The Mysterious Hebrew Codes

Special Notice: The conclusions of this Paper have been invalidated with New Research findings. Please see: Code Breaker

"It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter." Proverbs 25:2

Recently, researchers in Israel discovered a staggering phenomena of hidden codes beneath the Hebrew text of the Old Testament that reveal an astonishing knowledge of future events and personalities that cannot be explained unless God inspired the writers to record His precise words. The material is possibly the most important evidence I will present in the book that will prove to any unprejudiced observer that the Scriptures are truly inspired by God.

Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl, a brilliant Czechoslovakian Jewish scholar in astronomy, mathematics, and Judaic studies, found an obscure reference in a book by a fourteenth-century rabbi known as Rabbeynu Bachayah that described a pattern on letters encoded within the Torah. This discovery during the years before World War I inspired Rabbi Weissmandl to begin exploring for other examples of codes hidden within the Torah. During the war years he found that he could locate certain meaningful words or phrases, such as hammer and anvil, if he examined the letters at sequences that were equally spaced in the Hebrew text. In other words, if he found the first letter of significant word such as Torah, and then, by skipping forward seven letters he found the second letter of the word Torah, he continued to skip forward the same number of letters to see whether or not the complete word Torah was spelled out in the text at equally spaced intervals. Rabbi Weissmandl described this phenomenon as "equidistant letter sequences" (ELS). The rabbi was astonished to find that an incredible number of significant words were hidden in code within the text of the Torah at equally spaced intervals. These spaced intervals between significant letters varied from every five letters, every seven letters, and numerous other intervals. However, once they found a particular word spelled out at, say every 22nd letter, the balance of the letters from the words in this group were also spaced at an interval of every 22nd letter.

Initially, Rabbi Weissmandl could not be certain if this phenomenon was truly significant or whether it was simply due to the great number of possible combinations of words and phrases that could occur by chance arrangement by skipping forward various intervals of letters in the Hebrew text. The proof that this phenomenon was evidence of a supernatural intelligence and design was confirmed almost forty years later in Israel. The invention of sophisticated computers and statistical analysis was finally able to analyze the text of the Bible to prove that these codes could not have been produced by random chance. Although Rabbi Weissmandl found many coded names by simply manually counting the letters in the text, he did not record his discoveries in writing. Fortunately, some of his students did record several examples of his code discoveries. Over the following decades, students in Israel who had heard about his research began searching the Torah for themselves to ascertain whether or not such codes actually existed. Their discoveries ultimately resulted in he research studies at Hebrew University that have proven the validity of this research. The introduction of sophisticated high-speed computers allowed Jewish scholars at Hebrew University to explore the text of the Torah in ways that previous generations could only dream about.

Equidistant Letter Sequences

A group of dedicated Jewish scholars in Israel, following up on Rabbi Weissmandl's research, found many additional hidden codes embedded within the text of the Torah. A paper called Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis, was published in 1988 in the scholarly Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. This academic magazine is one of the most prominent mathematical and scientific journals in the world. The study was completed by Doron Witztum, Yoav Rosenberg, and Eliyahu Rips at Hebrew University and the Jerusalem College of Technology. This study has been republished in several other respected scholarly journals recently, including Bible Review, October 1995, and on the Internet. Their discoveries of complex Hebrew codes that reveal supernatural and prophetic knowledge about the future is causing tremendous consternation in the academic community because it challenges the long-held beliefs of liberal scholars who generally reject verbal inspiration of the Bible.

This scientific discovery is earth-shaking in its consequences because it reveals a staggering level of mathematical design and intelligence which could only have been produced by a supernatural mind, providing unshakable mathematical proof that the Bible was truly inspired by God. The incredible data demolishes forever the false claim by liberal scholars and skeptics that the Bible was written and edited by uninspired men and that it is full of errors and contradictions. Despite the fact that numerous scholars and scientists have attempted to challenge the validity of this Torah research, the evidence has not been refuted.

Every Jot and Tittle

Jesus Christ, Himself, affirmed that the actual letters composing the Scriptures were directly inspired by God and were preserved in their precise order throughout eternity. "For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled" (Matthew 5:18). The English word jot is our translation of the Greek word iota, the Greek letter i. This iota is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew letter yod, which is the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. The word tittle is the Greek work keraia, derived from the smallest Hebrew grammatical symbol. Jesus Christ stated that even the smallest of the letters and grammatical marks in the original text of the Bible were directly inspired by God.

