearly!

In February 1999 there was a big ultra-Orthodox Jewish demonstration against the Israeli Supreme Court in Jerusalem. Hundreds of thousands of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) people demonstrated against the court’s recent decisions, which they seemed to dislike. In a nearby park, a much smaller demonstration was spontaneously formed, of non-religious people who protested against this mass abuse of democracy. Two of them held a big sign that read “Daddy, why didn’t you protest when it was still allowed?”

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“’Contrariwise,’ continued Tweedledee, ‘if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.’” – ‘Through the Looking-Glass’, Lewis Carroll

I had an argument recently with someone over the Internet. It had to do with the origins of the Hebrew names for God, as part of the overall argument about the origins of the Bible itself. “According to the Bible,” he said, “the name ‘Yehova’ was being used around 3500 BC. Therefore, the archaeological Canaanite findings from 800 BC are much more recent.” – He actually wrote ‘Ye-ho-va’ (including the hyphens) rather than ‘Yehova’, well, you know…

One of the most curious methods of arguing about the origins of the Biblical text, is to use the stories told by the text itself as some kind of absolute evidence. Of-course! It is God’s word! The Bible itself says so, end of argument!

Has something gone wrong with the inference mechanism in some people? It seems as if this issue was deeply imprinted within us during our religious education, up to the point where some of us simply ignore the circularity within this kind of logic. “It’s written in the Bible” has become to be considered hard evidence, regardless of the fact that the issue under dispute may be the integrity of the Biblical text itself.

Such circular logic is much more common than what you may think. In previous chapters we discussed the Jewish perception that “succeeding generations are said to lessen in spiritual power” as well as the Biblical text “…and thou shalt observe to do according to all that they shall teach thee.” (Deuteronomy, chapter 17, verse 10). God tells me I should do what the old sages say. In turn, they interpret these words as an order to follow my rabbi’s instructions. Thus the chain of “decreasing spiritual power” is followed all the way to me, instructing me to follow and obey the very concept of decreasing spiritual power, and teaching me to take the Biblical God for granted. In other words, as has already been written: God says I should listen to my rabbi, which in turn teaches me that everything God says is right. Hallelujah!

Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’, which has been mentioned in a previous chapter, is a masterpiece of satire that has appropriate scenes for many religious whims. This time we’ll quote the somewhat educational discussion between the reluctant Brian and his followers:

Follower: Hail Messiah!

Brian: I’m not the Messiah!

Follower: I say you are, Lord, and I should know. I’ve followed a few.

Crowd: Hail Messiah!

Brian: I’m not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand?! Honestly!

Girl: Only the true Messiah denies his divinity.

Brian: What?! Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the Messiah!

Crowd: He is! He is the Messiah!

Brian: Now, fuck off!

Follower: How shall we fuck off, O Lord?

Imagine yourself in the following situation: Someone sells you precious consultation advice on a topic that is very important for your future. The consultant also warns you that others may say totally different things about this topic. However, when they do so – it’s just a test, actually managed by the consultant him/herself. Wouldn’t you be a bit suspicious about such strange advice? What sort of chance does that give you or the other consultants?

In the same vein, here is what the book of Deuteronomy advises you in the beginning of chapter 13 (verses 2-4):

“If there arise in the midst of thee a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and he give thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spoke unto thee, saying: ‘Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them’; Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or unto that dreamer of dreams; For the Lord your God putteth you to proof, to know whether ye do love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.”

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The real studies discuss several possible sources for this wonderful story (which appears in various versions in the ancient Middle Eastern cultures). Among other things they mention some seasonal floods in ancient Mesopotamia, and recently – the option of this story originating from the formation of the Black Sea, not too many thousands of years ago.

This way or the other, let’s stick literally for a moment to the original Biblical version – a flood annihilating the entire living kingdom, sort of, you know.

“And all the high mountains that were under the whole heaven were covered”, insists the text (Genesis, chapter 7, verse 19). Hmmm… let’s attempt performing a rough calculation: In order to cover Mount Everest (the highest mountain), the sea surface had to rise by about 9 km from its “normal” level.

In the same school we also learned (hopefully) how to calculate the volume of a sphere: We multiply 4/3 by Pi and by the sphere radius raised to the power of 3. This is more or less equivalent to 4.2 times the radius raised to the power of 3. Let’s apply this calculaion to our Biblical flood.

Earth radius is about 6,400 km. The radius in the peak of the flood had to be, of-course, 9 km larger, in order to cover “all the high mountains that were under the whole heaven”. Hence, the volume of the water was roughly the difference between the volumes of the two spheres: 4.2 times (6,409 raised to the power of 3 minus 6,400 raised to the power of 3). A simple pocket calculator will tell us that we’re talking about more than 4.5 billion cubic km of water.

Is it a lot? A little? Let’s see: If we were to bring all that water in a “ball of water”, what would be the volume of that water ball? The equation is simple: 4.2 times what radius raised to the power of 3 would give us such a result? Those of you who graduated school successfully will come up with the result quickly: We need a water ball with a radius bigger than 1,000 km. In other words, a small “water star” nearly the diameter of our moon.

We also need, obviously, to get rid of all this water afterwards.

The rate of our flood is also, how shall we put it, somewhat problematic. 40 days of rain, according to the same story. 9 km of height. What’s the average rate? Did the math? Here is the result: More than 9,000 mm (350 inches) of rain per hour. This is more than double the amount of rain falling on the rainiest places on Earth during a whole year… A meter of rain every 6 minutes, a foot of rain every 2 minutes, everywhere…

Such rain rate, or even rates that are many times smaller, are theoretically impossible, not to mention the calculation which demonstrates that no wooden “ark” would hold under such enormous water pressure. But that’s not all.

Each liter of sea water contains about 35 grams of salt. This is approximately 0.3 pound of salt per each gallon of water. In order not to kill the fish of the sea (which Noah, for obvious reasons, did not put in his ark), one needs to preserve more-or-less the same level of water salinity. Another quick calculation: 4.5 billion cubic km of new water mean roughly 150 million of billions of tons of salt, which are more than 100 million cubic km of salt, in its common shape. This is enough to cover the whole area of the USA with 10 km (6.2 miles) of salt, or to cover the whole area of the State of Israel with unimaginable 5,000 km (3,100 miles) of salt.

We also need, obviously, to get rid of all this salt afterwards. Furthermore, salty sea water would kill all the fresh water fish, from lakes and rivers which would be covered by that flood.

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We can keep on discussing these strange topics, but what’s more important is the following: With a little bit of creativity, every difficult question described above can be answered. Where did the water come from? An asteroid made of ice came in touch with our atmosphere. Where did the water go to afterwards? Lightnings decomposed it into oxygen and hydrogen, which evaporated into space. And so on and so forth – try to compile some similar additional excuses yourself – it’s quite an amusing game.

And when these excuses become too difficult or too ridiculous, we can always summon our Lord to help: God generated a miracle and flattened the mountains, so they would be covered sooner, or created the water from nothing. After all he is almighty… Since the Biblical story categorizes the event as a sort of miracle under God’s supervision, then why bother explaining at all? Actually, why bother researching anything if we assume in advance that the world does not have clear rules and all things can happen at anytime? Who needs science when you can walk on water?

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Or maybe (just like in many other cases) we have here an ancient story blown out of proportions – what do you say?