This is a review by Prof. Daniel Michelson
Dept. of Mathematics
University of California, Los Angeles

Let us eliminate the spaces between the words and consider the text as a sequence of letters. Now, starting from a certain letter let us skip N (specific number) letters and read the Nth letter, again skip N letters and read the Nth letter and so on. This will be called a reading with the interval "N". The number N may also be negative in which case the reading is backwards. Of course, besides the interval N one has to know where to start counting and how many intervals to go. Let us make things more clear by showing a few examples.

If one starts with the first letter in Genesis, the of the first word "Bresheet", and skips 49 letters one arrives at the letter , again lets skip 49 letters and we will arrive at the , and skipping another 49 letters will bring us to . Thus one finds that the word . Here we see that the word Torah is spelled out right from the beginning of Genesis.
The number 50 has several important meanings in Judaism. The 50th is the Jubilee year, there are 49 days of Omer which are counted from the second day of Passover until the Shavuot which is the 50th day, and there are also 50 gates of wisdom in Torah. This example is a part of a bigger pattern found by Rabbi Michael Weismandel about 40 years ago. Namely, in the second bood Exodus, the word Torah is again spelled out with the interval of 50 beginning with the very first letter in the book. In the fourth book, Numbers, the word Torah is spelled out with the interval -50, i.e. backwards with the letter starting in the first verse of the book. Finally, in the last book, Deuteronomy, the word Torah is spelled again backwards however with interval -49 instead of -50 and the letter starts in the 5th verse instead of the first. Why this deviation and why is there no Torah in the third book, Leviticus?
Gaon from Vilna wrote in Aderet Eliahu thatDeuteronomy actually starts from the 5th verse, while the first four verses correspond to the first four books. Indeed, the fifth verse reads: "On the other side of the Jordan, in the land of Moab, Moses undertook to expound the Torah. He said..."
It is claimed that Moses was given 49 gates of wisdom instead of 50. Since the subsequent explaination of Torah is given from the mouth of Moses, the word Torah is spelled out with the interval -49. We see that the system is symmetric in the first two books Torah is spelled out forwards and in the last two books, backwards. Hence, in the central book, Leviticus, you don't find the word Torah. Instead, the four letter name of G-d who gave the Torah is spelled out with interval 8 starting with the very first letter of Leviticus. (The number 8=7+1 is closely related to 50=7x7+1 but this is a separate story on which we will not elaborate here).

At this point a sceptical reader would exclaim that the whole system is nothing but a coincidence and the above explaination with 50 and 49 gates of wisdom was "cooked up" to tie several unrelated appearances of the word Torah into a system. "I'm sure", this sceptic would continue, "you would be able to find such words and systems in any book" Since the author of this review was, until recently, such a sceptic, the question of coincidence versus intentional design will be addressed most forcefully in this article. Meanwhile let us mention that on the statistical basis the word Torah is expected to appear with any given interval N in Genesis about 2 or 3 times. This estimate is based on the total number of letters in Genesis (78064) and on the amount of the letters (4152), (8448), (4793) and (6283) in the book. Indeed, Torah appears 3 times in genesis with the interval 50 which is what one would expect from any book of such length and of similar concentration of letters , , , . There is however no reason why one of these three appearances should start with the very first of the book and why this should happen both in Genesis and Exodus. As a matter of fact the probability of such a coincidence is about 1 in 3 million!