This intriguing statement by Jesus about the Scriptures has been confirmed two thousand years later by means of an intricate analysis of the Hebrew text of the Bible by mathematicians and computer scientists in Israel. To their total surprise, these researchers discovered that every single letter of the Torah fits into a complicated tapestry of staggering mathematical precision. In this regard we should remember the provocative words found in Proverbs 25:2, "It is the glory of God to conceal matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter."

This phenomenon of Hebrew codes was placed beneath the text of the Bible thousands of years ago. However, it has been hidden successfully by God until our generation. Many of these codes could not have been discovered by manual examination of the text. The invention of high-speed computers, developed in the last twenty years, enabled the researchers to examine every possible combination occurring in any of hundreds of possible intervals (from every second letter to every 500th letter, for example) throughout the millions of Hebrew letters in the Old Testament. However, once detected by the computer program, anyone can personally verify the existence of the code by manually counting out the letters to see that a particular name is spelled out by skipping the appropriate number of letters.

The Process of Analyzing the Torah

Using the ancient Hebrew textus receptus (the Masoretic text) of the Torah, the scientists began by eliminating the spaces between the Hebrew letters, words, and sentences throughout the first five books of the Bible. The traditional Orthodox text was written in this manner-without punctuation marks or spaces between the letters, word, grammatical marks, or sentences. To demonstrate what this would be like, let us take a sentence in English and write it out as it would appear in an ancient Hebrew manuscript.

THEBIBLEWASWRITTENINHEBREWWITHOUTPUNCTUATIONMARKS

To understand this sentence, we break it up with appropriate spaces:

THE BIBLE WAS WRITTEN IN HEBREW WITHOUT PUNCTUATION MARKS

There is a curious tradition in the writings of the ancient Jewish sages who claim that Moses first saw the Hebrew letters of the Torah revealed in his vision on Mount Sinai as a continuous sequence, without spaces between letters, composed of letters of black fire appearing upon a background of white fire. The sages wrote that Moses wrote these divinely revealed letters one-by-one in the five books of the Law, the Torah, as he recorded God's commands to Israel.

In their initial experiment, reported in their 1988 paper, the scientists arbitrarily chose three hundred Hebrew work-pairs that were logically related in meaning, such as hammer and anvil, or tree and leaf, or man and woman. They asked the computer program to locate any such word pairs in the Genesis text. Once the computer found the first letters in Hebrew of "hammer," it would look for the second letter at various intervals or spaces between letters. If the program couldn't locate the second letter of the target word "Hammer" following the first letter at a two-space interval, it would then search at a three-space interval, then a four-space interval, etc. Once it located the second letter at, say, the twelve-space interval, it would then look for the third letter at the same twelve-space interval, and so on through the entire 78,064 Hebrew letters in Genesis. The computer also looked for coded words by checking in reverse order. Since the computer can compute millions of calculations every second, the scientists could quickly examine every 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th letter, for example. The sophisticated computers could examine every one of millions of possible combinations to discover encoded words that no human could ever have found manually, including such words as Hitler, Berlin and Sadat.

After the program had examined the text for each of the three hundred word-pairs, the researchers were astonished to realize that every single word-pair had been located in Genesis in close proximity to each other. As mathematical statisticians, they were naturally astounded because they knew it was humanly impossible to construct such an intricate and complicated pattern beneath a surface text, such as Genesis, which told the history of the Jewish people. After calculating the probabilities of this phenomenon occurring randomly by chance alone, they published their calculations in their scientific journal. The odds against the three hundred word pairs occurring by chance in the text of Genesis are less than one chance in fifty quadrillion. To express this number another way, it would look like this: one chance in 50,000,000,000,000,000! Most scientific journals consider an experimental result significant if it exceeds the probability of one chance in twenty. The bottom line is that only a supernatural intelligence, far beyond our human capacity, could have produced the pattern of secretly coded words found in the Bible.

More Surprises

As they studied this pattern the scientists discovered that many of the coded words described future events and personalities in human history, from ancient times until today. When they looked at the string of Hebrew letters in Genesis 1:1, they counted forward forty-nine letters from the letter , the first letter (tav) of the Hebrew word Torah and found the second letter in the word. Skipping forward another forty-nine letters they found the third letter of the word Torah. Incredibly, the Hebrew word Torah was spelled out using every fiftieth letter in the text.

