Leonard TimmonsCritiques

I really wanted to love this book. Puzzles, numbers, religion all in one book, but this kind of fell short of being interesting. The theory was an attractive one, but the reason WHY it should matter just wasn't there. A lot of the book was difficult to follow with out rereading paragraphs. I think there is definitely a good book in there somewhere, it just needs work.

While I don't disbelieve that there are mysteries hidden within the Bible and that the argument within this book might be true, I couldn't follow the argument, the numbers or the purpose of the riddle.

Okay I really wanted to like this book. I have an avid interest in puzzles, conspiratorial and religious questions of all sorts. This book appeared to have everything I could have wished for! This being said the book was very complex with too much math and charts that were of no use to the laymen. I have no real idea what the big idea that the author of this book wanted me to understand. I kept getting sidetracked with the extraneous stuff.

I don't want to disparage the book too bad because it may have been reader problem. The author was a very nice fellow who took the time to contact me after I had won the book. Perhaps a little more common language and detail and the story first, then to the technical stuff would have made his thesis more understandable to me.½

What do the ages of the first humans in the Bible mean? Could people really have lived that long? Leonard Timmons has found an ancient calendar hidden in these numbers, and feels this discovery is key to understanding the Bible.

Timmons’s calendar is constructed by charting, on a timeline, the births and deaths of the men between Adam and Noah, fudging a little here and there to create a few more meaningful points on the timeline, and then discovering that it breaks down into four portions of 364 years plus one 5-year portion. Turn that into days, and you have a 364-day year, plus a 5-day seasonal correction after four years (think of our leap day). 364, for calendar aficionados, is the Jubilees calendar from the Qumran texts, so-liked because it plays nice, dividing neatly into 52 seven-day weeks.

Timmons’s analysis is founded on arithmetic combinations of round numbers (such as 500 or 1000) and of the number seven. Lamech’s age at his death, 777 years, appears to be a clue. For example, 56 is a nice number because it is 7x7+7. 84 is an excellent number because it is 77+7. Seven is recognized as God’s number, a perfect number, the number of days in the week. Readers of Revelation are quite aware of how important seven, and in particular three sevens (777), are in Biblical thinking.

Timmons is correct that numerology was important to the ancients, often used as a means of Biblical enlightenment. Consider the 666 of Revelation, and the miraculous catch of 153 fish by Jesus’ disciples. Timmons takes a stab at solving both of these riddles, which might be a mistake on his part; while no convincing solutions to the second puzzle have been offered, making the 153 puzzle fair game for speculation, scholars are nearly unanimous and surely correct in solving the 666 puzzle. (See http://www.dubiousdisciple.com/2011/01/revelation-1318.html and http://www.dubiousdisciple.com/2011/01/revelation-1318_27.html ) In any case, I would not be surprised at all to discover that there is meaning in the ages of the earliest humans in the Bible. It’s far more likely that the numbers have some sort of meaning to the authors than that people actually lived that long! However, even after reading Timmons’s book, a hidden calendar code seems a bit too conspiratorial for my taste. Timmons may be on the right track with his “meaningful numbers,” but attributing the whole thing to a hidden calendar doesn’t feel right to me.

That is, however, the book’s premise: Not only is there a calendar hiding within the ages of the earliest humans, but it has been purposefully hidden. This is not just numerology, it’s a devised puzzle, and (in my opinion) an inelegant one. The authors were not content just to lay out a calendar; they carefully hid the calendar, purposefully confusing us, swapping the meaningful number 56 here and there with 65 (the reverse of its digits) to confuse us, doubling and halving numbers here and there to bewilder us.

So who imbedded these puzzles? Perhaps collators of the Bible while in Babylonian captivity, or shortly after they returned to Jerusalem? That sounds somewhat believable, but Timmons thinks not; he argues instead that the Bible should be thought of as an ancient educational textbook for the enlightened, a sort of test to divide good puzzle-readers from bad. The Bible is a book of riddles to help the initiate develop his talent for insight. We’re not just talking about the creation stories; the Bible’s authors have encapsulated hidden knowledge in its texts from Genesis to Revelation! An “insight school” that lasted a thousand years! (Timmons actually suggests thousands).

