A remarkable discovery by a man called Dr Ivan Panin more than forty years ago now still remains virtually an untold story. Panin was a Russian, living in America. He was a brilliant mathematician, fluent in Hebrew and Greek, and an agnostic. The story goes that out of literary interest he decided to read the Old Testament in its original language. He stumbled upon what he believed to be mathematical proof that god existed.

To make a start we shall take the Hebrew alphabet. This consists of 22 letters with 5 finals added to make up 3 series of 9 or 27 letters in all. Each letter in the alphabet has a number attributed to it. For example, Aleph = 1 and Samech = 60.

Therefore when a word, sentence, paragraph or chapter is written in Hebrew, it also carries a numerical value.

This numerical value in turn has a spiritual coding and when the passage is broken down different spiritual values are found for each saying, word or name. As a few examples I have chosen the more important numbers in the Bible. Number 1 represents the beginning and unity. Number 3 means completeness or fullness. Number 7 is spiritual holiness. Number 12 is the perfection of the governing body or rulers. So we can see that within the very words of the Bible there can be a more subtle meaning or insight.

This is not unusual in itself as Latin also has numbers attributed to its letters. Even the English language has a kind of numerology. For example when we take the numbers that are given to the English language and work out the number for the name Jesus Christ we find that we get the number 7. This is then translated to mean 'the mystery'.

What is striking nevertheless is the ridiculous repetition of the number seven or multiples of seven in the original Hebrew script. Panin found that in the Hebrew Old Testament there were as many as seventy occurrences of this in every passage. Not only that, but in every possible way that the passage could be divided, including grammatical construction. From passage to passage there was an amazing over-arching link of septenary design, which carried on and on throughout the whole of a single book. Also when all the books are put together as one the same remarkable link occurs, as if they were somehow meant to be together. Every passage of every book, and every book of the Old Testament has this design. Nothing seems to upsets its course, not even the long lists of names, which sometimes can be laborious.

Getting back to numbers, we find that in each passage there is anything from 12 to 100 features of this design.

To elucidate the impossibility of this occurrence we shall take the possibility of there being only 24 features in one passage, of one book. The stunning mathematical chance is 1 over 191581231380566414000.