the purim revelation
The question you need to answer is:
What is a natural explanation of how a text written over 2000 years ago has an anomaly in it, in exactly the relevant part of the text, which points to the exact year, that exactly the same thing happened, to exactly the same amount of people, for exactly the same crime, the only other time in recorded human history?
What is a natural explanation of how a text written over 2000 years ago has an anomaly in it, in exactly the relevant part of the text, which points to the exact year, that exactly the same thing happened, to exactly the same amount of people, for exactly the same crime, the only other time in recorded human history?
One of the oldest known copies of Megillat Esther from 15th Century: British Museum
The Talmud and the early works of Kabbalah refer to the 6 millennia of existence from the birth of Adam to the final date of the coming of the Messiah. According to the Jewish calendar we are currently in the year 5780 - the 780th year of the 6th and final millennium. (Just like in secular counting the 18th century refers to the 1700’s and the 20th century refers to the 1900’s). That means that if this is true, we just have 220 years left at most! Very exciting. But how could we know if the books of the Jewish people are speaking the truth? Is there anything in them that no human being could have known?
Check this out.
The Megillat Esther (Scroll of Esther) which we read on Purim, tells the story of how an evil man named Haman, plotted to kill all the Jews. As usual, we end up foiling the plot and making a festival about it. One part of the text tells us that in winning the war we killed the ten sons of Haman. Immediately after that, the King asks Queen Esther what her request is, telling her she may ask for anything she likes. (Megillat Esther 9:12-14).
Her completely absurd request (rather than half the kingdom, or being allowed to return to Israel or a weekly massage) was that the sons of Haman, who were already dead, should be hanged ‘machar’ - tomorrow. This makes no sense, seems rather vindictive and even goes against Jewish law. This was pretty puzzling to our sages who suggest that tomorrow doesn’t only mean the next day (we see in the megillah they were actually hanged the next day- possibly as a deterrent, although the war was over??) but it also refers to some time in the future. (Tanchuma, Bo 13, Rashi, Shemot 13:14.)
A close look at the text of the megillah shows a startling thing. We find an anomaly in the list of the names of the ten sons of Haman. There are three very small letters - a taf, a shin and a zayin. (See in the image the 2nd, 8th and last line). In Hebrew numerology the letter values add up to 707. (Taf is 400, Shin is 300 and Zayin is 7). These are the only small letters in the whole text. We also find in the names an unusually large Vav (last line) - which in Hebrew numerology equals 6. Although the commentaries often offer explanations of big and small letters in the Tanach, no suggestion is ever given for the small letters in the megillah.
If we take the big letter as referring to the big unit - millennium - and the small letters as referring to the small units - years - we see that the anomaly points to the 707th year of the 6th millennium. In secular dating that falls out as 1946.
On October 16th 1946, ten nazis were hanged after being sentenced at the Nuremberg trials. The trials actually ended in June which would have been the 706th year of the 6th millennium, but the execution kept getting pushed off until they finally took place after Rosh Hashanah, the next Jewish year - 707.
So the facts we have in front of us are that an anomaly in exactly the relevant part of the text (the names of the sons) points to the exact year, that exactly the same number of men (there were actually 24 nazis accused, yet only 10 ended up being hanged) were dealt with in exactly the same way (they could have been hanged, shot, poisoned or electric chaired), for exactly the same crime the only other recorded time in human history, after the heroine of the story made the absurd request that it happen again in the future.
Just in case that isn’t mind blowing enough we see that on top of this
1. October 16th 1946 was the Jewish festival of Hoshanah Rabbah, of which the Zohar says -
"On the seventh day of the Sukkot festival, Hoshana Rabbah, the judgement of the nations of the world is finalized ... Judgments are aroused and executed on that day." (Vayikra 316)
2. The Talmud (Megillah 6a) mentions a country called Germamia of Edom which has 300 crowned princes, compared to 365 chieftains in Rome. It says that if the evil man from there goes forth, he will conquer the entire world. It’s astounding to note that at the time the Gemorrah was written
3. The midrash teaches that Haman’s daughter committed suicide just before the other children were hanged - just like Goering commited suicide the day before the hangings of the rest of the Nazis.
4. To top it all off, in a startling revelation, a Newsweek Magazine eyewitness report of the hangings by Kingsbury Smith of the International News Service dated October 28th 1946, shares about the last nazi to be hanged -
“…Julius Streicher made his melodramatic appearance at 2:12 a.m.
As the guards stopped him at the bottom of the steps for identification formality he uttered his piercing scream: 'Heil Hitler!' The shriek sent a shiver down my back. … .
