Mene, Mene, Tekel...

I started looking for all the words in the handwriting in the ordinary way – searching for any ELS of all 15 letters. As is to be expected, they do not appear at all in the Torah. So I had the options to include the book(s) following the Torah in the research or to reduce the number of letters. I whole-heartedly rely on the Power of God and firmly believe that His Wisdom is hidden in the Torah so I chose the second alternative. The first reasonable step was to cut out the 6-letter upharsin. This step seemed reasonable to me because the writing consists of three clearly distinguishable parts. This is confirmed by Daniels’s own interpretation. Even if it was written as a continuous string or any other ciphered manner, the prophet considered it in three steps.

But even so, the 9-letter string mene, mene, tekel does not occur in the Torah. On the other hand, the 6-letter mene mene (מ נ א מ נ א ) appeared as many as 2,208 times. The lowest skip appeared to be negative: -10. The lowest positive skip is 20. I tried with these skips and all skips up to 100 (8 skips altogether) as well as with skips that are close to any number multiple to the  matrix ELS: 14,965 but failed to obtain a siginificant, satisfying result. So the only way to obtain something sensible was to look for a specific pattern of appearance – figure(s) shaped in special manner(s) within the matrix. But tekel is a 3-letter word, for which there is a normal prospect to occur quite a number of times even in a relatively small matrix. I checked for upharsin alone, which occurs 57 times but there was no occasion that fits even the loosest matrix requirements. I had to give up.

I had either to reject the ‘hypothesis’ or to blame my own self for not searching properly. I decided that it is I who is wrong. I felt that the handwriting must be there but I hadn’t followed the right path. The example with Jesus was a good lesson to me how easily an item could be overlooked even at a very low skip. I was debating in my mind where is my fault when, suddenly, an idea dawned on me. I imagined the letters of the first term as the mortise and tenon used by carpenters when dovetailing furniture or the left and right hand’s fingers in clasped hands. Indeed, because the short word is repeated twice, instead of writing the words in a sequence, they could be written in alternate order of each corresponding letter. Thus, the central dogma of the Bible code, ELS (Equidistant Letter Sequence), will be adhered to! In other words, instead of searching for

מ נ א מ נ א

we will look for

מ מ נ נ א א

Due to the new symmetry, the words will ‘go together’ to the same extent as when written in a sequence: the skip between any two blue letters is equal to the skip between the red letters and all 6 letters will be like the cogged ends of the adjoining boards of a drawer. The only difference is that the skip between the letters within a word will be twice as large as the skip in the ‘normal’ arrangement but the interdependence between the letters will be kept.

I believed that my speculation was reasonable. I managed to find AD 2006 encoded in the Torah through an appropriate modification of its expression in Hebrew but by no means violation of the established rules. And there, in a less than 40?21 matrix, was ‘waiting’ one of the most mysterious long-term prophecies in the Old Testament. It was logical to expect that the other prophecy consisting of few letters, famous and not less mysterious but even more discussed throughout the ages, is present in a certain form thereabout. It is more concrete in the details of its fulfillment and is typically connected to Babylon. And we know that in the Book of Revelation, the Latter Days’ world is likened to the falling Babylon...

The overall number of occurrences of the rearranged string of letters appeared to be practically the same: 2,238. To my astonishment, the lowest ELS, 7, proved to be very close to the date 2,006 (ת ש ר ק ת ש ר ק ו ), to the right of it, and forming a reasonable matrix. Having such a find in hand I had nothing else to do but to start looking for tekel (ת ק ל ) accordingly. By ‘accordingly’ I mean searching the same line of the text for tekel further to the left but as close by as possible, at a positive skip of approximately same value. For this purpose, I checked the first tav (ת ) to the left after the last aleph. Curiously, it appeared exactly 7 places away. Then I looked for the first qof (ק ) to the left of this tav and checked whether it forms tekel with a lamed (ל ). And it did – at skip 12! See Figure 2. The whole text already intersects the stem.

So I had no doubt that the writing on the wall is encoded pointing to AD 2006 as a crucial period of time. Next I had to discover the third term of the handwriting: upharsin. At this point, I must let the reader know that the reasoning henceforth is based on my personal belief that Jesus of Nazareth is THE Messiah. However, due to my insufficient knowledge of Hebrew I may have missed a better solution. Also, I may have aroused suspicions of being biased. Therefore, I would highly appreciate any other opinion on the third part of the handwriting.

A Hunt for a Term

At this stage, the only absolutely clear thing to me was the fact that the third term cannot appear practically in its original form, upharsin (ו פ ר ס י ן ). The lowest skip of upharsin in the Torah is -215. So, even if it covered the line with the first two terms, the whole matrix would extend to over 1,000 columns. Then I decided to try with the word used by Daniel in the interpretation: peres (פ ר ס ). I checked it for skips up to ±20. The number of occurrences was 95. I examined the distribution. The item was spread approximately uniformly along the text. Curiously enough, one of the relatively big leaps – over 10,000 places - was over a part of the text where, near its middle, was the line in our matrix! Then I tried at skips up to ±30. Out of 131 occurrences, the nearest peres, at skip 29, was some 2,000 places away from the items in our matrix. Looking for peres in another line or as a vertical occurrence seemed to me useless. It hardly could be obtained a significant intersection with such a vast number of occurrences. I felt as if the experiment was telling me: ‘No, the answer is not here. Try something else!’