To their surprise they found that the opening verse of Exodus, the second book in the Bible, contained the same word Torah, once again spelled out at the same fifty-letter intervals beginning with the first appearance of the letter . However, when they examined the opening verses of the third book of the Bible, Leviticus, they did not find Torah encoded. However, they did discover the word God was spelled out when they skipped forward every eighth letter from the first letter yod that appeared in the book.

Upon examining the initial verses of Numbers and Deuteronomy, the fourth and fifth books of the Bible, the scientists again found that the word Torah was encoded. In the Book of Numbers, the word Torah is spelled out in reverse at a fifty-letter interval. However, to their surprise, while the word Torah was also found to be spelled out in reverse order in the Book of Deuteronomy, it appeared at a forty-nine-letter interval beginning with the fifth verse of the book.

Mathematicians calculated that the odds were more than three million to one against the word Torah being encoded by chance alone within the opening verses in the first five books of the Bible. Bible students know that the number fifty is very significant in Scripture. For example, God commanded Israel to free their slaves and return family lands that had been pledged to a lender on the fiftieth Year of Jubilee. In addition, the Bible reveals that Law itself, the Torah, was presented to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai by God precisely fifty days after their miraculous Exodus from Egypt.

These coded words are interlaced in intricate patters at evenly spaced intervals in the text reading both forward and backward. The scientists realized that these coded letters formed words and associations of such complexity and design that it is absolutely impossible that the patterns could have occurred by chance.

It is fascinating to observe that the key word "Eden" is encoded repeatedly sixteen times within the relatively short Genesis 2:4-10 passage of only 379 Hebrew letters dealing with the Garden of Eden. The odds against sixteen "Edens" occurring by chance in such a short passage is one chance in ten thousand. Another fascinating feature of this phenomenon was found, in Genesis 2, which deals with the Garden of Eden. Scientists found twenty-five different Hebrew names of trees encoded within the text of this one chapter. The laws of probability indicate that the odds against this occurring are one hundred thousand to one (Professor Daniel Michelson, Codes in the Torah).

Thousands of detailed and precise patterns and codes such as these were discovered hidden in the Hebrew text of the ancient Scriptures. Mathematical and computer statisticians, after exhaustive statistical analysis, concluded that this patter of coded words could not have occurred by chance nor could a human writer have purposely produced this phenomenon. Their conclusion is that only a divine intelligence could have directed Moses to record this precise text containing such complex codes thousand of years ago.

Other Mysterious Codes Reveal God's Prophetic Foreknowledge

The scientists discovered that some of the words coded in the text of the Torah concerned events and personalities that occurred thousands of years after Moses wrote the text. Naturally, many academics rejected out of hand the possibility that this phenomenon could be real. However, despite many attempts, no one could refute the data. They recently discovered a pair of words - "Zedekiah", the last king of Judah in 587 B.C., when Jeremiah was a prophet, and "Matanya", which was king Zedekiah's original name before he ascended the throne (2 Kings 24:17). Incredibly, they also found the word "Hanukkah", which refers to the festival of lighting the Menorah that commemorates the rededication of the Temple after it was recaptured from Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 165 B.C. The word "Hanukkah" appears near the word "Hasmoneans" which is the famous name of the family of warriors led by Judias Maccabee, the Jewish general who defeated the Syrian armies of King Antiochus IV Epiphanes. How could the writer of Genesis have known about King Zedekiah and the Festival of Hanukkah when the Book of Genesis was written centuries before they occurred?

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat

Possibly the most astonishing of the phenomena recently discovered involves codes that reveal events that occurred in our generation. As one example, the name of the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat occurred together with the name of the leader of the Moslem Brotherhood assassination team that killed him. The same code sequence also contained the year of his assassination, 1981, and the words "president", "gunfire", "shot", and "murder". Incredibly, even the Hebrew word for "parade" appears in this coded sequence. President Sadat was assassinated during the president's review of a military parade in 1981.

Adolph Hitler, the Nazis, and the Death Camps Were Prophesied in the Bible

Truly one of the most incredible of the hidden codes is their discovery of the words "Hitler", "Nazis" and names of several of the actual death camps embedded within this text of the Book of Deuteronomy: "For the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a might, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God; him shalt thou serve, and to him shalt thou cleave, and swear by his name. He is thy praise, and he is thy God, that hath done for thee these great and terrible things, which thine eyes have seen. Thy fathers went down into Egypt with threescore and ten persons; and now the Lord thy God hath made thee as the stars of heaven for multitude" (Deuteronomy 10:17-22).

