Science Says: 13.7 Billion Years
I’m now reading the appendices of “The Truth Behind the Bible Code” and wouldn’t you know it: an understanding that I had since my childhood has yielded some ‘proof’ of sorts for when God created the Universe. I’ll let Dr Jeffrey Satinover explain:
The kabbalist whose studies of the creation account in Genesis are the most precise and authoritative was Nechunya be HaKanah. Among other matters in which he was expert, Nechunya specifically asserted that the 42-lettered name allowed one to deduce from the creation account the correct age of the universe. Because in his day this kind of information was considered religiously sensitive (as it is today), Nechunya’s own explanation of the numbers involved was somewhat sketchy. But another kabbalist who followed closely in Nechunya’s footsteps — Rabbi Yitzhak deMin Acco — laid out the calculations precisely. These make it doubly clear that the calculations of the synodical “starting date” for the first new moon and of the “primodial year” (which values both Nechunya and deMin Acco used) were to be understood literally only insofar as the numbers produce accurate results. They were not meant to be taken literally as indicating the age of the world.
Thus, Nechunya claimed that if you properly understood how to use the 42-lettered name, Genesis provides that a period of time between the origin of the universe and the creation of man, namely 42,000 “Divine Years.” But a “Divine Year” isn’t 365.25 of our days; it’s 365,250 of our years. So, between the origin of the universe and the creation of man there transpired 42,000 x 365,250 years. In other words, says Nechunya, Genesis tells us that the universe came into existence 15.3 billion years ago.
Did Nechunya (or deMin Acco) obtain this number from some other source and then retrofit the information into complicated “permutations” of Genesis? It’s hard to imagine how: DeMin Acco lived in the thirteenth century A.D.; Nechunya himself in the first century A.D.
(From Technical Appendix A: Details of the New Moon – page 275.)
I wasn’t expecting 153 to show up again. But there it is.
