Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS)

Equidistant Letter Sequences

In DON YOUR BRACES ASKEW, ignore the spaces and take letters at intervals of five, starting with the first:

D ON YO U R BRA C ES AS K EW

so the ELS would be DUCK, whether as warning or waterfowl identification to be determined from context.

Most ELSs don't spell words; if I make an ELS out of every third letter in the sentence you're reading, I get gibberish like MTSOSLO . . . , which is more typical. Still, the Torah is a long document, and if you look for patterns, you'll find them.

As a mode of religious inquiry, this seems strange at first. Is the God of the Old Testament really the kind of deity who signals his presence by showing up in a word search? In the Torah, when God wants you to know he's there, you know —ninety-year-old women get pregnant, bushes catch fire and talk, dinner falls from the sky.

Still, Rips, Witztum, and Rosenberg were not the first to look for messages concealed in the ELSs of the Torah. There's some sporadic precedent among the classical rabbis, but the method was really pioneered in the twentieth century by Michael Dov Weissmandl, a rabbi in Slovakia who spent World War II trying, largely in vain, to raise enough money from the West to buy respite for Slovakia's Jews from bribable German officials. Weissmandl found several interesting ELSs in the Torah. Most famously, he observed that starting from a certain "mem" (the Hebrew letter that sounds like "m") in the Torah, and counting forward in steps of fifty letters, you found the sequence "mem shin nun hay," which spells out the Hebrew word Mishneh, the first word of the title of Maimonides's Torah commentary. Now you skip forward 613 letters (why 613? because that's the exact number of commandments in the Torah, please try to keep up) and start counting every fiftieth letter again. You find that the letters spell out Torah —in other words, that the title of Maimonides's book is recorded in ELS form in the Torah, a document set down more than a thousand years before his birth.

Like I said, the Torah is a long document—by one count, it has 304,805 letters in all. So it's not clear what to make, if anything, from patterns like the one Weissmandl found—there are lots of ways to slice and dice the Torah, and inevitably some of them are going to spell out words.

Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg, mathematically as well as religiously trained, set themselves a more systematic task. They chose thirty-two notable rabbis from the whole span of modern Jewish history, from Avraham HaMalach to The Yaabez. In Hebrew, numbers can be recorded in alphabetic characters, so the birth and death dates of the rabbis provided more letter sequences to play with. So the question is: Do the names of the rabbis appear in equidistant letter sequences unusually close to their birth and death dates?

Or, more provocatively: did the Torah know the future?

Witztum and his colleagues tested this hypothesis in a clever way. First they searched the book of Genesis for ELSs spelling out the rabbis' names and dates, and computed how close in the text the sequences yielding the names were to the ones yielding the corresponding dates. Then they shuffled the thirty-two dates, so that each one was now matched with a random rabbi, and they ran the test again. Then they did the same thing a million times.[*] If there were no relation in the Torah's text between the names of the rabbis and the corresponding dates, you'd expect the true matching between rabbis and dates to do about as well as one of the random shuffles. That's not what they found. The correct association ended up very near the top of the rankings, notching the 453rd highest score among the 1 million contenders.

They tried the same thing with other texts: War and Peace, the book of Isaiah (part of Scripture, but not the part that God is understood to have written), and a version of Genesis with the letters scrambled up at random. In all these cases, the real rabbinical birthdays stayed in the middle of the pack.

The authors' conclusion, written with characteristic mathematical sobriety: "We conclude that the proximity of ELSs with related meanings in the Book of Genesis is not due to chance."

Despite the quiet language, this was understood to be a startling finding, made more so by the mathematical credentials of the authors, especially Rips. The paper was refereed and published in 1994 in the journal Statistical Science, accompanied by an unusual preface by editor Robert E. Kass, who wrote:

Our referees were baffled: their prior beliefs made them think the Book of Genesis could not possibly contain meaningful references to modern-day individuals, yet when the authors carried out additional analyses and checks the effect persisted. The paper is thus offered to Statistical Science readers as a challenging puzzle.

Despite its startling findings, the Witztum paper didn't immediately draw a lot of public attention. All that changed when the American journalist Michael Drosnin got wind of the paper. Drosnin went hunting for ELSs of his own, jettisoning scientific restraint and counting every cluster of sequences he could find as a divine foretelling of future events. In 1997, he published a book, The Bible Code, whose cover features a faded, ancient-looking Torah scroll, with circled sequences of letters spelling out the Hebrew words for "Yitzhak Rabin" and "assassin who will assassinate." Drosnin's claims to have warned Rabin of his 1995 assassination a year in advance were a potent advertisement for his book, which also features Torah-certified predictions of the Gulf War and the 1994 collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter. Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg denounced Drosnin's ad hoc method, but death and prophecy move units: The Bible Code was a best seller. Drosnin appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and CNN, and had personal audiences with Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Clinton chief of staff John Podesta during which he shared his theories about the upcoming End of Days.[*] Millions saw what looked like mathematical proof that the Bible was the word of God; modern people with a scientific worldview were presented with an unexpected avenue toward accepting religious faith, and many took it. I have it on good assurance that one new father from a secular Jewish family waited until the Statistical Science paper was officially accepted before deciding to circumcise his son. (For the kid's sake, I hope the refereeing process was on the speedy side.)

But just as the codes were drawing wide acceptance in public, their foundations were coming under attack in the mathematical world. The controversy was especially bitter among the large community of Orthodox Jewish mathematicians. The Harvard math department, where I was a PhD student at the time, had on the faculty both David Kazhdan, who had expressed a modest openness to the codes, and Shlomo Sternberg, a vocal opponent who thought promotion of the codes made the Orthodox look like dupes and fools. Sternberg launched a broadside in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society in which he called the Witztum-Rips-Rosenberg paper "a hoax" and said that Kazhdan and others with similar views "have not only brought shame on themselves, they have disgraced mathematics."

The math department afternoon tea was kind of awkward the day Sternberg's article came out, let me tell you.

Religious scholars, too, were resistant to the lure of the codes. Some, like the leaders of the yeshiva Aish HaTorah, embraced the codes as a means of drawing unobservant Jews back into a more rigorous version of the faith. Others were suspicious of a mechanism that represented a sharp break from conventional Torah study. I heard of one distinguished rabbi who, at the end of a long and traditionally boozy Purim dinner, asked one of his guests, a code adherent, "So tell me, what would you do if you found a code in the Torah that said the Sabbath was supposed to be on Sunday?"

There wouldn't be such a code, the colleague said, because God commanded that the Sabbath is on Saturday.

The old rabbi didn't give up. "Okay," he said, "but what if there were?"

The young colleague was silent for a time, and finally said, "Then I guess I'd have to think about it."

At this point, the rabbi determined that the codes were to be rejected; for while there is indeed a Jewish tradition, particularly among rabbis with mystical leanings, of carrying out numerical analysis of the letters of the Torah, the process is meant only to aid in understanding and appreciating the holy book. If the method could be used, even in principle, to induce doubt as to the basic laws of the faith, it was about as authentically Jewish as a bacon cheeseburger.

The statistical question is how much freedom the search allowed: which names, spellings, dates, intervals, and measures of proximity could be tried before reporting a result? A striking match must be assessed against that search process, rather than judged by how impressive it looks in isolation.