In the Hebrew text of Deuteronomy 10:17-22 , the word "Hitler" in Hebrew is spelled out at a twenty-two letter interval. Beginning with the second last appearance of the Hebrew letter (bet) in this passage, researchers counted every thirteenth letter from left to right. To their amazement they discovered that the coded letters spelled out the phrase, "b'yam marah Auschwitz", which means, "in the bitter sea of Auschwitz". As they carried the counting forward another thirteen letters they came to the letter resh . From this resh, they counted every twenty-second letter from left to right. To their amazement they found the word "Hitler", the name of the greatest enemy of the Jews in history, the one who almost conquered the Western World in World War II. It was Hitler's satanic obsession against the Chosen People that motivated him to create the Final Solution which ultimately slaughtered over six-million Jews and another six-million Poles and Russians in the murderous death camps in Eastern Europe, such as Auschwitz. Amazingly, the actual names of the Nazi concentration camps, "Auschwitz" and "Belsen", were also encoded close to the word "Hitler" and "Berlin" in a cluster of letters hidden within the text of this passage in Deuteronomy.

Scientists found the Deuteronomy 33:16 also contained a hidden message about the Nazi Holocaust. Beginning with the first Hebrew letter mem , they counted every two hundred and forth-sixth letter from left to right and found that the coded letters spelled out the phrase, "Melek Natzim", which translates as the "King of the Nazis". Another group of nearby letters spelled out the phrase, "laiv m'Laivi" which means, "the heart from Levi", referring to the Levites, one of the twelve tribes of the Jews. Incredibly, this same passage yielded another hidden code about the rise of Nazi Germany; the phrase "kemi bait rah", "an evil house rose up".

One of the most fascinating of these Nazi codes appeared in Deuteronomy 32:52. Beginning with the appearance of the first letter aleph , the researchers counted from left to right every six hundred and seventy letters throughout the passage, and discovered the name "Aik'man", which is a Hebrew form of the name "Eichmann". Adolph Eichmann was a Nazi official who designed the Final Solution, the evil system of concentration camps used in the Holocaust. Eichmann and Hitler were among the greatest killers in history.

The whole series of hidden codes dealing with Nazi Germany ended in Deuteronomy 33:21 with a final astonishing code. Beginning with the letter resh that appeared in the word "Yisrael", researchers counted every twenty-second letter from left to right and found the tragic phrase "re'tzach alm" describing the terrible sufferings of the Jews during the Holocaust, which translated as "a people cry murder, slaughter". I have often been asked by Jews about why the Bible's prophecies do not say anything about the Holocaust, the worst event in the history of God's Chosen People. Now we can see that God included these coded words beneath the text of the Bible describing this terrible time of persecution.

Skip           Word(s)
-------------------------
50             the Holocaust 

The French Revolution in the Torah

Another passage in the Book of Genesis revealed a cluster of encoded words that deals with the French Revolution. The following words are clustered together: "Mapecha HaSarfatit" (which spells "the French Revolution" in Hebrew), "Louis", the name of the French king, and word "Beit[house of] Bourbon", his royal dynasty. In the same cluster were the following words: "Hamarseilles"(the name of the French national anthem) and the word "Bastilla"(the infamous French prison for political prisoners that was stormed by revolutionaries). Interestingly, this cluster dealing with the French Revolution appears embedded in Genesis, chapters 39-41, which describe Joseph's imprisonment in Egypt. The Hebrew word for "Bastilla" is found encoded within the sentence in Genesis 39:20 that describes "the prison in which the king keeps his prisoners".

It is fascinating that these messages and data have been hidden secretly within the text of the Torah for thirty-five centuries until today. However, a skeptical and scientifically minded generation in our lifetime has generally rejected the authority and inspiration of the Bible. There is a greater need for our generation to see evidence and proof that the Bible is the true Word of God. In the sovereign plan of God, it is only in this generation of sophisticated high-speed computers and new techniques of statistical analysis, that men could both discover and fully appreciate this divine message from the past that introduces our skeptical generation to the God of their future.

Dr. David Kazhdan, chairman of the mathematics department at Harvard University, warned those who would casually reject this evidence of Torah codes: "The phenomenon is real. What conclusion you reach from this is up to the individual".

