Posted by Mark Prigg: February 21, 2013 09: 30 EDT | update: 02:54 EDT February 22, 2013, burying bad news is a common strategy in modern politics
But the researchers said it was actually the first time it was used in the Bible.
Researchers in the UK and the United States say they have discovered a secret "Genesis death sandwich" that reveals an amazing pattern between the two key themes of "life" and "death.
They say that the beginning and end chapters of the book often refer to life, while the mention of death is only found in the middle groups.
The research team at the University of Kiel in the UK and the University of American security Ridge said the finding was the first known use of a technology known as "support" that sandwich between two references to another topic
This technique is commonly used today, such as when bad news is caught between two good news.
This pattern, known as the "Genesis death sandwich", is the first clear example of this common rhetorical structure used in the text describing the creation of the universe.
"This is a major discovery for historians and theologians interested in the Old Testament, indicating that whoever wrote the version of the text circulated to us, it is obvious that Dr. Gordon Luger of the University of Kiel, who has used this rhetoric, said that he has developed a new tool for analyzing the text.
Called the search visualization tool, it represents the entire text as a grid, each square represents a word, and the colored square represents the search keyword.
When the words "life" and "death" were used to study the King James version of Genesis, the new pattern appeared.
However, the team admitted that they were not sure whether the placement was intentional or not.
"Whether this is done consciously or unconsciously, it may still be a mystery, although the possible cause of this pattern may be to soften the negative message of death, or to tie life and death for a greater impact
Dr. Gordon Rugg from Keele University and Dr. David Musgrave from Amridge University in the United States also used search visualization tools to explore other important texts, including Iliad.
They found a pattern in the text, providing new evidence to support the theory that the section of the ship's catalogue is actually a piece that incorporates the homer epic story
"Our new approach to text visualization means that the whole book can be displayed on a single page in A4, so that you can easily see the pattern.
"This provides researchers with a quick and easy way to identify patterns, or to see which of their ideas might be red herring, which is a good idea for researchers working with large text
The new tools can not only explore the patterns in historical texts and literature, but also have a wide range of other potential applications.
One such use is to re-examining cold-
The case police investigation is conducted by analyzing the old witness statements to identify the relevant stories.
Using the search visualization tool, you can see patterns that can be difficult to identify by reading a large number of documents manually.
The software can also be used as a new way of web search.