Wednesday, November 25, 2015

The Missing Age

The ages reached by Abraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov, according to P, follow a neat mathematical series:

175 = 7 * 52, 180 = 5 * 62, and 147 = 3 * 72.

It is a very remarkable fact. Was there a mathematician among the authors of P? What did he want to encode?

One age is notably missing, in the Torah of P, and that is the age 144 = 9 * 42. Could it be that 9 * 42 is an eschatological number instead? Note that 5708 + 9 * 42 = 5501 + 27*13.