Timmons rejects the Documentary Hypothesis (which proposes that the Torah was written by at least four distinct authors, none of them Moses). I cannot help but think he commits another error by pitting his puzzle theory against the Documentary Hypothesis; it seems far more reasonable to me that the Documentary Hypothesis disproves the ancient textbook idea rather than vice-versa.

Anyway, the hidden calendar is not really the important thing. It’s just a discovery that should prompt us to read the Bible differently; to reveal to us the surprising intellect and understanding of its authors. Free now to explore a deeper meaning in the scriptures than a literal reading, Timmons next launches into his interpretation of the Bible’s themes; how the ancients thought of demons, angels, soul, spirit, faith, even God … and it’s nothing like what we thought they meant. This insight helps Timmons decode stories like the Flood and the Garden of Eden, and he provides two creative and fascinating interpretations. Even Jesus’ parables and Revelation’s mysteries are revealed.

I found the book to be an interesting fringe theory, and fun with numbers (right up my alley), but not something I found convincing. However, my feeling is that there is surely a 4- or even 5-star book idea here, that Timmons’s interpretations are ingenious, but that he overreaches by claiming them to be the correct interpretation … as if the Bible writers actually meant their stories to be read this way.

I am sorry I do not understand this book.
It is well writen I just don't know enought about this to understand it.½

Mr. Timmons writes of the idea that embedded in Genesis 5 of the bible is a calendar. After a lot of adding and subtracting and math theories(I always did hate math!) he comes up with a calendar written thousands of years ago. I totally believe there is more to the bible than what we read and have no reason to believe or disbelieve the theory. I'm still on the fence about his ideas. Some people will love this book and enjoy cracking the code along with Mr. Timmons. For me, I enjoyed it after the math class part was over.

In this book Mr. Timmons shows that there is a calendar hidden in Chapter 5 of Genesis among all of the "begats" that most of us skip over in our reading of the Bible. He uses the ages of the patriarchs to prove his thesis. I admit that I got lost a confused when he begins to talk numbers and subtracting or adding a year here and there. And when he talks about "sliders" he left me completely behind. That being said I can see that there is some reason behind the writing of Genesis 5. I accept Mr Timmons thesis that it is a calendar and the very good possibility that the Bible was written as a textbook for those people with "insight". Mr. Timmons says that the Bible is full of parables and riddles that are there to test the readers' insights into the riddles and parables.

Mr. Timmons then expands his thesis to the first eleven chapters of Genesis. The two stories of creation, the eating of the forbidden fruit, the Cain and Able story, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel are all tied together and in most cases are the same lessons, only expanded upon. The quest of man is eternal life and these stories show how to reach that and how to avoid the things that might get in our way of achieving that goal. His description of the Flood as actually being a siege of a fort build by Noah is extremely interesting. He closes the book by looking at Chapter 13 of Revelations through his thesis and also some of Jesus' parables.

Mr. Timmons has given me a lot to think about. I found the math part of the book a little hard to keep up and the diagrams that are included took a while to wrap my mind around. But it is an interesting look at a part of the Bible that we all know the stories from and think that we understand them. He gives us a new way of looking at those stories. Nine hundred sixty-nine years old was a long life span and to those who have had difficulty in that one fact, then Mr. Timmons' book is well worth the reading. I know I will be thinking of the the things that I highlighted in my reading and looking at those beginning stories a little differently.

This ambitious book aims to demonstrate that an accurate solar calendar puzzle has been embedded in the pages of Genesis. This becomes the basis for a new ‘scientific’ way of reading the Bible as the report of a school for insight.

Leonard Timmons is an engineer, and hopes that his book is written with an ‘engineer’s spirit’. The book proceeds by engaging us deeply in the search for the calendar and then opening out the discussion to wider Biblical issues.

The proof that there is a solar calendar hidden in the text is mathematical. The ages of the patriarchs and the years before or after Noah’s flood are manipulated to show a regular calendar of 365 days with four intercalary days after four years. I found the maths difficult to follow. They depended partly on ‘special looking’ numbers like 777 and partly on multipliers (182 x 2 + 1 = 365). Mr Timmons makes no mention of the fact that Hebrew has no numbers, the letters of the alphabet standing in for them, and I wondered whether the relationship between the value and the shape of the number would always apply. For example, 777 does look somewhat ‘special’ in Hebrew, where it is written 7 hundreds 7 tens and 7, with the seventh letter of the alphabet (zayin - ז ) in the place of the 7.

