[Purebiblesearch-release] PureBibleSearch : ELS Search Alpha Test Version

[Pure B. S. R. N. L. <pur...@li...>]

To All King James Pure Bible Search (KJPBS) Users:

Over the past year, I have been approached by several people wanting to see Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS) Search support (also known as the "Bible Code") added to the KJPBS software.  Interestingly, I myself had been curious about ELS since 1997, when Harold Gans, a former Cryptographic Mathematician for the NSA, performed an extended version of the original Witztum-Rips ELS experiment.

In 1997-1998, I actually started writing software to do ELS searches, but in the original Hebrew text, as the original research used.  Back then, software development tools for working with foreign languages, particularly right-to-left languages with a non-Latin Alphabet, were clunky at best.  And about that time, I found a commercially available Bible Code search app from a company in Israel and decided to buy it instead, and I shelved the code I had started writing.  But my experiments with ELS on the commercial software were quite limited, since I don't speak or read Hebrew.  So, eventually I set it aside as well.

Fast-forward to 2012 and I am called to develop software for Pastor Mike Hoggard, at Bethel Church in Festus, Mo., that can do Bible searches in the King James Bible.  That, as you know, became KJPBS.  It was developed specifically with extensive support for doing exact counts of the Bible text to find numerical patterns that exist in the English King James Bible.

Now, some 12 years later, I'm approached by those believing that the English King James text also has similar ELS patterns to that of the original Hebrew and people are requesting that I add ELS Search support to KJPBS to perform those searches.

As it turns out, the foundation that KJPBS has for searching and indexing the Bible text is quite extensive and flexible and it wasn't too terribly difficult to extend it to perform ELS Searches, working at the "letter level" instead of the "word level".  Though, it still took quite a bit to convince me to spend any time working on it, as even those people who originally discovered ELS and published its findings in those renown mathematics journals of the 1990's had renounced their findings, particularly after ELS was abused and monetized by a certain journalist who drug the whole "Bible Code" concept through the mud.

Since KJPBS is capable of searching Bible databases other than just the King James, it means its ELS implementation can also do searches in the original Hebrew text, like I had investigated in the 1990's.  And with its ability to support internationalization, thanks largely to the cross-platform Qt Framework it uses, it would become the software app I wanted to write back then.

I have spent the past five months or so writing the ELS Search subcomponent of KJPBS.  It's fully functional and essentially complete.  It is still in need of a lot of polishing and some more integration with the main KJPBS, such as for doing persistent settings so that users can set things like fonts and colors and such.  But, it's to the point that an "alpha" version can be made available for a greater audience to start experimenting with.

If you are reading this and wish to start experimenting with ELS Searches, or just want to checkout the latest snapshot of KJPBS development, you can follow the details below to do so.  Perhaps you can help prove that ELS is more than just apophenia?  Or maybe you'll prove that that's all it is?  Who knows.

Before you start, I highly recommend that you search the internet for "Equidistant Letter Sequence" and "Bible Code" and read its history and as many details about it as you can.  For example, it's not just about how many times something appears or doesn't appear.  It's about finding related words or phrases intersecting in close proximity when the probability of finding them in such clusters by random chance should dictate otherwise.  For example, finding "UFO" and "ROSWELL" together, perhaps clustered with other related words and details, might be significant.  I'm not saying there isn't necessarily something significant to the counts and skips of certain words, but the essence of ELS itself has little to do with counts and is more to do with the probability of clustered words.

And before you ask if there's a list of words found or words to search, no there isn't and there won't be.  This isn't about finding words from the Bible itself.  It's about finding words from any context and any language that just happen to "coincidentally" occur clustered together in the Bible.  For this software to provide such a word list, it would have to have every possible dictionary available.  Words could be proper names and places or even dates.  Things that you wouldn't find in the plain text of the Bible and may not even find in a normal dictionary.  So no, there is no "word list".

Please note that this is NOT a full "official" release of a new version of KJPBS.  The version posted on the official, PureBibleSearch.com, website is still the same version that's been there for quite sometime.  Instead, this is an alpha snapshot test version of the current KJPBS code.  It can be installed and used alongside (though not running simultaneously) with the existing version.  There's no need to uninstall or change your existing KJPBS setup to try this.

The snapshots are published on GitHub as assets.  Here's the link to the release page, with the most recent version at the very top:
https://github.com/dewhisna/KingJamesPureBibleSearch/releases
There are instructions there for each Operating System supported (Windows, Linux, and Mac).  The files for the snapshot are found in the "Assets" drop-list below the instructions.

Also, since this is still a work-in-progress, it's not a fully polished installer and as such requires a bit more computer know-how to set up.  It's also not cryptographically digitally signed yet either.  However, both MD5 and SHA256 checksums of the asset files are posted there with the instructions.  If the instructions on the page above don't make any sense to you and you can't figure out how to install it, then you are probably not a good candidate to serve as an "alpha tester".

I have given the task of coalescing feedback, tracking ELS Search findings, and supporting user questions to two individuals:  Ed Trujillo and Kevin Christy.  This is largely because it was them that approached me last year about adding ELS support to KJPBS and helped pushed me toward implementing it.

They are leading discussions on ELS findings through Brandon Peterson's KJV Code (kjvcode.com) Discord channel, which you can access here:
https://discord.gg/azMEAuEJ6n

Ed has created a couple of YouTube videos to help people get started.  The first is on installation on a Mac:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWeVa8IRsH8

And two are on performing searches:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZe32OG6kis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds_OIhvl59Q

Ed Trujillo can also answer specific questions via email at:
surest.towered-01 (at) icloud.com

So if you're interested in ELS, then go ... hunt ... see what you can find.

God Bless,
Donna

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