10:59 AM
There are quite a lot of claims of ciphers and the like in the Bible. So far as I know, they're all controversial. E.g., there's a famous bit where, in the course of describing the various adornments in IIRC Solomon's temple, some measurements are given for a circular bowl sort of thing that if taken rather literally and exactly imply that pi = 3. (The thing is one cubit across and three cubits around, I think.) This is kinda embarrassing if you're the sillier sort of [...]
... biblical literalist, so someone had a look at the text around there and found some way of interpreting it as encoding a much more accurate value for pi. :-)
Actually, there's one relatively uncontroversial ciphery thing. You've probably heard that 666 is "the number of the beast". That's from the very last book of the (Christian) Bible, the so-called Revelation. On its surface it's a rather fantastical account of future events, describing what you might call the end of the world. Most likely much of its actual purpose was to complain about the Roman Empire and its treatment of Christians. So, anyway, that number 666 is quite likely [...]
... actually 616 (minor textual uncertainties are commonplace in ancient texts), and in Greek and Hebrew there is a (similar, IIRC) standard way of converting between numbers and letters -- a bit like the A1Z26 commonly used in puzzles in English -- which makes 616 a rather plausible value for "Nero Caesar", the emperor who was giving Christians a hard time when Revelation was probably written.
Of course other people since have found any number of other ways to interpret it, some of which are rather hilarious. (You know those Universal Product Code barcodes you see on lots of things, to make things easier for warehouses and supermarket checkouts and the like? At the start and the end and in the middle there are some slightly longer pairs lines, which scanners use to figure out where the barcode is and how big it is. [...]
... These pairs of lines slightly resemble the way a digit 6 is coded for on the right-hand half of the barcode (the encodings are different on left and right, presumably to make it easier for scanning to work whichever way up the code is). Therefore BARCODES ARE THE DEVIL'S NUMBER 666 BOOOOO. Many people have actually believed this.
Then there are people who do things like this: write down some bit of the biblical text in a grid, and look for straight lines along which you can read words, and if you find some related words appearing near to one another you claim that this means some connection between them was foretold by the divinely-inspired authors. This particular silly idea had some publicity a couple of decades ago, IIRC, partly because one genuinely eminent mathematician endorsed it. Of course it's nonsense [...]
... because the sort of coincidence involved is very common, which someone demonstrated nicely by taking the first chapter of "War and Peace" or "Moby-Dick" or something of the kind and showing that they could find clusters of words just as impressive as the so-called "Bible Codes".
But I don't think there are any cases where it's generally agreed that some portion of the biblical text is ciphertext encoding something important.
(Besides A1Z26 and allegedly Atbash, the Hebrew Bible makes a bit of use of another puzzler's favourite: the acrostic. Some of the psalms have successive lines or stanzas beginning with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. I don't think there's any case in which the initial letters encode a word, name, or message.)
The answer to this puzzle consists of 10 letters and is of the form ____ ____
From smallest to largest, row by row
Row 1: K.A b. Row 2: W.M b. Row 3: H.S b. Row 4: N.M.B b. Row 5: G.M b.
You are given a 4x6 square grid. Each square of the grid
should be filled with different positive integers.
The gcd (greatest common divisor) of any two adjacent (horizontally or vertically)
squares should be greater than one.
What is the minimum sum of such 24 integers?
Please explain the logic. I am not trying to solve it using trial and error or using any software.
