J6: Codes

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This is where the counting bit comes in.

Rabbi Michael Weissmandel (see his war story) first
had the idea to approach the Bible in an arithmetic
way. He decided to look for the code-word TORAH (Tav, Vav, Resh, Heh) in the first book of the Bible, Genesis. Circling the first Tav that he found, he decided to skip 50 letters. (Why 50 ? Well, the Torah was given 50 days after the Jews left Egypt, so he thought this would be a good starting gap). The amazing thing is that he actually DID find TORAH spelt out at intervals of 50 letters, not only in Genesis but also in Exodus. If you want to see this for yourself, go straight to the examples page. There is no need to panic if your ability to read Hebrew is not what it used to be, the alphabet and transliteration also appear on the same page.

A War Story

Rabbi Weissmandel was born in Czechoslovakia at the end of the 19th century and he was very active in the Czech Resistance during the 2nd World War. Deported to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1944, Rabbi Weissmandel jumped from the train and survived the Holocaust. A gifted mathematician, he used his knowledge of the Torah to research a variety of codes, including the TORAH example that has been mentioned. After his death in 1957, his students published some of the codes that he had discovered.

What is ELS?

Equidistant Letter Sequences is exactly what you and Rabbi Weissmandel have been doing, only more so. In the 1970's and 1980's, three Israeli mathematicians started working on a computer programme that would scan the Bible by skipping fixed sets of letters to make up new words. Computers, being able to search a vast amount of letters in a short time, have greatly aided the process of tracking down codes in the 304 805 letters of the Torah (Five Books of Moses). Typically, a computer can be programmed to search every nth letter where n = any value from 1 to thousands thus making the search for codes infinitely simpler.

Decoding Genesis

The programme developed by Professor Eliyahu Rips, Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg scanned Genesis for the hidden names of 32 Jewish sages who lived between the 9th and 18th century. The results, published in 1994 in the scholarly journal Statistical Science, showed not only most of the names of these sages but also, more interestingly, the dates of their birth and death encoded close to their names.

The programme also confirmed the existence of the TORAH code first found by Rabbi Weissmandel. In statistical terms, the odds against this TORAH code existing in both the books of Genesis and Exodus at set intervals of 50 letters are more than 3 million to one.

Cinderella Meets the Prince and Becomes a Best-Seller

The Israeli findings were extraordinary - how could the author of Genesis know details about rabbis who lived centuries after it was written ? The Qumran Scrolls discovered in 1947 proved that the Bible existed at least from the first century BCE, 1200 years before the Jewish sage Maimonides lived. Nonetheless, these codes attracted only a limited audience.

That is, until the American journalist Michael Drosnin became interested in them. Spending many hours with Rips and Witztum, Drosnin was shown how other "hidden" phrases could be found in the text of the Bible. For example, the word "Hitler", "Nazi" and "slaughter" were found in close proximity to each other. Another of Drosnin's "findings" was the assassination of Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin.

Between Deuteronomy 2:33 and 24:16, the name of Yitzhak Rabin appeared with a space of 4772 letters in between each letter. (You can see now why a computer is needed to work out these codes). Crossing the name was the passage from Deuteronomy 4 : 42 (look it up), where the Torah discusses what is to happen to a person who kills another person without intent (manslaughter). The actual phrase in Hebrew reads: "rotseach asher yirtzach et re'ehu bivli da'at . . ." or "a killer who kills his neighbour without intent. . . ". Drosnin is only interested in the first three words "a killer who kills", seeing this as an indication of a prophecy that Rabin would be killed. Clearly the text is being taken out of context here. Without knowing about the actual event, one could not say, looking at the text, whether this meant that Rabin would be called a killer by some people (he was) or whether he had committed unwitting manslaughter (he was a professional soldier, after all) or whether someone would kill him without intent (his killer has certainly claimed intent). All these possibilities existed in the year Tav Shin Nun Vav (September 1995 - 1996) of which the code appears nearby.

Of course we know now that Prime Minister Rabin was in fact tragically killed. Once the context of the event became known, the code-searcher also found the words Tel Aviv and Amir near Rabin's name. Before the event, however, before knowing the context, no accurate predictions could be made. The Code might exist but interpreting it can raise all sorts of problems.

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