The Scientists Prove Their Findings

The Israeli scientists wrote a follow-up paper for submission to Statistical Science, a scientific journal that insisted that a group of opposing scholars review and challenge their data and examine their computer program before publication. Despite the fact that all of the reviewers held previous beliefs against the inspiration of the Scriptures, the overwhelming evidence and the integrity of the data forced the editors to approve the study's scientific accuracy and reluctantly publish the article. Robert Kass, the editor of Statistical Science, wrote this comment about the study: "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". ("Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis", Statistical Science, August 1994). The study concluded that the peculiar sequences of Hebrew letters at equal spaces from each other that formed significant words could not possibly have occurred by simple coincidence.

The Response From Recognized Experts

I realize that this information will sound almost unbelievable to many readers. However, the well-respected mathematician, Professor Kazhdan of Harvard University, and his fellow scientists from other universities including Yale and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, have confirmed that this is "serious research carried out by serious investigators". These recognized experts in mathematics wrote a letter confirming the value of this research in the introduction to a recent Israeli book about this phenomenon called Maymad HaNosaf (The Added Dimension), written by Professor Doron Witztum of the Jerusalem College of Technology. Professor Witztum is the leading researcher on these Torah codes. Realizing that this discovery is extremely controversial in today's academic world, these scientists encouraged additional research on the phenomenon and declared that "the results are sufficiently striking to deserve a wide audience". In light of their known attitude of rejection of the Bible's inspiration and the supernatural, their statement is a powerful endorsement that the phenomenon is legitimate.

One of the most interesting of the experiments examined the text of Genesis 38, which describes the history of Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar, who gave birth to two sons, Pharez and Zerah. The Book of Ruth tells us that King David, the greatest king of Israel, was descended from Pharez in this manner: Pharez was the ancestor of Boaz, who married Ruth and gave birth to Obed, the father of Jesse, who was the father of King David. Every one of the five Hebrew names of these ancestors of King David were found encoded at forty-nine-letter intervals, hidden within the text of Genesis 38. Incredibly, these five names also appeared in the correct chronological order as recorded in the Bible. The statisticians calculated that the odds against these five names occurring in this passage in the exact, chronological order they lived, are more than eight hundred thousand to one against this happening by chance.

They also examined the text of Genesis 28 dealing with Jacob's vision of the ladder to heaven, which he received at Mount Moriah, the "place of God". The scientists found the key words "Temple" and "Torah" encoded at twenty-six-letter intervals in a continuous sequence of nine Hebrew letters. The occurrence of these two significant words occurring together in sequence in a biblical passage declaring that "this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven" is extraordinary. The researchers calculated the probability of these key words occurring by chance in this passage dealing with the "place of God" was less than one chance in seventeen billion (17,000,000,000).

In another analysis, they examined the first chapter of Leviticus, which records God's laws concerning the priesthood of Aaron, the High Priest of Israel. They found the Hebrew name "Aaron" encoded twenty-five times in this one chapter, not counting the four times the word Aaron appears in the normal surface text. The odds against this occurring by chance are more than four hundred thousand to one.

Scientists who have studied these results state no human could create such a Hebrew document containing hundreds of encoded, significant words hidden within this text. They concluded that it would be impossible to reproduce this phenomenon in a Hebrew text even if they had the help of a group of brilliant language geniuses, or the assistance of the world's most sophisticated super-computers. In addition, it is impossible to account for the prophetic knowledge of future personalities and events found in these codes. The inescapable, logical conclusion is that God inspired Moses to record the precise Hebrew words in the words of the Torah. In addition to demonstrating that the text of the Torah was dictated by God, this evidence of this marvelous design destroys the false theory of the skeptics that the Book of Genesis was created by different "editors" who interwove several different texts centuries after the life of Moses. Only one supernatural mind could have imposed this marvelously complex design upon these five books of the Law. Only God could have designed the text of the Torah. Recently, the researchers discovered similar codes throughout the Old Testament.

