In 1 Kings 7:23:
'And he [Hiram on behalf of King Solomon] made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.'
You have quoted the English translation of the Hebrew text. What you do not know is that in the original Hebrew there is a deliberate misspelling of the text. Hebrew letters are alphanumeric. The ancient scribes used the cumulative values of the lines and books to help ensure the accuracy when making a copy of their scriptures. This deliberate misspelling was always carried over from copy to copy.
Even back just 25 years our schools would approximate "PI" with the fraction of 22/7 (3.1428571428571428571428571428571) for the value of "PI" (3.1415926535897932384626433832795).
A Spelling Lesson
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The common word for circumference is qav. Here, however, the spelling of the word for circumference, qaveh, adds a heh (h).
In the Hebrew Bible, the scribes did not alter any text which they felt had been copied incorrectly. Rather, they noted in the margin what they thought the written text should be. The written variation is called a kethiv; and the marginal annotation is called the qere.
To the ancient scribes, this was also regarded as a remez, a hint of something deeper. This appears to be the clue to treat the word as a mathematical formula.
Numerical Values
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The Hebrew alphabet is alphanumeric: each Hebrew letter also has a numerical value and can be used as a number.
The q has a value of 100; the v has a value of 6; thus, the normal spelling would yield a numerical value of 106. The addition of the h, with a value of 5, increases the numerical value to 111. This indicates an adjustment of the ratio 111/106, or 31.41509433962 cubits.((111/106)*30) Assuming that a cubit was 1.5 ft. this 15-foot-wide bowl would have had a circumference of 47.12388980385 feet.
This Hebrew "code" results in 47.12264150943 feet, or an error of less than 1-1/2 thousandths of an inch! How did they accomplish this? This accuracy would seem to vastly exceed the precision of their instrumentation. How would they know this? How was it encoded into the text?
FYI:In September, 2002, Professor Yasumasa Kanada and nine other researchers at the Information Technology Center at Tokyo University calculated the value for pi, using over 400 hours of a Hitachi supercomputer, to 1.24 trillion decimal places.
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