The Book of Psalms: Bible Code
The Middle Verse
The reader may find it odd to find a page on the Holy Bible in a website dedicated to imaginary numbers and quantum physics, but the name 'Cataphysics' refers to cata meaning 'total' i.e. total physics, which includes both the physical and the metaphysical or what could be termed the 'spiritual'. And the Bible is certainly a spiritual book.
The question we have is; does the Bible contain a code? This question has been asked innumerable times before. The most famous investigation of its kind is investigated in a book, aptly named 'The Bible Code', which uses computers to count stepwise through Bible versus in an effort to reveal prophecies.
The focus of our work is a little different. For starters, we will only be looking at the Book of Psalms. Why the Book of Psalms? Because it is this book that contains some of the most interesting features of Bible chapters, at least from a numeric (and therefore mathematical) standpoint.
It has long been known that the shortest chapter in the Bible is Psalms 117. The longest chapter is Psalms 119 and the central chapter is 118. According to a website called 'Learnreligions.com' there are exactly 594 chapters preceding Psalm 118, and exactly 594 chapters after it. This is a total of 1,118 chapters. The website goes on to claim that the verse at the very center of the Bible is Psalms 118:8. The verse reads: "It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man." (NIV).
But is this really true?
After all, the verses weren't attributed to the Bible until thousands of years after it was first penned and there are differences between the numbering of various verses in various Bibles, which can often lead to some confusion. Could this be the case in this instance?
I don't know, but that is the argument being made on a website called 'prayerfoundation.org'. Judging by the name and the look of this site, it is definitely a Christian, so we can trust that they are not biased against the concepts presented in Learnreligions on any ideological grounds. Prayer Foundation points out that there are "594 chapters up to (and including) Psalm 116, and 594 Chapters from 118 on (including Psalm 118)". Therefore, it is obvious that Psalms 118 cannot be the central chapter of the Bible. Instead Psalms 117 is. Psalms 117 is also the shortest chapter, but it contains no middle verse, since it only contains two verses:
1. O praise the Lord, all ye nations: praise him all ye people.
2. For his merciful kindness is great toward us, and the truth of the Lord endureth forever. Praise ye the Lord.
The author on the Prayer Foundation website goes on to point out that there is an even number of verses in the KJV, so there cannot be a central verse. This is somewhat fallacious reasoning, as the central verse was - as I understand it - was the central verse of the Psalms 118 and not the central verse of the Bible as a whole. But, if Psalms 118 is not the central chapter of the Bible as a whole, then that point is moot. It is not stated explicitly on the learn-religion website if they are using the KJV for their calculations and in fact they clearly quote from the NIV. But I think we can posit that there is little difference between the two as far as chapter count is concerned.
This is not true of other donominations. For instance, if we look at how the chapters are arranged in Catholic Bibles we see that there are around 1334 chapters. That means again that there can be no central chapter in this instance. But that all depends on which verses you would like to count and which Apocryphal books you would like to include your canon. With this much ambiguity taking place, we can never know for certain what the final count of chapters and verse in the Bible is really supposed to be, or if there even is one.
However, there is something strangely coincidental about the Bible having these specific verses at the very centre of the work and this is likely not a coincidence. So, lets investigate it from the point of view that it is in fact deliberate and is therefore indicative of some sort of a code. By doing so, we may find something else of importance.
The Psalms Code
The Bible is a big book. In fact it is a collection of betwen 66 (Protestant) and 73 (Catholic) books depending on your denomination. I'm not going to count all of the chapters and verse in each of these books and luckily I don't have to as someone else has done it form me. On this excellent website called 'catholic-resources.org', we have a list of all 46 Old Testament (OT) books with their number of chapters and verses included. The same website also provides information for all of the New Testament (NT) books. As its name suggests it uses the Catholic count of 73 books and it also includes discrepancies, where a specific chapter may contain an extra verse. When I say an 'extra verse' I don't mean that passages have been added to or taken away, merely that they have been divided up in a different periodicity.
I've made an executive decision on when to include extra verse and when not to and I believe that I've exercised prudent judgement in doing so, with a mind to being as fair and accurate as possible. The end result is a dictionary of all the chapters and verse out of which the following graph was made:
The blue line here is the number of verses in each chapter. We can see Psalms 119 (the longest chapter) as the big spike near the centre of the graph. The red line is just the blue line reversed and finally the green line is simply the average. 'Corealistion' and 'Intergeneralisation' are simply my terms for these process, brought over from another project I did on Lunar Cycles
Notice that there are two spikes in the centre of the graph. This double spike is indicative of a bass boost in the a closed cavity. So, we can attempt to convert the information in the graph into a sound wave, increase the bass and listen back to it. The code to produce the sound file is as follows:
from scipy.io import wavfile
import numpy as np
fet = [(i + j + k) for i, j, k in zip(hen, hen2, hen3)]
mret = [fet] * 700
sampleRate = 43200
scaled = np.int16(fet/np.max(np.abs(fet)) * 32767)
wavfile.write('filename.wav', sampleRate, scaled)
After we have generated our sound file, we are going to need to clean it up and make it pleasant to listen to. The raw information from a computer just sounds like really fast and highpitched noise at a horrific volume, so it makes sense to lower it down, to slow it down, and to drop the frequency of the pitch. After that you will want to add a compressor and/or a leveller to bring ther volume back up. After that you can run it through a variety of effects to get the most out of it. My process was to repeat the intergeneralised file, which contains the average of all the chapters in the Bible numerous times and then begin a sliding pitch shift, so that the file can be heard in a number of different states.