Streicher was swung suddenly to face the witnesses and glared at them.
Suddenly, he screamed, 'Purim Fest 1946.'
An extraordinarily absurd thing for a Nazi to shout out as his final words!
So the facts are that we have a text written over 2000 years ago, with an anomaly in it, in exactly the relevant part of the text, which in its most simple reading points to the exact year in which exactly the same thing happened, to exactly the same number of people, for exactly the same crime, the only other time in recorded human history. Not only that, we saw that the text itself, in that relevant place, calls for the event to happen again in the future.
SOME OBJECTIONS AND WHY THEY DON'T WORK ...
Probably the best attempt I've seen is Ephraim Rubin's well written refutation. Apart from the points that I have already clarified for him in this article (and that even if they were true don't damage the main evidence at all), he mentions as his main point that there are in fact two other less common versions of the text (I haven't seen these or verified this, but I'll take his word for it). The Soncino Printing House one has an extra small taf and the Yemenite one has no small zayin – which obviously changes the predicted year. So how do which know which one is the original?
Just a little bit of thought will show you that this point does not invalidate or weaken the evidence in any significant way.
(For a start, the fact that one of only three texts got the exact date, when exactly the same thing happened the only other time in recorded history is still statistically highly improbable and significant. If there were, for example, 500 versions of the text with different years it would not be so impressive that one of them got it right. The probability that one in only three versions got it right is still statistically highly significant).
Logically it's very obvious that of the three texts, the one we most commonly use is the most valid one.
As an example - if 100 communities around the world have the tradition to put on tefilin, and 98 of them wear black tefillin, one wears green ones and one wears pink ones – it’s pretty clear what the valid tradition is and who got it wrong. All the printing presses apart from Soncino and all the communities apart from the Yemenite one have the same text with the correct date in it. This is pretty clear evidence of which is the correct and original text.
On top of this -
- all the oldest copies of the actual scroll, dating from before the establishment of the Soncino printing house have the three small letters, strongly suggesting that Soncino printing house made a mistake. (I believe that Soncino have actually corrected their original mistake now)
- that leaves us with two possibilities, one found in a very small minority of texts from Yemen which has the wrong date and one found in 98% of the scrolls and texts we have , (including the oldest known copy of the scroll) which have the right date.
That means that there is no question as to what the original text was.
OTHER REFUTATIONS:
Although not significant challenges, just for completeness, I'm sharing Failed Messiah's arguments.
a) If Esther could see the future, she should have asked for Gd to save the 6 million Jews rather than hang the 10 Nazis.
A: No-one claims that Esther knew anything about the future, the holocaust or even what the small letters and big letters were referring to. She just wrote down the words as dictated to her by her Divine Inspiration.
b) There were really 24 Nazis who were in some way involved in the trial, so Failed suggests that means Haman should have had 24 sons. A: This just makes it EVEN MORE remarkable. This means that there it was at least a 1/24 chance of the actual number of Nazis hanged in 1946 being exactly the same as the number of Haman's sons who were hanged. If 24 were involved in the trial, how is it that only 10, the exact relevant number, were hanged?
SO WHAT DO PEOPLE WHO DON'T WANT TO ACCEPT WHAT THIS EVIDENCE POINTS TO HAVE TO RELY ON?
The thing that everyone eventually has to fall back on is the claim that this is just a coincidence. They claim, quite rightly, that it is highly likely that you will find coincidences in any text, especially one the size of the Tanach. Even on the front page of the New York Times and the home page of this website, you are likely to find some hidden ‘codes.’ There is something called Law of Truly Large Numbers which demonstrates that numerological coincidences are in fact common and can be manipulated to produce preconceived results. (see this great article on the subject).
Our case if different for 2 reasons:
So to sum up as we started:
(sorry to be repetitive but this is pretty important)
To refute this evidence you have to give me a natural explanation of how a text written over 2000 years ago has an anomaly in it, in exactly the relevant part of the text, which points to the exact year, that exactly the same thing happened, to exactly the same amount of people, for exactly the same crime, the only other time in recorded human history.
Check this out.
The Megillat Esther (Scroll of Esther) which we read on Purim, tells the story of how an evil man named Haman, plotted to kill all the Jews. As usual, we end up foiling the plot and making a festival about it. One part of the text tells us that in winning the war we killed the ten sons of Haman. Immediately after that, the King asks Queen Esther what her request is, telling her she may ask for anything she likes. (Megillat Esther 9:12-14).
