Torah codes: questions and answers
Plain answers about the laboratory, the text it reads and the figures it shows.
Questions
What is a Torah code?
A Torah code is an equidistant letter sequence (ELS): a word spelled by letters standing the same number of places apart in the text, counted with no spaces between the words. That number is the skip.
Does a Torah code prove anything?
No. This laboratory measures and claims nothing: beside every count it shows how many sequences chance alone would be expected to produce in the same letters, and short words of common letters appear at some skip almost everywhere.
Which text do you search?
The Westminster Leningrad Codex, as the consonants are written (the ketiv): 304,850 letters in the Torah by our count, where the figure most commonly cited is 304,805. Editions differ by a few letters, and we call neither count the correct one.
Can I search the whole Tanakh, or a single book?
Yes. The Torah is the default; you can choose the whole Tanakh (1,197,042 letters), the Prophets or the Writings, any of the twenty-four books, or a range of chapters.
What is a skip?
The distance between the letters of a sequence: at skip 50 you read every 50th letter. Skip 1 is the text as written, so searches start at skip 2 unless you ask for 1.
What does backward mean?
A backward sequence reads against the text's order: its first letter comes later in the text, and it is shown with a negative skip, so −50 means each next letter stands 50 places earlier.
How are final letters treated?
By default a final letter counts as its ordinary form — ך as כ, ם as מ, ן as נ, ף as פ, ץ as צ — in the text and in your term alike; the strict setting keeps the five final forms distinct.
What about ketiv and qere?
The search reads the ketiv, the text as written, by default; the qere setting substitutes the read form for the words where the Masoretes note one, so you can compare the two.
Why are results listed in canonical order?
Every list on this site runs in the order of the text, from Bereshit forward, so a sequence is listed by the position of its first letter; sorting by skip or by compactness is a choice you make.
How is the chance figure computed?
For each skip, the number of places the term can start is multiplied by the product of its letters' frequencies in the scope, and the results are added over every skip and direction searched. The probability of finding at least as many as were found is read from the Poisson distribution with that mean.
What are control runs?
A control run shuffles the scope's letters — the same letters, in random order — and runs the same search again; repeated runs show how many sequences a text with no order would give, beside the real count.
Can I search the Divine Name?
Yes. The Name is searched on its true letters, and it is displayed under the site's reverent-display setting wherever it appears.
Is the laboratory free?
Everyone gets every feature. A free account runs 5 code searches, every search you have already run stays open — re-run it any time, free, forever — and Premium Membership searches without limit; without an account, each search shows a preview of its first 3 sequences.