The finished file can then be run through a spectrographer and exported as an mp3 or wav file. I used the freely available software known as Audactiy to create this sound file. The finished product sounds like this:
To clarify you are listening to the digital information of the number of verses in each section of the Bible, forwards and backwards and then averaged. The end result sounds like a train pulling into a station, or something to that effect. Asides from being an interesting and fun little project to undertake this has not been all that enlightening, as per any would-be Psalms Bible Code. However, someone may find this audio file useful in prayer or meditation, so it may not be a total loss.
The full code to generate the 'Psalms Bible Code' graph above.
import numpy.ma as ma
import plotly.plotly as py
numa = [18, 19]
a = numa[0]
psalc = [12, 11]
c = psalc[1]
tor = {'gen':[31, 25, 24, 26, 32, 22, 24, 22, 29, 32, 32, 20, 18, 24, 21, 16, 27, 33, 38, 18, 34, 24, 20, 67, 34, 35, 46, 22, 35, 43, 54, 33, 20, 31, 29, 43, 36, 30, 23, 23, 57, 38, 34, 34, 28, 34, 31, 22, 33, 26],
'exo' : [22, 25, 22, 31, 23, 30, 29, 28, 35, 29, 10, 51, 22, 31, 27, 36, 16, 27, 25, 26, 37, 30, 33, 18, 40, 37, 21, 43, 46, 38, 18, 35, 23, 35, 35, 38, 29, 31, 43, 38],
'lev' : [17, 16, 17, 35, 26, 23, 38, 36, 24, 20, 47, 8, 59, 57, 33, 34, 16, 30, 37, 27, 24, 33, 44, 23, 55, 46, 34],
'num' : [54, 34, 51, 49, 31, 27, 89, 26, 23, 36, 35, 16, 33, 45, 41, 35, 28, 32, 22, 29, 35, 41, 30, 25, a, 65, 23, 31, 39, 17, 54, 42, 56, 29, 34, 13],
'deut' : [46, 37, 29, 49, 33, 25, 26, 20, 29, 22, 32, 31, 19, 29, 23, 22, 20, 22, 21, 20, 23, 29, 26, 22, 19, 19, 26, 69, 28, 20, 30, 52, 29, 12],
'josh' : [18, 24, 17, 24, 15, 27, 26, 35, 27, 43, 23, 24, 33, 15, 63, 10, 18, 28, 51, 9, 45, 34, 16, 33],
'jud' : [36, 23, 31, 24, 31, 40, 25, 35, 57, 18, 40, 15, 25, 20, 20, 31, 13, 31, 30, 48, 25],
'ruth' : [22, 23, 18, 22],
'sam1' : [28, 36, 21, 22, 12, 21, 17, 22, 27, 27, 15, 25, 23, 52, 35, 23, 58, 30, 24, 42, 16, 23, 28, 23, 43, 25, 12, 25, 11, 31, 13],
'sam2' : [27, 32, 39, 12, 25, 23, 29, 18, 13, 19, 27, 31, 39, 33, 37, 23, 29, 32, 44, 26, 22, 51, 39, 25],
'kings1' : [53, 46, 28, 20, 32, 38, 51, 66, 28, 29, 43, 33, 34, 31, 34, 34, 24, 46, 21, 43, 29, 54],
'kings2' : [18, 25, 27, 44, 27, 33, 20, 29, 37, 36, 20, 22, 25, 29, 38, 20, 41, 37, 37, 21, 26, 20, 37, 20, 30],
'chron1' : [54, 55, 24, 43, 41, 66, 40, 40, 44, 14, 47, 41, 14, 17, 29, 43, 27, 17, 19, 8, 30, 19, 32, 31, 31, 32, 34, 21, 30],
'chron2' : [18, 17, 17, 22, 14, 42, 22, 18, 31, 19, 23, 16, 23, 14, 19, 14, 19, 34, 11, 37, 20, 12, 21, 27, 28, 23, 9, 27, 36, 27, 21, 33, 25, 33, 26, 23],
