Let’s start at the very beginning. It is, as “>very good place to start. Let’s go to the biblical book of Genesis, or, more specifically, to the Hebrew text of it, known as B’reishit, and look at the first four verses. Let’s start with the first word in the first verse, b’reishit. The last letter of b’reishit is the Hebrew letter tav. Now let’s look for the letter which is fifty letters away from that tav. Let’s repeat that process two more times, each time skipping forty-nine letters and seeking the next letter that is fifty letters away from the one we just found. If you count carefully, when you reach the third letter in the second word of the fifth verse in B’reishit, the four Hebrew letters you find in this sequence are tav, vav, resh and hey. Together, in that order, they spell “>Hebrew Bible.
Congratulations! You have just uncovered a hidden Bible code, one formed by an equidistant letter sequence, or ELS. Skeptics can repeat the exercise, and get the same result, as the beginning of the next book in the Hebrew Bible, the book of Exodus, known in Hebrew as Sh’mot. Find the first tav in the first verse of Sh’mot (it’s at the end of the second word) and the next three letters each 50 letters apart. Again, if you are careful, you should find the sequence tav, vav, resh and hey, or Torah.
Too simple? A mere coincidence, you say? Wait, there’s more.
This time, start at Exodus 11:9. Find the first letter in the name Moshe (Moses), a mem. Now apply the 50 letter ELS process and you should find the letters shin, nun and hey. If so, you have uncovered the word Mishneh. Next, go back to the mem in Moshe. Skip 613 letters to reach the tav in the third word in Exodus 12:11 and begin the 50 letter ELS process once more. Ending at the second hey in the first word of Ex. 12:13, you should, once again, find the tav-vav-resh-hey sequence, which spells Torah. And there you have it: the great work of the incomparable sage “>Mishneh Torah, is not only referenced in the Torah itself, the two title words are linked by the exact number of commandments in the Torah, “>here (at 1/27)), but you get the point.
Some argue that these sorts of sequences and clusters and even more complex word associations in the Torah contain hidden messages, messages placed there when God gave the Torah to “>Talmud, a collection of oral commentary on the Torah, reduced to writing beginning around the third century of the Common Era. Consider the very first word of the Ten Commandments, found in Ex. 20:2. In Hebrew, the word anochi (“I am”) is formed by the letters aleph, nun, khaf and yud. The Talmud reports that Rabbi Johanan suggested that these letters were an acronym for the phrase “I Myself have written the Script.” (See “>Rabbi Bahya ben Asher is said to have mentioned an ELS when commenting on a verse in B’reishit/Genesis. About two hundred and fifty years later, in Tzfat, “>here.) The first reported reference in modern times dates to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Prague “>Eliyahu Rips and two researchers, Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg, (“WRR”) published an article, ““>78,064 Hebrew letters in B’reishit in the “>Benzion Netanhayu, as saying of the code: “If it’s real, then I will believe in God, not only God, but the God of Israel, and I will have to become religious.” (Id. at 79.) Is it real? Drosnin also quotes Hebrew University game theorist and Nobel Prize winner “>Francis Crick, co-discover of the spiral structure of “>Barry Simon contends that the WRR calculations assume an independence of events when no such assumption is warranted. (See Simon, ““>Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, likens the results to the classic stockbroker’s con, in which a broker send out unsolicited stock tips to a wide swath of potential clients and then narrows the number of recipients over time to those who happen to be that tiny minority of originally solicited investors who receive a string of successful calls. Not knowing of his transmissions of unsuccessful tips sent to others, the members of this smaller group reasonably think that his record proves the broker to be a genius and worthy of hiring. There is an underlying flaw in the con and the codes, however, according to Ellenberg. It is that “(i)mprobable things happen a lot.” (See Ellenberg, How Not to be Wrong (Penguin Press 2014), at 98.)
The late Cal State – Fullerton professor of mathematics and statistical mechanics, “>The Rise and Fall of the Bible Code,” at 13-14/24.)
Putting the technical difficulties of the Famous Rabbis Experiment aside, one of the core attractive features of the code claims, the finding of an impressive number of seemingly significant letter and word associations in an ancient text (and, for some, a holy one, at that), was negated early on. Mathematics professor “>Brendan McKay showed, contrary to WRR, that results similar to those reported by WRR could be achieved by a search of the Hebrew version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. (See final edition “>found several.
McKay, Bar-Natan and others subsequently drafted a comprehensive rebuttal to the Famous Rabbis Experiment called “Solving the Bible Code Puzzle” and “>here.)
Presented with the criticism of some of the opponents of the codes, and based on his own new research, Nobel laureate Aumann changed his mind. Not being able to confirm the existence of the Bible codes, in 2004 he “>letter most frequently found in the Torah.
Moreover, finding Yeshua in the Torah is no more probative than finding the names in the Famous Rabbis Experiment. Perakh searched for Yeshua in a contemporary, thoroughly secular Israeli work and found ELS’s and word clusters similar to those found in the Torah for “Jesus is my name”, “Jesus is my teacher,” “Jesus is able” and “Blood of Jesus.” He also found Yeshua in the Hebrew translation of Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. (See Perakh, above, at 7-10/24.)
The failure of the case for Bible codes
The validity of Bible codes should not rise or fall depending on whose theological ox is being gored, and it does not. It fails for more fundamental, more objective reasons. And it fails decisively.
Whatever the objections may be, the rejection of the WRR paper and Drosnin’s code books has been clear and broad. Over fifty mathematicians and statisticians have endorsed the “>www.judaismandscience.com.
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