What is the worldwide controversy surrounding the Bible Code? For decades, scholars have noticed that a number of key words occur in the standard Biblical text in the form of arithmetic progressions. However, pursuing this idea was quite hard, due to the lack of sophisticated tools. But nowadays, with the aid of high- speed computers, researchers have tried to establish that the phenomenon in question is real! The first researchers were Doron Witztum, Professor Ilya Rips and Yoav Rosenberg.
The idea behind the research is finding Equal Letter Sequences (ELS), which are words separated by the same number of spaces, e.g, taking the entire Torah or a specific book, dropping spaces between words and looking for new words in the resulting stream.
To provide proof for their research, the researchers conducted the "Famous Rabbis Experiment." The researchers studied the proximity measure for names of prominent Jewish figures together with dates of demise of these figures.
In the following diagram, you can see an example of the research.
The researchers looked at a specific section in the Bible, here in the Book of Genesis (15). In this two dimensional array there are 465/2 letters with no spaces between the columns and rows. The name "Rambam" is written as a sequence of letters, the only time the Maimonides name is shown in the book. In this section, also the name "Ben Maimon" (the Rambam's full name), is shown.
Several mathematicians argue against the Torah codes, as the idea whether the Torah was encoded and now encrypted has raised several voices.
Claims against the codes:
Three fundamental problems were detected by Prof. Simon, one of those objecting to the codes. The first claims that any text of similar size will have similar clusters of words to those found in the Torah. A number of tests were performed in order to prove this.
The first- In the codes, the names of 25 trees were found in the section of Bereshit describing the Garden of Eden. They were all found as ELSs in this section. Dr. Brendan McKay took the same section and performed 100 random permutations of its letters, finding that all 25 tree names still appeared as ELSs in 58 out of the 100.
Prof. Simon performed the same test with "War and Peace" using a section of the book that started at the exact same letter position and had the same length as the original text. He found that all 25 tree names appear as ELSs in the analogous section of "War and Peace".
The second-Brendan Mckay researched the famous book Moby Dick and found clusters based on the names of Indira Ghandi, Rene Moawad, Leon Trotsky, Martin Luther King, Yitchak Rabin and others. Here are examples of what he found in the book:
Prof. Simon finishes this claim by mentioning that " one can always find a story once you locate a cluster ..."
The second problem Prof. Simon found is that the probabilities calculated in the "Rabbi's Experiment" are computed by methods contrary to the accepted laws of probabilities. Without going into detailed calculations of probabilities, the author's claim is that the experiment assumed independence of results in situations where it wasn't valid, therefore displaying better results then there should have been.
The third claim is based on the "Rabbi's Experiment". Prof. Simon claims that the names of the Rabbis could have been chosen in a number of ways. For example: Rambam appears as "HaRambam" and "Rabbi Moshe". The researchers of the "Rabbi's Experiment" found a high statistical correlation for these lists in Bereshit but not in the test text of "War and Peace".
The catch is that these results are purely statistical. In fact, not all 32 Rabbis' names were found close to their dates of birth or death. Accounting for multiple dates and appellations, there were actually 298 pairs tested, out of which 135 (45%) do not even occur as ELS pairs!
Prof. Simon considers the fatal flaw in the "Rabbi's Experiment" the fact that the list of words (see third section) that was made by Professor S. Z. Havlin is not objective, meaning that another researcher can not replicate the choices in the list, since it is based on subjective judgments. He concludes: "The basic scientific necessity, which claims that a used method must be repeatable, is violated, meaning, the experiment isn't valid science!"
Opinion in favor of the codes:
When the original list of rabbis and their dates of birth/death (see introduction) was used, highly significant statistical results were obtained.
Prof. Persi Diaconis, one of the world's leading statisticians, challenged the researchers to perform a new experiment on a second list of rabbis. The method of measurement used in the new experiment was identical to the one used in the original experiment. This experiment, too, yielded highly significant results.
In addition to the experiments done by Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg, a number of other experiments verify the existence of Torah Codes. One of these experiments was performed by Harold Gans, formally a senior cryptologic mathematician specializing in code breaking. He has shown a significant correlation between ELSs of the appellations of both lists of rabbis (original list and test list described in section 2) and ELSs of the Jewish communities in which they were born or died.
Finally, the author refutes the claim stating that the choice of words in the lists greatly changed the results and the significance of the experiment. But, mathematically, it can be proven that a different choice of spelling can merely alter the result by a small factor of 3 or 4. Meaning, the highly significant results that were reached will remain so even after a requested adjustment.
Besides the mathematicians, we cannot ignore this controversy in the religious world.
It was stated that for decades rabbis have mentioned ELS. Amongst them, well- known kabbalists, such as Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, and in our century, Rabbi Weissmandl who found the most famous example of ELS:
Counting at 50- letter intervals, starting from the first tav in both Bereishit and Shemot, the word Torah is spelled out.
However, Rabbi Jacobs states that "one can produce such results from almost any book with a degree of selective adaptation. It has been noted that the 46th word from the end of Psalm 46 in the Authorized Version of the Bible is "shakes" and the 46th word form the beginning is "spear"; it presumably could thus be argued that Shakespeare had a hand in the AV translation." He mentions that "while belief must be reasonable, in the sense that it must not be in flat contradiction to the known facts, to believe is not the same as to prove."
We have presented you with only the tip of the iceberg. If you want more about the subject, we recommend two Internet sites, one in favor of the Bible code and one against. Both have links to other sites on the topic:
1) http://torahcodes.co.il/
2) http://www.wopr.com/biblecodes/
Now it is up to you to decide what you think about the Bible code!