Discovery of the Canon Wheel

The Canon Wheel

THE SEVENFOLD SYMMETRIC PERFECTION of the Canon Wheel is one of the most obvious signs of the divine design of the Bible. It is, therefore, the first point of attack by most opponents. They typically start by asserting that the seven canonical divisions are arbitrary and therefore meaningless. Others assert that there are various ways to categorize the books of the Bible, so no one pattern can be considered “correct” or “better” than any other. These objections are answered in my article called A Complete Categorical View of the Bible. This article answers another common objection, namely that I made a deliberate effort to “force fit” the structure of the Canon to arrive at the cross-like tri-radiant symmetry that is isomorphic to the halo of Christ in traditional Christian iconography (see The Tri-Radiant Halo as the Sign of Deity).

The Bible Wheel

The Canon Wheel is just the Bible Wheel with the traditional canonical divisions such as “Torah” and “Minor Prophets” colored and labeled. The process that led to its discovery is a prime example of the fruitfulness of the Bible Wheel in the scientific sense that it leads to new insights. I discovered the Bible Wheel on May 12, 1995 and studied it for four years before noticing that the books on the first Spoke “just happened” to be the “first books” of their respective canonical divisions, as follows:

• Genesis – the First Book of the Law
• Isaiah – the First Book of the Prophets
• Romans – the First Book of the NT Epistles

I was immediately struck by the simple beauty of those three “first books” aligned on the first Spoke, and felt that there might be more to discover, so I sat down at my computer and opened my CorelDraw program and drew this picture:

This happened on the morning of May 14, 1999, exactly four years and two days after the initial discovery of the Bible Wheel. Note that I drew Aleph on the left so that the names of the books could be easily read. I was not expecting, let alone “looking for” any cross-like pattern. Note also that I included the traditional Hebrew names for the divisions even though the content the English vs. Hebrew canons is different. This was because I was “thinking in Hebrew” a lot at that time.

Now the thing that really surprised me was that I had been fruitfully studying the Bible Wheel for four years and had never noticed this connection before. This was because I, like most students of the Bible, was not in the habit of thinking in terms of the canonical divisions. So I looked in a few books and immediately noticed three more standard groupings, and drew this second picture:

At this point I was beginning to feel awestruck that there was this much coherent structure in the Bible Wheel … and as I looked closer at the one place that I would have expected a division to align with the Torah, my jaw fell open and I realized that there was perfect symmetry in the canon when the Five Major Prophets are divided from the Twelve Minor Prophets:

So I sat for a few hours totally dumbstruck at the perfection of God’s Word. Then I realized that I had inadvertently placed the Aleph-Tav at the bottom, and redrew the diagram to get this:

So there it is – the Canon Wheel with Aleph and Tav at the top with the tri-radiant divisions aligned with the arms of the cross which I had habitually been placing in the center of the Bible Wheel for many years. There was no “trying to find a cross in anything.” There was no “force fitting” of anything. It all just happened in the course of about 5 hours on one day. All these pics are digital photos of the actual pics I drew in the course of discovery that morning.