Pattern 67 First Half of Genesis 1:1 Repeated in the Human Reference Genome

Why this pattern matters

The first three words of Genesis 1:1 contain 14 letters, exactly half of the verse’s 28 letters. Pattern 67 searches the specified human reference genome for amino-acid sequences having exactly the same repeated-letter structure as these first 14 Hebrew letters.

How this pattern is measured

Use the exact GRCh38.p12 chromosome files originally downloaded from NCBI on August 28, 2019.



Process chromosomes 1–22, X, Y, and mitochondrial DNA using verify.java.

Read the nucleotide characters in groups of three.

Translate each recognized codon into its standard one-letter amino-acid symbol.

Search the resulting sequence for 14-symbol sections having the same pattern of repeated and distinct characters as the first 14 letters of Genesis 1:1.

Count every qualifying location across the 25 chromosome files.

Hebrew transliteration: B R A J Y O B R A A L H Y M
Repetition structure: 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 3 7 8 5 9

Positions 1 and 7 must match.
Positions 2 and 8 must match.
Positions 3, 9, and 10 must match.
Positions 5 and 13 must match.
The other distinct Hebrew letters must map to distinct amino-acid symbols.

Result for Genesis 1:1

These 48 matches use different one-to-one mappings between the nine distinct Hebrew letters and amino-acid symbols. The program records the chromosome, position, matched amino-acid sequence, and substitution key for each occurrence.

Exact data required to reproduce this result

This result requires the same GRCh38.p12 chromosome files downloaded from NCBI on August 28, 2019. Later human-genome assemblies or revised chromosome files may produce different results.

Download the archived GRCh38.p12 files

The SHA-256 checksum = eee5bd070d0cb55a26909100a8f1929530a1e5fa608c60180a90b09113cd937e

Download gz.zip, extract it, and place the chromosome .gz files in the gz directory used by verify.java.

Read detail page for Pattern 67

Download the Pattern 67 verification program

The program does not claim that the Hebrew alphabet is encoded directly in DNA. It searches for the same equality-and-repetition structure under arbitrary one-to-one substitution keys.

verify.java:

translates the forward sequence;
begins with the reading frame used by the program;
processes the reference genome, including noncoding regions;
represents stop codons as X;
represents unrecognized or unavailable codons as Z;
rejects matches containing X or N during the later word-search routine.

Probability note

Pattern 67 presently reports an exact reproducible count rather than a standalone probability. A defensible probability estimate would require applying the identical procedure to a predetermined collection of comparable 14-letter control structures and reporting how frequently they produce 48 or more matches.

This page uses the probability notation provided in the original pattern sequence.

Supporting tables

First 3 words are highlighted.