Her completely absurd request (rather than half the kingdom, or being allowed to return to Israel or a weekly massage) was that the sons of Haman, who were already dead, should be hanged ‘machar’ - tomorrow. This makes no sense, seems rather vindictive and even goes against Jewish law. This was pretty puzzling to our sages who suggest that tomorrow doesn’t only mean the next day (we see in the megillah they were actually hanged the next day- possibly as a deterrent, although the war was over??) but it also refers to some time in the future. (Tanchuma, Bo 13, Rashi, Shemot 13:14.)
A close look at the text of the megillah shows a startling thing. We find an anomaly in the list of the names of the ten sons of Haman. There are three very small letters - a taf, a shin and a zayin. (See in the image the 2nd, 8th and last line). In Hebrew numerology the letter values add up to 707. (Taf is 400, Shin is 300 and Zayin is 7). These are the only small letters in the whole text. We also find in the names an unusually large Vav (last line) - which in Hebrew numerology equals 6. Although the commentaries often offer explanations of big and small letters in the Tanach, no suggestion is ever given for the small letters in the megillah.
If we take the big letter as referring to the big unit - millennium - and the small letters as referring to the small units - years - we see that the anomaly points to the 707th year of the 6th millennium. In secular dating that falls out as 1946.
On October 16th 1946, ten nazis were hanged after being sentenced at the Nuremberg trials. The trials actually ended in June which would have been the 706th year of the 6th millennium, but the execution kept getting pushed off until they finally took place after Rosh Hashanah, the next Jewish year - 707.
So the facts we have in front of us are that an anomaly in exactly the relevant part of the text (the names of the sons) points to the exact year, that exactly the same number of men (there were actually 24 nazis accused, yet only 10 ended up being hanged) were dealt with in exactly the same way (they could have been hanged, shot, poisoned or electric chaired), for exactly the same crime the only other recorded time in human history, after the heroine of the story made the absurd request that it happen again in the future.
Just in case that isn’t mind blowing enough we see that on top of this
1. October 16th 1946 was the Jewish festival of Hoshanah Rabbah, of which the Zohar says -
"On the seventh day of the Sukkot festival, Hoshana Rabbah, the judgement of the nations of the world is finalized ... Judgments are aroused and executed on that day." (Vayikra 316)
2. The Talmud (Megillah 6a) mentions a country called Germamia of Edom which has 300 crowned princes, compared to 365 chieftains in Rome. It says that if the evil man from there goes forth, he will conquer the entire world. It’s astounding to note that at the time the Gemorrah was written
- There was no such place as Germany
- That historians say that in the Middle Ages ‘Germany remained a crazy patchwork of some 300 states’ (WL Shirer: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich)
- The Gemorrah connects Germamia to Rome - the main ally of the Nazis.
- That it speaks of an evil man going forth from Germamia trying to destroy the whole world.
3. The midrash teaches that Haman’s daughter committed suicide just before the other children were hanged - just like Goering commited suicide the day before the hangings of the rest of the Nazis.
4. To top it all off, in a startling revelation, a Newsweek Magazine eyewitness report of the hangings by Kingsbury Smith of the International News Service dated October 28th 1946, shares about the last nazi to be hanged -
“…Julius Streicher made his melodramatic appearance at 2:12 a.m.
As the guards stopped him at the bottom of the steps for identification formality he uttered his piercing scream: 'Heil Hitler!' The shriek sent a shiver down my back. … .
Streicher was swung suddenly to face the witnesses and glared at them.
Suddenly, he screamed, 'Purim Fest 1946.'
An extraordinarily absurd thing for a Nazi to shout out as his final words!
So the facts are that we have a text written over 2000 years ago, with an anomaly in it, in exactly the relevant part of the text, which in its most simple reading points to the exact year in which exactly the same thing happened, to exactly the same number of people, for exactly the same crime, the only other time in recorded human history. Not only that, we saw that the text itself, in that relevant place, calls for the event to happen again in the future.
SOME OBJECTIONS AND WHY THEY DON'T WORK ...
Probably the best attempt I've seen is Ephraim Rubin's well written refutation. Apart from the points that I have already clarified for him in this article (and that even if they were true don't damage the main evidence at all), he mentions as his main point that there are in fact two other less common versions of the text (I haven't seen these or verified this, but I'll take his word for it). The Soncino Printing House one has an extra small taf and the Yemenite one has no small zayin – which obviously changes the predicted year. So how do which know which one is the original?
Just a little bit of thought will show you that this point does not invalidate or weaken the evidence in any significant way.