Overall, I was happy to go along with Mr Timmons’s discovery of a calendar, but I was disappointed that no mention was made of similar uses of the Biblical texts.

1. Kabbalah, the mystic use of numbers dates back to at least the 5th Century BCE, and would have been a useful comparison and test of Mr Timmons’s theory.

2. A calendar is presented in the Bible. It seems to have two forms, pre- and post-Exilic, and these calendars are lunar rather than solar. In addition, other ancient civilisations, in particular neighbouring Egypt hid calendar puzzles in their monuments. What light did these other calendars shed on the Genesis 5 calendar?

These would have contextualised and validated Mr Timmons’s findings.

Discovering the calendar puzzle provides Mr Timmons with a framework for understanding other aspects of the Bible. He interprets the Flood story, for example, as a story not about water but about being flooded by people. The Flood, he claims, is the first time in history a fort (the Ark) was built to withstand a siege.

This is an interesting interpretation: what concerns me is that Mr Timmons appears to believe his is the final interpretation. The idea of a fort fits the text, he says, so that is what it must be about. While I applaud his close reading of the text, I believe other interpretations are possible and readers must keep an open mind.

Mr Timmons would have made these discussions clearer if he had pursued his insight that all the stories in Genesis 1-11 are artifices. Whether or not they describe historical events, stories are made up of words designed to communicate specific ideas. I wasn’t sure when Mr Timmons saw a story as historical (the first siege) and when he saw them as guides to other truths (angels as insights).

The book may have benefited overall from a tighter focus: is it about calendars, or is it about a way of reading the Bible? If it is about both, then the relationships between the calendar puzzle and the framework for understanding scripture needs to be clearer.

It would surely have benefited from conversations with other sources, whether scholarship about other calendars, or the study of Biblical Hebrew and the limits of what can be known.

Leonard Timmins has produced a fascinating thesis about the solar calendar and is clearly enthusiastic to share his findings with a wider audience. In the end, however, he did not provide me with a reason to care about his discovery, and to that extent, failed to carry me into the broader ideas he has about understanding the Bible.