I had to pause and weigh up the found. Everything in the matrix was interlinked. Hence, the directions for the search for the third term should be hidden in the items already revealed. As a rule, we always start from the simplest and move towards the more complicated. The first and evident fact is that the number of letters in mene mene tekel (blue and green ovals) matches that of 2006 (red ovals): 9. Was this a validation that one of the critical years of the kingdom of men is encoded with 9 Hebrew letters? Both mene and tekel refer to measuring and numbering. May be the key has something to do with numbers?

I reflected on the Book of Revelation. There, John refers to the Latter Days’ world as Babylon the Great. So what is the link between the ancient and the modern Babylon in terms of numbers? The sexagesimal number system! This is a number system of base 60. Its origins are in ancient Mesopotamia and it survived up to our own times. Although we use the decimal system almost everywhere (computers use their own, binary, system of 0’s and 1’s), we still have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour and 360 degrees – 6 times 60 - in a circle. Probably the latter number is defined as the number that is closest to the number of the days in a year (the exact number is about 365.28 days) and is practicable for calculations. This practicality is due to the fact that 60, and hence 360, is a number that is divisible by many integers: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. 360 is divisible also by 40, 45, 60, 90, 120, and 180. We should keep in mind that a prophetic year both in the Old and the New Testament interpretations is agreed by most scholars to consist of 360 days.

I counted the number of columns starting with the first mem and ending with the qof in the stem. It turned out to be 60. The only other calculation coming up to my mind was the multiplication of 60 by 9 – the number discussed above. 60?9 = 540. I didn’t notice then anything significant in the latter number. Not yet.

I was surprised by the fact that the tav ‘continued’ the double mene at the same skip: 7. I checked the newly formed string מ מ נ נ א א ת . It appears exactly 100 times in the Torah. Is it just another hint that numbers will play a crucial role in the code-breaking? And is it also a hint that the number of occurrences will matter? There was an even more surprising fact. There are only 3 occurrences of this letter sequence in the Torah at skips up to ±1,000. The next-to-the-lowest skip was found to be negative: -104. None of them forms the combination shown in Figure 2 at practical ELS-s in the respective direction – I have checked the skips up to over 100. So we may conclude that there is a very low probability that this commensurable tekel ‘extension’ of the double mene ELS appears by chance. Most probably they go together as a code. Also, there is a ת ק ל encoded with a skip multiple of the ‘basic’ matrix ELS 14,965 (44,895) that intersects at the qof with the tekel just found and forming a symmetrical design unnoticed during my earlier research (blue squares, see Figure 3). This fact reinforces, in my opinion, the impression that we are on the right way.

But if it is a code, then the third term should be somewhere nearby. In order to keeping the proportion, it should be at a rather low skip. Also, the terms disclosed so far require a positive ELS. But what criterion of search is to be established? In the writing itself, it had a dual meaning referring both to the Persians and to division. But we know that in the Latter Days the kingdom of men will be destroyed and the Kingdom of God will be established instead. So, definitely, the kingdom will not be given to Persians! Therefore, it is useless even to try to find the third word as it was written on the wall. What is more, it must not be there! And it is not. On the other hand, historically, the division did not appear to be the typical event befalling Babylonian empire. It has been its destruction. Babylon just disappeared as a political power in this fatal night. If there has been a division, it would be rather the division between its vanished political might and the spiritual influence that we still feel nowadays.

There is something peculiar with this third term. While the first two terms were repeated literally by Daniel in his explanation, the last one was not repeated. It was not repeated at all in the form written on the wall. This term would have been found so strange by the translators of the NIV that they do not mention it in its primary form, upharsin, but as parsin even in the famous verse. The original word is given in a footnote and it is explained that the term is Aramaic (but the other two terms are also Aramaic!) and stands for and parsin. Even more, it is stated in the same footnote that peres can mean, apart from ‘Persia’ or ‘divided’, ‘half mina’ or ‘half shekel’. A comparison with “for a time, times and a half” (underlined by me) predisposes one’s mind to the idea that these two prophecies are linked.

So I decided that the word upharsin, as such, cannot be used as means for the code-breaking but probably there is a key in the primary writing that could be a sign of a hidden word. I tried to find a significant term starting with letters few places after the lamed in tekel. After having made several attempts, without a result, suddenly my attention was attracted by the conjunction ‘and’. Indeed, both in Hebrew and Aramaic, this conjunction is a single letter, vav, attached to the first letter of the corresponding word. It is never used alone. My intention was to start from a vav used as a conjunction and check for significant term(s) at low positive skips. I expected that the first vav used as a conjunction will be attached to an insignificant word. I checked for the first vav in the plain text following the lamed. There was one, just 2 places to the left but it was not used as a conjunction. The second vav, however, appeared to be a conjunction... Together with the word immediately following the vav, it read