'ezra' : [11, 70, 13, 24, 17, 22, 28, 36, 15, 44],
'neh' : [11, 20, 38, 17, 19, 19, 72, 18, 37, 40, 36, 47, 31],
'tob' : [22, 14, 17, 21, 22, 18, 17, 21, 6, 14, 18, 22, 18, 15, ],
'judi' : [16, 28, 10, 15, 24, 21, 32, 36, 14, 23, 23, 20, 20, 19, 14, 25, ],
'est' : [22, 23, 15, 17, 14, 14, 10, 17, 32, 3, 17, 8, 30, 16, 24, 10],
'mac1': [63, 70, 59, 61, 68, 63, 50, 32, 73, 89, 74, 53, 53, 49, 41, 24],
'mac2' : [36, 32, 40, 50, 27, 31, 42, 36, 29, 38, 38, 46, 26, 46, 39, ],
'job' : [22, 13, 26, 21, 27, 30, 21, 22, 35, 22, 20, 25, 28, 22, 35, 22, 16, 21, 29, 29, 34, 30, 17, 25, 6, 14, 21, 28, 25, 31, 40, 22, 33, 37, 16, 33, 24, 41, 30, 32, 26, 17],
'psalm1' : [6, c, 9, 9, 13, 11, 18, 10, 21, 18, 7, 9, 6, 7, 5, 11, 15, 51, 15, 10, 14, 32, 6, 10, 22, 11, 14, 9, 11, 13, 25, 11, 22, 23, 28, 13, 40, 23, 14, 18, 14, 12, 5, 27, 18, 12, 10, 15, 21, 23],
'psalm2' : [21, 11, 7, 9, 24, 14, 12, 12, 18, 14, 9, 13, 12, 11, 14, 20, 8, 36, 37, 6, 24, 20, 28, 23, 11, 13, 21, 72, 13, 20, 17, 8, 19, 13, 14, 17, 7, 19, 53, 17, 16, 16, 5, 23, 11, 13, 12, 9, 9, 5],
'psalm3' : [8, 29, 22, 35, 45, 48, 43, 14, 31, 7, 10, 10, 9, 8, 18, 19, 2, 29, 176, 7, 8, 9, 4, 8, 5, 6, 5, 6, 8, 8, 3, 18, 3, 3, 21, 26, 9, 8, 24, 14, 10, 8, 12, 15, 21, 10, 20, 14, 9, 6],
'prov' : [33, 22, 35, 27, 23, 35, 27, 36, 18, 32, 31, 28, 25, 35, 33, 33, 28, 24, 29, 30, 31, 29, 35, 34, 28, 28, 27, 28, 27, 33, 31],
'ecc' : [18, 26, 22, 17, 19, 12, 29, 17, 18, 20, 10, 14],
'sol' : [17, 17, 11, 16, 16, 12, 14, 14],
'wiz' : [16, 24, 19, 20, 23, 25, 30, 21, 18, 21, 26, 27, 19, 31, 19, 29, 21, 25, 22],
'sur' : [29, 18, 30, 31, 17, 37, 36, 19, 18, 30, 34, 18, 25, 27, 20, 28, 27, 33, 26, 30, 28, 27, 27, 31, 25, 20, 30, 26, 28, 25, 31, 24, 33, 26, 24, 27, 30, 34, 35, 30, 24, 25, 35, 23, 26, 20, 25, 25, 16, 29, 30, ],
'isi' : [31, 22, 26, 6, 30, 13, 25, 23, 20, 34, 16, 6, 22, 32, 9, 14, 14, 7, 25, 6, 17, 25, 18, 23, 12, 21, 13, 29, 24, 33, 9, 20, 24, 17, 10, 22, 38, 22, 8, 31, 29, 25, 28, 28, 25, 13, 15, 22, 26, 11, 23, 15, 12, 17, 13, 12, 21, 14, 21, 22, 11, 12, 19, 11, 25, 24],
'jer' : [19, 37, 25, 31, 31, 30, 34, 23, 25, 25, 23, 17, 27, 22, 21, 21, 27, 23, 15, 18, 14, 30, 40, 10, 38, 24, 22, 17, 32, 24, 40, 44, 26, 22, 19, 32, 21, 28, 18, 16, 18, 22, 13, 30, 5, 28, 7, 47, 39, 46, 64, 34, ],
'lam' : [22, 22, 66, 22, 22],
'bar' : [22, 35, 38, 37, 9, 72],
'eze' : [28, 10, 27, 17, 17, 14, 27, 18, 11, 22, 25, 28, 23, 23, 8, 63, 24, 32, 14, 44, 37, 31, 49, 27, 17, 21, 36, 26, 21, 26, 18, 32, 33, 31, 15, 38, 28, 23, 29, 49, 26, 20, 27, 31, 25, 24, 23, 35],
