The history of Torah codes

The scribes who counted

Counting the letters of the Torah is an old Jewish practice. The Talmud, in Kiddushin 30a, records the early scribes' count — naming the middle letter, the middle word and the middle verse of the Torah — and adds that later generations are no longer expert in full and defective spellings. The Masoretes, too, noted the number of verses and the middle of each book in their notes at its end.

The sages of the Talmud describe counting letters; they never describe reading letters at equal intervals.

Rabbeinu Bachya ben Asher

Rabbeinu Bachya ben Asher of Saragossa is often cited as an early example: his commentary on Genesis 1:2 is said to point to letters read at an interval. The passage is cited far more often than it is quoted, and we print no wording we have not read in the source itself.

Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl (1903–1957)

Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl, a rabbi and scholar from Slovakia who re-established the Nitra yeshiva in the United States after the Second World War, is remembered for observations of letters at equal intervals in the Torah — among them תורה at a skip of 50 from the first ת of Genesis and of Exodus.

His observations were recorded by his students and published after his death; most of what is cited in his name comes to us through them. The gallery checks each of these claims on the Leningrad text and shows the exact start and skip.

Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg in Statistical Science

Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg reported that the names of famous rabbis and their dates of birth or death appear as equidistant letter sequences in Genesis closer together than their statistical test expected by chance. The journal presented the paper to its readers as a puzzle to examine.

Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, Yoav Rosenberg, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis", Statistical Science 9(3), 1994, 429–438.

McKay, Bar-Natan, Bar-Hillel and Kalai in Statistical Science

Brendan McKay, Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel and Gil Kalai argued that the choices behind the 1994 experiment — which names and titles to use for each rabbi, and which forms of the dates — allowed enough flexibility to explain its result, and that the effect did not survive their controls. They showed that comparable choices could produce a comparable result in a Hebrew translation of War and Peace.

The authors of the 1994 paper disputed this critique, and the exchange continued in other writing. The two papers remain the main statistical record.

Brendan McKay, Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, Gil Kalai, "Solving the Bible Code Puzzle", Statistical Science 14(2), 1999, 150–173.

Rabbinic views

Views differ. Many contemporary rabbis caution against treating letter sequences as evidence of anything or as a way to learn of future events, and urge that the Torah be studied for its plain meaning and its teaching; others have found the observations a reason to look more closely at the text.

This laboratory measures and claims nothing: it finds the sequences, shows where every letter stands, and prints what chance alone would produce beside every count.