From Adam to Noah:The Numbers Game
Leonard Timmons

The Bible was not written by men inspired by God. It was not written to guide mankind according to God’s desire. Instead the Bible was written by the wisest scholars available. The primary goal for writing the Bible was to develop an educational system that would able to pass on the acquired knowledge of humanity to succeeding generations. The scholars who wrote the Bible highly valued the ability of students who were able to engage in insightful reasoning. The authors valued insightful reasoning so much that the Bible was written in a code consisting of riddles and numerical puzzles. Only the most insightful students would be able to understand the riddles and puzzles contained in the textbook that today we call the Bible.
The author believes that ancient Middle Eastern astronomers were able to calculate an accurate calendar consisting of a 364 day year with a day of leap year occurring every four years in the month of February. Mr. Timmons emphasizes the Bibles authors put together many of the stories of the Bible with full knowledge that the stories are untrue. Timmons believes that the stories “were meant as teaching aids” to help teachers discover the most gifted who were capable of unraveling and explain the most confounding riddle and parables.
Mr. Timmons offer several stories that differ from the stories that Bible readers are familiar with. The first story offers an explanation for why Adam and Eve were expulsed from the Garden of Eden. God presented Adam and Eve with a riddle concerning the tree life. Eve did not properly solve the riddle. Eve thought she and Adam were to avoid eating from the tree of life when in reality as Mr. Timmons has determined the solution to riddle. Adam and Eve were to avoid experiencing sexual gratification. As a result of experiencing sexual gratification Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden and were cursed so that they would toil to produce some from the soil to eat.
Mr. Timmons reinterprets the story the about Cain and Abe differently than the traditional story of Cain killing Abel. According to Mr. Timmons, Cain not was jealous of Abel because God was more pleased with Abel’s bounty of his best animals. According to Mr. Timmons Cain and Abel disagreed on how to best worship God. Cain was more concerned with accumulating wealth and viewed Abel’s slaughtering of his best to honor God as a wasteful act. As each man believed that method of how to worship God was to best method follow of worshiping and each insisted that his follow his method of worshiping God the argument led to Cain killing Abel and confiscating his brother’s accumulated herd of animals.
Another Biblical story that readers typically misinterpret is the story of Noah’s flood. If the story is interpreted literally then the reader will assume that it rained for forty days and forty nights. However, Mr.Timmons reports that there was a population explosion resulting from the unbridled sexual gratification occurring between men and women.
Traditionally Bible readers are aware Adam and Eve were told eat from the trees in the Garden of Eden and that once they were expelled from the garden they had to cultivate and grow their own crops. As there were more people to compete for the food resources that were available some people broke God’s dietary rule and began to consume flesh. As women began to feed their children flesh they became giants when compared to Noah and his family who ate fruit from that crops that they cultivated.
Noah and his family built a fort and accumulated the remaining animals to prevent their extinction now that men were hunting and eating flesh. In addition to storing animals Noah and his family also stored fruits and vegetables. The flesh eating population became healthier than Noah and his vegetarian family. As flesh eaters became healthier they also became more attractive causing population explosion to increase and people began starving to death. According to Mr.Timmons as food became scarcer the first war occurred as the giant flesh eaters attacked the fort that Noah built known in the literal reading as the ark.
Noah attempted to end the war offering to compromise but the giant flesh eaters would not compromise refusing to return to a vegetarian diet. As more of them began to die from starvation they agreed to a compromise that placed restrictions on eating flesh also excluding animals that were not be consumed including the animals that were to be killed only for sacrificial purposes.
Mr.Timmons spend a considerable amount time attempting to prove that the first eleven chapters of Genesis contains a numerical puzzle with a solution that prove s that ancient astronomers were able to accurately able determine a calendar that consisted of a 364 day year. Although I do not doubt that the astronomer from ancient Middle Eastern tribes were able to accurately a 364 day calendar, I was not by genealogical charts and timelines that such a puzzle existed within the first eleven chapters of Genesis.
There is also no archaeological evidence to support that Noah and his family were besieged by a nation of giants and no evidence of the archaeological remains of the fort that saved Noah his family and the animals that were preserved from extinction.

This review was written for LibraryThing Member Giveaway

From Adam to Noah is a close look at the first 11 chapters of the Bible with a new interpretation of the stories outlined there. Leonard Timmons has been fascinated with the genealogies in this section of Genesis and, through years of research, found evidences that these were really a set of calendars, perfect year, divisible year and lunar year. These were a puzzle hidden in plain sight and written to test the abilities of prophets and their powers of prediction and reliability. He explains why numbers were important to ancient writers. He then connects the Garden of Eden with the story of Noah, stating that these are not literal stories. (This tends to explain how Cain found a wife as did Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve.) He also explains his concepts of the Face of God (what he calls the Ultimate Meta-knowledge Relationship or UMkR), the Son of God, sons of men and many other theological concepts. His interpretation of the Bible and its meaning radically differs from accepted Biblical criticism today.

The book has numerous illustrations, very necessary in trying to follow his reasoning, especially in Chapter 2 where he outlines his calculations for the calendars. (And, even with a heavy science and math background, I found my eyes glazing over during this chapter.) There are footnotes further explaining concepts. References to the text with full citations are found in the back of the book. However the book would have benefited with a full bibliography citing his sources. There is also an index, allowing a reader to check back on a concept while reading.

For literal Christians, this book would be a very difficult read. For those whose minds are open to other interpretations, this is a new and fresh approach whether you believe the author's reasoning is correct, partially correct or totally wrong. He feels that the Bible was not the inspired “Word of God” but a test for gifted learners. I tend to look at the Genesis stories as the way an ancient people without the scientific knowledge of today looked at themselves and the world about them. And the stories are similar throughout the ancient world.

The author does not print his credentials in the book; however I wish he would have done so. He is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology with a degree in electrical engineering. (That was my “aha!” moment – only a scientist would be this meticulous and thorough in researching a book like this and citing his sources.) As far as I can tell, he does not have any formal theological education but has done a lot of study in the area, including attending religious retreats.

You may be disturbed by this book and its new ideas; however it will make you think about what you do believe and why it is important to you.½

I had a really tough time following the logic in the second chapter regarding the calendar structure of the various ages. He also tended to ramble quite a bit. Regardless, I did enjoy the commentary regarding Adam and Eve.