More Astonishing Discoveries

In a 1994 follow-up paper, the team of researchers recorded the results of their search for pairs of encoded words that relate to events which occurred during the period long after the time when Moses wrote the Torah. They selected the names of thirty-four of the most prominent rabbis and Jewish sages during the thousand years leading up to A.D. 1900. Interestingly, the researches simply selected the thirty-four sages with the longest biographies in the Encyclopaedia of Great Men In Israel, as well-respected Hebrew reference book. They asked the computer program to search the text of the Torah for close word pairs coded at equally spaced intervals that contained the name of the famous rabbis paired with their date of birth or death (using the Hebrew month and day). The Jewish people celebrate the memory of their famous sages by commemorating their date of death. Incredibly, the computer program found every single one of the thirty-four names of these rabbis embedded in the text of Genesis paired at significantly close proximity with their actual date of birth or their date of death. The odds against these particular names and dates occurring by random chance were calculated by the mathematicians as only once chance in 775 million.

Scholars at the Statistical Science Journal who reviewed this experimental data were naturally astonished. They demanded that the scientists run the computer test program again on a second sample searching for the next thirty-two most prominent Jewish sages listed in the encyclopaedia. To the astonishment of the skeptical reviewers, the results on the second set of famous sages were equally successful. The staggering result of the combined test revealed that the names and dates of their birth or death of every one of the sixty-six most famous Jewish sages were coded in close proximity within the text of Genesis.

An article in Bible Review magazine by Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, in October 1995, reported that the mathematical probability of these sixty-six names of Jewish sages and their dates of birth or death occurring by chance in an ancient text like Genesis was less than one chance in two and a half billion! Interestingly, the researchers attempted to reproduce these results by running the computer program on other religious Hebrew texts outside the Bible, including the Samaritan Pentateuch. The Samaritans developed their own variant text of the five books of Moses, called the Samaritan Pentateuch, which differs in many very small textual changes from the Hebrew Bible, which is the basis of our modern Authorized King James Version. Despite the surface similarity of the two texts to the normal reader, the researchers could not detect word pairs in the Samaritan Pentateuch or any other Hebrew text outside the Bible.

When you carefully think about the phenomenon you can see that even a minor change of spelling or choice of words would totally destroy the precise sequence of Hebrew letters that reveals these hidden words coded at evenly spaced distances throughout the text of the Torah. A reviewer insisted they attempt to find codes in a Hebrew translation of Tolstoy's famous novel War and Peace, because it was the same length as the Book of Genesis. However, the phenomenon was not present in War and Peace; nor any other modern Hebrew writing. In fact, an exhaustive analysis reveals that no other Hebrew text outside the Old Testament contains these mysterious codes, not even the Hebrew apocryphal books written during the four hundred years before the birth of Christ.

Naturally, following the appearance of this article on divine authority in Bible Review, there was a virtual onslaught of letters to the editor in the following monthly issues attacking the article in the strongest terms. Most of the critical letters dismissed the phenomenon out-of-hand without seriously considering the scientific data that was presented. Several critics attacked the author's argument and data in ways that revealed they either failed to grasp the actual statistical method used to detect the Hebrew codes or they didn't understand the rigorous methodology that eliminated the possibility that this phenomenon had occurred by pure random chance.

After his research was published in Bible Review in November 1995, the original researcher, Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, responded to his critics who had challenged his assertion that a pattern of elaborate and significant words was encoded within the text of the Torah. Dr. Satinover replied to his critics as follows: "The robustness of the Torah codes findings derives from the rigor of the research. To be published in a journal such as Statistical Science, it had to run, without stumbling, an unusually long gauntlet manned by some of the world's most eminent statisticians. The results were thus triply unusual: in the extra ordinariness of what was found; in the strict scrutiny the findings had to hold up under; and in the unusually small odds (less than 1 in 62,500) that they were due to chance. Other amazing claims about the Bible, Shakespeare, etc., have never even remotely approached this kind of rigor, and have therefore never come at all close to publication in a peer-reviewed, hard-science venue. The editor of Statistical Science, himself a skeptic, has challenged readers to find a flaw: though many have tried, none has succeeded. All the 'First Crack' questions asked by Bible Review readers-and many more sophisticated ones-have therefore already been asked by professional critics and exhaustively answered by the research. Complete and convincing responses to even these initial criticisms can get fairly technical" (Bible Review, November 1995).

Some critics have suggested that the Israeli scientists simply played with the computer program long enough, that by chance alone, "they got lucky". This objection raises the relevant objection that there might be numerous unreported "hidden failures", a common problem in most scientific research today. To prevent this from occurring, editorial observers from the Statistical Journal demanded that the scientists analyze their data by examining a completely new group of personalities that were chosen solely by the Statistical Journal's editorial judges, namely the sixty-six most famous Jewish sages. The results I quoted earlier were based on this group of individuals chosen by these judges. In addition, the judges appointed by the Statistical Journal analyzed the computer programs to determine that they were both valid and neutral in their design.