(For a start, the fact that one of only three texts got the exact date, when exactly the same thing happened the only other time in recorded history is still statistically highly improbable and significant. If there were, for example, 500 versions of the text with different years it would not be so impressive that one of them got it right. The probability that one in only three versions got it right is still statistically highly significant).
Logically it's very obvious that of the three texts, the one we most commonly use is the most valid one.
As an example - if 100 communities around the world have the tradition to put on tefilin, and 98 of them wear black tefillin, one wears green ones and one wears pink ones – it’s pretty clear what the valid tradition is and who got it wrong. All the printing presses apart from Soncino and all the communities apart from the Yemenite one have the same text with the correct date in it. This is pretty clear evidence of which is the correct and original text.
On top of this -
- all the oldest copies of the actual scroll, dating from before the establishment of the Soncino printing house have the three small letters, strongly suggesting that Soncino printing house made a mistake. (I believe that Soncino have actually corrected their original mistake now)
- that leaves us with two possibilities, one found in a very small minority of texts from Yemen which has the wrong date and one found in 98% of the scrolls and texts we have , (including the oldest known copy of the scroll) which have the right date.
That means that there is no question as to what the original text was.
OTHER REFUTATIONS:
Although not significant challenges, just for completeness, I'm sharing Failed Messiah's arguments.
a) If Esther could see the future, she should have asked for Gd to save the 6 million Jews rather than hang the 10 Nazis.
A: No-one claims that Esther knew anything about the future, the holocaust or even what the small letters and big letters were referring to. She just wrote down the words as dictated to her by her Divine Inspiration.
b) There were really 24 Nazis who were in some way involved in the trial, so Failed suggests that means Haman should have had 24 sons. A: This just makes it EVEN MORE remarkable. This means that there it was at least a 1/24 chance of the actual number of Nazis hanged in 1946 being exactly the same as the number of Haman's sons who were hanged. If 24 were involved in the trial, how is it that only 10, the exact relevant number, were hanged?
SO WHAT DO PEOPLE WHO DON'T WANT TO ACCEPT WHAT THIS EVIDENCE POINTS TO HAVE TO RELY ON?
The thing that everyone eventually has to fall back on is the claim that this is just a coincidence. They claim, quite rightly, that it is highly likely that you will find coincidences in any text, especially one the size of the Tanach. Even on the front page of the New York Times and the home page of this website, you are likely to find some hidden ‘codes.’ There is something called Law of Truly Large Numbers which demonstrates that numerological coincidences are in fact common and can be manipulated to produce preconceived results. (see this great article on the subject).
Our case if different for 2 reasons:
- This isn’t a case of simple numerology. This is a case where there is an ANomALy - large and small letters that stand out against the other letters, and appear in exactly the relevant part of the text. Seeing as it involves an anomaly in the size of the letters, it doesn’t fall into the realm of simple numerology as does for example the koran code. It has a whole extra factor beyond just the numbers. For example: The article on truly large numbers (linked above) writes that "At a typical football game with 50,000 fans, most fans are likely to share their birthday with about 135 others in attendance." Amazing fact and definitely a coincidence. However if that birth date appeared in different coloured writing on page 135 of the match day programme, or they were all sitting next to each other, you be hard stretched to say that was a coincidence.
- Although coincidences are common, it would be a huge stretch to call this a coincidence. The statistical probability of these letters appearing in the text as a mistake is astronomically absurd, especially when you take into account all the other coincidences (Hoshana Rabbah, Goering suicide, Germany in the Talmud) that come along with it. The claim that something is a coincidence is always weak and intellectually unsatisfying for the simple fact that there is no basis for the claim apart from the fact that the evidence goes against their preconceived conclusion. Ask them "How do you know it's a coincidence? What is that based on? What's your evidence for claiming it's a coincidence?" Really there is no evidence. The only honest answer they can give is that they don't like the more likely conclusion that the evidence points to. They made up their mind before seeing the evidence, and on seeing it don't want to change their belief, so fall back on coincidence. It's not intellectually honest. When people persist and keep arguing that it is really not unlikely to find something like this in a text - I ask them to show me any other example of this in any other text ever written ie a text where there is some sort of anomaly on top of the statistically improbable numerical outcome. No-one has ever showed me one yet – which means it isn’t at all common and likely.
So to sum up as we started:
(sorry to be repetitive but this is pretty important)
To refute this evidence you have to give me a natural explanation of how a text written over 2000 years ago has an anomaly in it, in exactly the relevant part of the text, which points to the exact year, that exactly the same thing happened, to exactly the same amount of people, for exactly the same crime, the only other time in recorded human history.