The above is one of hundreds of patterns found by Rabbi Weismandel in Torah in the time of WWII. After his death in 1948 (?), his students published in the early fifties the book "Torat Chemed" where just a handful of his findings were exhibited. The rest of the findings were lost. Of course, at that time there were no computers. In stead, Rabbi Weismandel was guided by a deep knowledge of Torah as for what to seek and where to seek. As for the length of the intervals, most of his examples refer to the numbers 50 or 26, the last being the Gematria of the four letter name of G-d. Later on, a few followers of the Rabbi continued the search, which was still done by hand. We should mention Rabbi Shmuel Yaniv, Abraham Oren and their students. But the real breakthrough occurred in 1982 when the computer was put to work. Here most of the credit should be given to Dr. Eli Rips from Institute of Mathematics, Hebrew University who was joined by Dr. Moshe Katz from the Technion, Haifa and later on by Doron Viztum from Jerusalem. Let us make it clear, the computer does not have an intelligence to find meaningful patterns. Instead it is used as a fast and accurate counting machine. The text being investigated is typed into the computer and is stored there as a file of integers. A set of instructions would then tell the computer to look for a certain word in the text with equal intervals in a given range. For example, find all appearances of the word Israel, which in integer form spells 10 21 20 1 12, in the first 10000 letters of Genesis, with equal intervals ranging from -100 to 100. The computer then shows that the word is spelled out only twice, the intervals being 7 and -50 and is located in the four verses 1:31-2:3
We are stunned by the fact that these verses constitute our Kiddush recited every Shabbat evening over a cup of wine. Indeed 7 and 50 are the only numbers related to the Shabbat. the number 7 stands for the seventh day of creation and also for the seventh year [also chalah, candel, wine, meat all = 7]. The 7th year is the year of Shmita when the land rests. Then, after 7 Shmita cycles the land should also rest for the Jubilee year, this is the 50th year. Again, a coincidence? A simple calculation shows that the probability of the word Israel to appear once with a given interval in the above verses is about 1 in 1200. The chance of two appearances with intervals of 7 and 50 either backwards of forwards is about 1 in 400,000. Another interesting example is shown. The text which is Genesis 38 tells the story of Yehuda and Tamar. As the result of their affair, Tamar gave birth to Perez and Zerach. From the book of Ruth we learn that Perez started a lineage which led to Boaz. Boaz married Ruth and had a son Oved, which has a son Yishai, which was the father of King David. So it was a natural question to ask whether King David with his lineage is hidden in this chapter. Indeed, you find the names
/ / /
= Bayez, Ruth, David.
This is spelled out with the same interval -49, moreover, they all appear in the correct chronological order! We already mentioned the importance of 49 being the 7th Shmita followed by the Jubilee. However, 49 is also the last day of the counting of the Omer which starts on the second day of the Passover and ends a day before Shavuot. every day in this counting has a name and the 49th is called Malkut B'Malkut, kingdom of kingdom. Is there a name which would fit David, the king of kings, better? Let us also mention that David was born and died on the very day of Shavuot and the book of Ruth is traditionally studied on this holiday. Shavuot is the day that the Torah (10 Commandments where given. Also, one should know that the Mashiach is called Mashiach ben David... Mashiach son of David. He will be from the same lineage.). But maybe this system is another coincidence? It is easy to estimate the probability of such an event. As we count the total number of letters in Genesis 38 and the relative proportion of each of the letters of the alphabet, we come to the conclusion that the probability of the word Bayez to appear in our chapter with a given interval is 0.02. (That is assuming that on the level of equal intervals the text is random). Similarly, for the other four names the probabilities are 0.63,0.065,0.76 and 0.25. The odds for all 5 names to show up with a given interval are about 1 in 6,500. If we also request that the names line up in chronological order, the chances are reduced to 1 in 800,000. Now, if one would claim that the interval 49 is as important as -49 and the same for 50 and -50, these 3 possibilities would increase the chances to 1 in 200,000, still quite an impressive number!

Let us turn to the third example. We are in the beginning of the Parsha Ica, where it talks about the famous dream of Jacob with the stairway reaching the sky. As Jacob awoke from his sleep he said, "Surely the Lord is present in this place, and I did not know it!" (Gen. 28:16). Where was this place? Rashi writes that this was Mount Moriah where the Temple was built later on. Moshe Katz who was reading the commentaries by Rashi decided to check for the word Mikdash (temple). Indeed, the word does appear with a very important interval of 26, the name of G-d. Starting with the of the word Makom (place) in the above verse. However, as you find another five letter word HaTorah (the Torah) and Mikdash (temple) are spelled as one continuous sequence of 9 letters with the interval 26. The probability of such an event is about 1 in 17 billion! In the same story we also find the words Zion and Makom spelled out with the interval of 26.

The next example was found by Moshe Katz, it is realated to Joseph's second dream in Genesis 37:9-10. "Here I had another dream and here the sun and the moon and eleven stars are bowing down to me." On which Jacob answers,"What is the dream you have dreamed? Are we to come, I and your mother and your brothers, and bow low to you to the ground?" Rashi explains that what Jacob had on his mind: "the mother,Rachel, the moon, had already died, while Jacob did not know that the moon refers to Bilhah, Rachel's maid, who raised Joseph as if she was his mother" As we stick together the words Asher Xlmt Hbua... Which you have dreamed, they spell Rachel Met, Rachel Died. Now we are looking for the word Bilhah. The computer found two appearances of this word on the same page, both starting with the same letter next to the phrase Asher Xlmt, one is with the interval -99 and another with -156.

There are hundreds of equally impressive examples which are not shown here due to the limited scope of this review. However, on the basis of the presented material we ask again the same question, are the above systems a mere coincidence or are they deliberately planned? Now the sceptic concedes that the odds for each individual system are very small, however there are millions of different stories which one could look for so that occasionally some of them occur with small odds. Likewise in a loottery there are millions of players and few winners. The truth of the matter is that there are 3 - 4 people who have been searching mainly the book of genesis by computer for the last two years. They explored perhaps a few thousand words and systems while the success ratio was astounding. Nevertheless, to counter the above argument on a statistical basis one has to find "story - independent" phenomena, i.e. something which could be checked automatically by computer and compared with other texts. The following example will be used to demonstrate such a general phenomena. this example is also important from a historical perspective since it marked the beginning of the "computer era" in the study of Torah.

More can be found at http://www.foreveryjew.com/studiesframes.html

-- Edited by RevDavcurand at 08:17, 2005-03-09