'dan' : [21, 49, 100, 34, 30, 29, 28, 27, 27, 21, 45, 13, 64, 42],
'jos' : [9, 25, 5, 19, 15, 11, 16, 14, 17, 15, 11, 15, 15, 10],
'joel' : [20, 27, 5, 21],
'amo' : [15, 16, 15, 13, 27, 14, 17, 14, 15],
'obi' : [21],
'jon' : [16, 11, 10, 11, ],
'mic' : [16, 13, 12, 14, 14, 16, 20, ],
'nah' : [14, 14, 19, ],
'hab' : [17, 20, 19],
'zeph' : [18, 15, 20],
'hag' : [15, 23],
'zec' :[17, 17, 10, 14, 11, 15, 14, 23, 17, 12, 17, 14, 9, 21],
'mal' : [14, 17, 24],
'Matt' : [28 , 25 , 23 , 17 , 25 , 48 , 34 , 29 , 34 , 38 , 42 , 30 , 50 , 58 , 36 , 39 , 28 , 27 , 35 , 30 , 34 , 46 , 46 , 39 , 51 , 46 , 75 , 66 , 20 ],
'Mark' : [16 , 45 , 28 , 35 , 41 , 43 , 56 , 37 , 38 , 50 , 52 , 33 , 44 , 37 , 72 , 47 , 20],
'Luke' : [24 , 80 , 52 , 38 , 44 , 39 , 49 , 50 , 56 , 62 , 42 , 54 , 59 , 35 , 35 , 32 , 31 , 37 , 43 , 48 , 47 , 38 , 71 , 56 , 53],
'John' : [21 , 51 , 25 , 36 , 54 , 47 , 71 , 53 , 59, 41 , 42 , 57 , 50 , 38 , 31 , 27 , 33 , 26 , 40 , 42 , 31 , 25],
'Acts' : [28 , 26 , 47 , 26 , 37 , 42 , 15 , 60 , 40 , 43 , 48 , 30 , 25 , 52 , 28 , 41 , 40 , 34 , 28, 40, 38 , 40 , 30 , 35 , 27 , 27 , 32 , 44 , 31],
'Rom' : [16 , 32 , 29 , 31 , 25 , 21 , 23 , 25 , 39 , 33 , 21 , 36 , 21 , 14 , 23 , 33 , 27],
'Cor1' : [16 , 31 , 16 , 23 , 21 , 13 , 20 , 40 , 13 , 27 , 33 , 34 , 31 , 13 , 40 , 58 , 24],
'Cor2' : [13 , 24 , 17 , 18 , 18 , 21 , 18 , 16 , 24 , 15 , 18 , 33 , 21 , 13],
'Gal' : [6 , 24 , 21 , 29 , 31 , 26 , 18],
'Eph' : [6 , 23 , 22 , 21 , 32 , 33 , 24],
'Phil' : [4 , 30 , 30 , 21 , 23],
'Col' : [4 , 29 , 23 , 25 , 18],
'Thess1' : [5 , 10 , 20 , 13 , 18 , 28],
'Thess2' : [3 , 12 , 17 , 18],
'Tim1' : [6 , 20 , 15 , 16 , 16 , 25 , 21],
'Tim2' : [4 , 18 , 26 , 17 , 22],
'Titus' : [3 , 16 , 15 , 15],
'Phlm' : [1 , 25],
'Heb' : [13 , 14 , 18 , 19 , 16 , 14 , 20 , 28 , 13 , 28 , 39 , 40 , 29 , 25],
'James' : [5 , 27 , 26 , 18 , 17 , 20],
'Pet1' : [5 , 25 , 25 , 22 , 19 , 14],
'Pet2' : [3 , 21 , 22 , 18],
'John1' : [5 , 10 , 29 , 24 , 21 , 21],
'John2' : [1 , 13],
'John3' : [1 , 15],
'Jude' : [1 , 25],
'Rev' : [22 , 20 , 29 , 22 , 11 , 14 , 17 , 17 , 13 , 21 , 11 , 19 , 17 , 18 , 20 , 8 , 21 , 18 , 24 , 21 , 15 , 27 , 21]}
den = [tor.values()]
zen = [i for c in den for i in c]
hen = [i for c in zen for i in c]
ghen = sum(hen)
hen2 = hen[::-1]
hen3 = [(x+y)//2 for x,y in zip(hen, hen2)]
print(hen3)
gin={}
gin['trace1']=hen
gin['trace2']=hen2
gin['trace3']=hen3
data=[]
for i in gin.values():
data.append(dict(y=i, type='scatter', mode='lines')),
# Create trace
figure = dict(data= data)
# Plot and embed in ipython notebook!
py.iplot(figure, filename='basic-tor3')