Software finds secret pattern in book of Genesis

If you believe in conspiracy theories (or love works by Dan Brown), get ready for information that can get your mind buzzing with ideas: researchers have discovered a “secret pattern” in the book of Genesis, the first text of the Bible.

It all started when Gordon Rugg (from Keele University, UK) and David Musgrave (from Amridge University, USA) came together to develop Search Visualizer, a text analysis software.

The program is able to search and catalog terms or expressions, transforming content into grids, where each square represents a different word. Search terms are highlighted in the form of colored squares.

With this, it is possible to more easily visualize the distribution of subjects by the text, highlighting those of relevance and their connection with other themes within the work analyzed. According to Rugg, the method is an alternative for pattern identification, allowing researchers to find important ideas within a text more simply.

God's messages?

Although works by authors such as Shakespeare have already been reviewed by the software, the team's biggest surprise came during the search for the book of Genesis. By searching for the words “life” and “death, ” Search Visualizer found a literary pattern that, although widely used today, was previously unknown to scholars regarding the Bible.

The technique is called scaling and, in it, the author makes a kind of "sandwich" with the text, placing a subject to be less evident in the middle of two mentions of another theme, to be highlighted.

An example of this is when journalists intersect bad news between two good news. In the case of Genesis, the interspersed content is related to death. According to the researchers, the pattern is quite clear: the opening and closing verses of the book bring several mentions to life, while only the central passages speak of death.

For Rugg, it is not possible to know if the staggering was done consciously, although the reason for creating the pattern in the book is possibly to soften the issues related to death.