The Torah Code – approach to the Torah study specially intended for our generation?

Eliyahu Rips

Careful reading of the Torah, whether in the original version or in a good translation, allows to notice some peculiarities in the text, that go beyond the apparently straightforward, linear logic of the tale. Along with that, whatever one's personal convictions on the source of the creation of the Torah are, the last thing one can suspect about the author is a poorly developed logical apparatus. The same tradition that stands behind the text, have produced the Talmud – a book with incredibly complex logical structures, part of which become understood but today (let us mention the discovery by the Nobel Laureate Y. Aumann, with the help of the modern game theory, of a principle, underlying certain directions in the Talmud, that remained incomprehensible for almost two millennia). The Jewish tradition considers unobvious places in the Torah as a starting point for a discussion and tries to understand these places with different kinds of interpretations. There also exists another viewpoint, not contradicting but rather resonating with the mentioned one, where the extraordinary nature of the Torah text is considered as a direct hint that what we have before us – is a code. First mentions of this vision are found in the works of medieval Jewish scholars, the same idea was expressed by Blaise Pascal and many other prominent personalities. Even the founder of the modern science Isaac Newton has spent a major part of his life trying to unclose hidden messages in the Torah. However, possibly but our generation has the tools allowing to conduct a consistent and unprejudiced investigation of the hypothesis that the Torah – is a code. Naturally, one speaks of the possibility of computer processing of data.

We are indebted for the application of computer mathematical software to a systematic study of the possibility of the presence of encoded messages in the Torah to the professor of mathematics of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem Eliyahu Rips. The main object of the study are the so-called equidistant latter sequences (ELS). These arise as follows. A letter is chosen at will inside the Torah text which is considered without divisions into words, as a continuous sequence of letters. Then a letter which is located at a distance of, say, 4 letters from the initial one is taken, after that a letter located 4 letters away from the new one is taken, and so on. Part of sequences obtained in this way turn out to be meaningful, while application of rigorous methods of the statistical analysis shows that the probability of getting such meaningful sequences, just as a result of a coincidence, is vanishingly small. Despite that the topic is extremely far from an orthodox mathematical subject, the rigor of the conducted analysis did not allow to discard the results, and the works by E. Rips and his collaborators, after an unusually tough reviewing procedure, were published in a respectable mathematical journal "Statistical Science".

The studies by Rips and his collaborators have transformed the hypothesis that the Torah is a code from a speculative suggestion into an area of factual knowledge with a rigorously defined procedure of research and analysis. Objections, based on a claim that analogous codes could be found in any book and arise just out of randomness, are in reality proofless. At the same time, if to accept that the Torah is a code, then it becomes obvious that the analysis of the ELS is but the tip of the iceberg, and we should expect a richest diversity of regularities still unknown to us. Possibly it is up to our generation to discover those regularities.