Thursday, June 16, 2016

Quaint Shortcomings of This Search System

I ought to point out that my results may on rare occasion render less than all the actual results available because 3 Torah verses have "pesiktas" in them, where two "child-possukim" are actually joined into one "parent-possuk".

They are here:
Bereishis 35:22
Bamidbar 26:1
Devarim 2:8

What this means is, were your search to actually find "hits" in these 3 locations, those involved with the contained sub-sentences within them would go missing. Why? Because I do not check values of "child-possukim" within the "parent-possuk".

Take the gematria method for example. It may be the gematria of either of the two embedded verses in the one possuk could produce a hit, but these potential hits of a "child-possuk" will go missing. I only calculate the gematria of the "parent-possuk".

Concrete example:
Suppose you type in a gematria value of 383, and choosing its option: "single whole possuk".

When my program inspects the single verse Bamidbar 26:1
ויהי אחרי המגפה   ויאמר יהוה אל משה ואל אלעזר בן אהרן הכהן לאמר
                                                                       ^
... it will NOT find a match in this verse because the "whole" possuk of reference, that of the 13 words, exceeds 383. I do not inspect separately the value of the 1st 3 words, which here actually equal 383, because I ignore pesiktas!

I don't check these 6 "child" possukim on their own because when I first created my database I never considered pesiktas. And now for me to change the database structure, and all the code that references it, would be too much trouble.

(Actually there is a roundabout way to find these "hidden hits" but then you'll have to sort these out from the results buried in a longer list of results; You can use the other gematria option available: "words within a possuk"; This option will indeed find and list the hit.)

Just letting you know of this program's shortcomings.

A New Search Method Implemented - "Geometric Possukim"

Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh's class/video to Jewish children (link) on mathematics in Torah gave me an idea for a new search method to introduce. In the 1st 16 minutes of the tape he defines what "triangular" and "squared" possukim mean. Accordingly, I now scan the scripture looking for either of these two features per possuk.

I took into consideration the biggest and smallest possukim in letter-count in Tanach (193 and 11 respectively) and devised a small loop of logic to configure the results adequately. I did not lay out these possukim to display as triangular or square-shaped but I do tell you which they are.