We need to keep in mind that the standard text of the five books of the Torah was published years ago in widely available computer programs and printed texts. These texts cannot be modified. In fact, as a result of the production and sale of fascinating "Torah Codes" computer programs that are now available in North America, anyone with a computer and lots of time can personally verify the existence of these codes beneath the text of Scriptures. I have personally verified the presence of these fascinating patters of hidden codes during long hours of examination using the computer programs I acquired several years ago in Jerusalem when this research was just beginning.

Professor Harold Gans, a senior researcher who examined sophisticated foreign government intelligence codes for the U.S. Army, has publicly confirmed the existence of these codes as reported in Statistical Journal through the use of advanced analytic techniques and his own sophisticated computer program. Dr. Gans is a brilliant mathematician who has published 180 technical papers. Gans learned of this discovery by Professor Witztum of coded words hidden within the Torah. However, as a skeptic, he initially believed that the claims were "ridiculous." Unlike many readers, as an intelligence specialist dealing with complex codes and computers, Gans had the technical ability to test the claims and data for himself. In 1989 he created a complex and original computer program on his computer to check Witztum's data. For nineteen straight days and nights, Gans let his program examine all possible variations and combinations in the 74,064 Hebrew letters in the Book of Genesis. Dr. Gans program checked through hundreds of thousands of possible letter combinations at many different spaced intervals. Finally, Gans concluded that these Torah codes actually existed and that they could not have occurred by random chance or by human design. He had confirmed the absolute accuracy of Professor Witztum's conclusions. As a result of his discoveries, Professor Gans now teaches classes in synagogues throughout the world about the incredible evidence proving divine authorship of the Bible.

A follow-up study examined the data on the sixty-six hebrew sages in the last 2000 years. Incredibly, Dr. Harold Gans's study found that the text of Genesis also revealed the encoded names of the actual cities where each of these sixty-six sages was born. Professor Witztum produced a new scientific paper, on this new set of data about the cities of the sages which proved the odds against this occurring by chance was one chance in 250,000,000. In responce to the claim that this phenomenon is a result of simple chance, the scientific team determined that the odds against even the simplest codes occurring by random chance is only one chance in 62,500. However, when we examine the most complex patterns mentioned in this paper the odds are far in excess of billions to one against the possibility that this phenomenon has occurred by random chance. I can assure you there are many additional examples that will be revealed in the future. Careful investigations are now being conducted by many scientists from other universities and laboratories that confirm the supernatural nature of the phenomenon.

A Caution Regarding This Phenomenon of Hebrew Codes

There is an important caution we need to keep in mind regarding this phenomenal discovery. Remember that no one can search the Torah using these codes to foretell future events. The reason is that it is impossible to extract the encoded information unless you already know what the future facts are. The information about future event cannot be pulled out of the text in code in advance of the event because you wouldn't know what to tell the computer to look for. It is only after the event has occurred that you could have the program look for the name of the person or the event and check to see if the codes contain the information concerning the event. In other words, this method confirms that the Torah has encoded data about events that occurred centuries after it was written. However, the method cannot be used to foretell the future. The Bible prohibits us in foretelling the future.

The ability to prophesy future events is left to God alone. The Bible clearly forbids fortune telling. The prophet Isiah warned against false prophets and declared only God can prophesy future events accurately (Isaiah 46:9,10). When an event has occurred and we can verify that the codes within the text of the Bible accurately describe it thousands of years ago then God will receive the glory, not man. Although this discovery proves that some future events were encoded by God within the text of the Torah, we must wait until the future becomes the past before we can find it. It is also important to remember that although the phenomenon of hidden codes is statistically powerful, it is still relatively weak. The proximity of the word-pairs in the Hebrew text is defined only statistically. In addition, the phenomenon of word-pairs appears only when we examine a large number of examples that reveal a much closer proximity than would be expected by chance occurrence alone.

Another important point to note is that these Hebrew codes do not contain any hidden theological or doctrinal messages. this phenomenon has nothing to do with numerology. There are no secret messages or theology. God's message to mankind is only found in the open words of the Scriptures. However, the discovery in our lifetime of these incredible codes reveals names and events that provide a wonderful proof to a sceptical humanity that God truly inspired the writers of the Bible to record His message to mankind.

