Hongshik Ahn - A Mathematical View of Genesis

This book was written as an effort to reconstruct a fun part of the Bible through a mathematical view. The book might be considered to be a challenge to the authority of the Bible. But I do not intend it to be so. Before starting this book, I am stating a comment by Professor Hwan-Jin Yi of the Methodist Theological University in South Korea: It is natural that numbers or names in the Bible do not match because the Bible is a collection of various documents that have been handed down. Confessions of faith from different traditions have been merged into one story. Although there is a limitation when mathematically analyzing the numbers and genealogies in Genesis , I have tried to the best of my abilities, to organize it in a way that readers can understand better.

When I was in elementary school, one of my church friends always won big Bible quiz competitions and I envied him. Although I picked up some knowledge about the Bible from Bible school teachers, I didnt read the Bible until I graduated from high school. I decided to read the Bible when I entered college, beginning with Genesis 1:1. I remember that I gave up after reading a few chapters, and then started again from the beginning, repeating this cycle several times. Finally, I finished Genesis and moved onto Exodus . Reading Exodus was fun at first, but it was difficult to progress further when I encountered laws, rituals, and unfamiliar measures of the tabernacle dimensions in the later chapters. So I gave up at that part and then read Genesis again, moving onto Exodus , but then I stopped at the same part. I repeated this cycle until my senior year in college. I was able to talk about the contents of Genesis in detail after reading it so many times. Another reason why I could not get past Exodus was that the Bible I had was a version written in old Korean language. Finally, I finished reading Exodus during my senior year and also finished reading the Torah; it was relatively easy to read the rest of the Bible. After graduating from college in Korea, I came to the United States for graduate study. Before entering graduate school, though, I stayed at my sisters apartment in Philadelphia for two months. While there, I found a Bible that was written in modern Korean and started reading it. I was able to finish the rest of the Bible while staying at my sisters apartment because that version was very easy to understand. I continued to read the Bible several more times, including the Apocrypha.

The material in the Bible was still new to me when I was reading it for the third or fourth time because it contains so much information. Thus, I couldnt remember most of it, although I had read it before. However, after I read the Bible several more times, I was able to remember the material better and I started to approach it from a different angle. I interpreted the material in the Bible in a new direction that most people do not think of. I also often thought about the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Because I thought it would be unique, I decided to write this book using my experience with mathematics. Although the interpretation is unique, I tried not to deviate from the essence of faith. I hope this book invites more people to become interested in the Bible. Also, I want people who are intimidated by the large volume of the Bible or those who tend to give up reading the Bible as I did in my college years, to have the opportunity to become familiar with the Bible through reading this book. I have provided related background information in the Bible for those who do not have knowledge of the Bible in order to be able to understand this book without difficulty. Many people view Genesis as a folk tale about the creation of the Jewish people. I also think Genesis can be considered an interesting story book. Thus, I think it is unfortunate that there are many people who have not read the Bible yet, even among Christians. Genesis also contains a lot of sexually explicit stories and stories showing the collapse of morality. I tried to not limit this book to Genesis , in an attempt to help readers grasp the entire Bible by relating to the other parts of the Bible.

Another feature of this book is that there are interesting stories after every few chapters in order to relieve the boredom. I teach twice a week for 80 minutes each class at my university. The problem is that the human attention span usually does not exceed 40 minutes, but I have observed that students are refreshed and able to focus for the rest of the class if I provide an interesting story during the middle of class. Also, many names of places appear in the Bible and most of the readers pass those without knowing where they are located. Therefore, I have provided a map of ancient Israel in Chapter 14. Names of the places appearing before or after the map correspond to the numbers and alphabets on the map. I hope readers will be able to get a solid understanding of those places while reading this book. This book consists of 50 chapters as Genesis does. Each chapter of this book corresponds to the same chapter of Genesis .

I studied mathematics at Seoul National University in South Korea and then received my PhD degree in statistics from University of Wisconsin at Madison. The way of mathematical thinking is exposed throughout this book. I hope readers are able to experience through this mathematical thinking a different perspective that is a refreshing interpretation of the Bible. I wish to thank Professor Hwan-Jin Yi of the Methodist Theological University in South Korea for reading the first draft of this book written in Korean and providing helpful comments. I thank Professor Eugene Hammond of Stony Brook University who proofread the entire book and gave numerous valuable comments and corrected errors. I also thank my daughter Suejin for reading the first draft of the English translation from Korean and giving me helpful comments; Dr. Songjoon Baek at National Cancer Institute for providing the map of ancient Israel in Chapter 14; Ms. Yeonjin Oh for preparing the cover of this ebook.