The phenomenon of Torah codes is now being presented to Jewish groups and synagogues throughout North America and Israel by a group called "Discovery Seminar," sponsored by the Alish HaTorah College of Jewish Studies. This group was created in Israel by a number of scientists, mathematicians, and Judaic scholars. In addition to presentations in Israel, Aish HaTorah have adapted the material to English enabling their teams to share this fascinating information with Jewish audiences throughout the world showing the divine inspiration and authority of the Torah. Many people have told me that numerous agnostic Jews have returned to their religious roots in Orthodox Judaism as a result of their exposure to this incredible evidence of God's inspiration of the Scriptures.

The Implications

Even those scholars who are philosophically opposed to God and the inspiration of the Bible are stunned by this research. Despite many arguments and challenges the data still stands uncontested. Secular scientific journals have declared that the phenomenon is real and not a result of fraud or computer error. The simple truth is that this phenomenon could not have occurred by chance alone. Nor could any group of brilliant human beings, even with super-computers at their disposal, produce this awesome result of encoding a huge number of significant names beneath the surface text of the Torah. The odds against these biblical codes occurring by random chance are one in several billion.

To those who would casually ignore these odds and suggest that they are not that impressive, consider this equivalent scenario. Imagine that someone blindfolded you and laid out before you a mountain of one billion pills loaded with cyanide. In the whole pile of pills is one pill that contains sugar. Would you blindly swallow one of these pills by chance if you knew that only one pill contained sugar while all of the rest would result in instant death by cyanide poisoning?

It would surpass the skills of any group of human writers to encode these complex and prophetic messages within the text of the Torah. Since the evidence is overwhelming that the five books of Moses were written over three-and-a-half thousand years ago we are left with the undeniable conclusion that this phenomenon is another clearly authenticated signature of God upon the pages of His message to mankind.

Some Examples;

Here are some more pairs of finds related to places, people and times and history.

The AIDS epidemic - Here are more finds connected with the AIDS virus that appear coincidentally from Dr. Doron Witztum's book, "HaMaimod HaNosaf" (The Additional Dimension). In this case, the text was searched for the word 'a destruction' near the passage in Genesis dealing with the destruction of the Flood (Noah). In the same tableau the minimum occurrence of the the words 'in the guise of a virus' is found coincidentally with the words 'AIDS' and 'a terror'.

The Gulf War - Israeli negotiations with the P.L.O. - These finds connected with the Gulf War and the recent Israeli negotiations with the P.L.O. collected from the Aleynu Seminars and from Dr. Moshe Katz. Each set were found in small matrix tableaus in Sefer Bereshis:

Special Notice: The conclusions of this Paper have been invalidated with New Research findings. Please see: Code Breaker

Reference: Jeffrey, Grant R., "The Signature of God", Frontier Research Publications, Inc. (1996), p.202-220

"The Signature of God" can be ordered from GRANT R. JEFFREY MINISTRIES

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Additional References for the tables:

TORAH SOFT NEWS, VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1, PURIM, 5753

-Codes in the Torah, Prof. Daniel Michelson, in B'Or HaTorah, Number 6, 1987, p. 7-39, SHAMIR, Jerusalem.

-Jewish Studies Magazine, Yeshiva Dvar Yerushalayim, 33, Jerusalem, Summer 5747-1987.

-Discovery, Jerusalem and Arachim, Bnei-Brak Seminars ___________________________________________________

TORAH SOFT NEWS VOLUME 1, NUMBER 2
Torah Soft News - Summer '95 SHAVUOS, 5755

-Codes in the Torah, Prof. Daniel Michelson, in B'Or HaTorah, Number 6, 1987, p. 7-39, SHAMIR, Jerusalem.

-Codes in the Torah: A Rejoinder, Prof. A. M. HaSofer, in B'Or HaTorah, Number 8E, 1990, SHAMIR, Jerusalem.

-Codes in the Torah, discussion- Profs. Michelson, HaSofer, Eidelberg, Rabbi Stolper, in B'Or HaTorah, Number 9, 1995, p. 113-129, SHAMIR, Jerusalem.

-Jewish Studies Magazine, Yeshiva Dvar Yerushalayim, 33, Jerusalem, Summer 5747-1987.

-Discovery, Jerusalem and Arachim, Bnei-Brak Seminars.

-D. Witztum, E. Rips, Y. Rosenberg, Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis, Journal of Statistical Science, Aug. 1994.

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