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The Torah Codes, CrackedOK, so maybe God didn't write the Bible.

By Benjamin WittesPosted Thursday, Oct. 7, 1999, at 3:30 AM ET

I'm a rationalist and a skeptic, someone who safely separates faith from reason. But when I read a scientific paper titled "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis," I confess I felt a strong urge to grow side-locks and a long beard and start atoning for my years of doubt. The article, published in 1994 in a prestigious, peer-reviewed journal called Statistical Science, argued with unnerving force that the first book of the Bible contains embedded codes that predict events that long postdate its writing and that these codes are, statistically speaking, "not due to chance." As I wrote in Slate two years ago (see "Cracking God's Code"), the paper's hypothesis, if correct, would all but prove both the existence of God and the divinity of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible).

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The paper startled me and many others. People became Orthodox Jews because of the codes. I know of one man who held off circumcising his son until the paper was published. It spawned a runaway best seller, Michael Drosnin's The Bible Code. It became a recruiting tool for ultra-orthodox Jewish yeshivas. And it amused, then frustrated, mathematicians worldwide. What made the codes especially eerie was that, while scientists were almost universally skeptical of them, nobody could figure out what was wrong with them. No one had published a rebuttal in a peer-reviewed journal. As long as that remained the case, even rationalists like me had to consider the possibility that science could support the most radical religious conclusions.

Related in Slate

In case you missed it, click here to read Benjamin Wittes' 1997 piece on the original Torah codes paper. Soon after, "Chatterbox" reported on the first hints of flaws in the research. Earlier this year, David Klinghofer and Stephen Dubner had a dialogue on the Torah's proper role in Judaism (click here to read the first installment, then follow the daily links to later ones).

Related on the Web

An abridged version of Witztum and Rips' original paper, as well as coverage of the current controversy, can be found on the Official Torah Codes Web page. Australian National University, where McKay teaches, has posted his article; and Barry Simon, an Orthodox mathematician at CalTech, wrote a piece attacking the codes from scientific and theological points of view. Witztum responds to these charges on his own Web page. Aish HaTorah, an international network of Jewish education centers, has assembled additional pro-codes information. You can visit the Web site for Pi--last year's sleeper hit movie about a mathematician who tries to decode the Torah. To buy Michael Drosnin's book, click here. And to conduct your own research on the subject, consider using the Bible Decoder, a software package that can probe the Book for messages in any language.

But the Torah codes' time is finally up. In the current issue of Statistical Science, Australian mathematician Brendan McKay and three Israeli colleagues have convincingly debunked them, and the former editor of Statistical Science who published the original paper has endorsed their rebuttal. For those of us who were freaked out by the codes, the new paper comes as a relief.

The codes' rebuttal has taken so long because the science behind the original paper is very sophisticated. (One of the authors, Hebrew University professor Eliyahu Rips, is a well-respected mathematician.) The original paper sought to test the anecdotal observation that pairs of conceptually related words tend to appear in close proximity to one another in the Torah, coded in what are called equidistant letter sequences. An ELS is a string of letters compiled by pulling letters out of a text at regular intervals. For example, if you start with the first letter of this paragraph and read only every fourth letter, you will find the word "TORT." Every text contains many such "codes," so the question was whether the observation of codes with apparent meaning in Genesis was a deliberate message from the almighty or mere coincidence.

To test whether the Genesis ELS were intentional, Doron Witztum and co-authors Yoav Rosenberg and Rips used a computer to search Genesis for ELS containing the names of famous rabbis and their dates of birth or death. These rabbis were all born long after Genesis was written, so their names could not have been encoded on purpose by any human author. Yet in the Genesis text--unlike in control texts such as a Hebrew translation of War and Peace--the rabbis appeared on average closer to their own dates than to the others'. This seemed to show that someone had actively encoded the text--someone who knew beforehand when rabbis would be born or die.

After years of onerous testing and retesting, McKay and his colleagues--Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, and Gil Kalai--have found the serious methodological flaws the peer reviewers missed. First, McKay et al. note, the codes are hypersensitive to small changes in the data. Excluding only four of the 32 rabbis essentially eliminates the effect, for example.

The core of their critique focuses on the manner in which the rabbis were named in the Witztum-Rips-Rosenberg paper. The names of medieval rabbis are not fixed in the way that modern names are; the great rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, for example, is often called Maimonides or the Rambam. Searching for the rabbis' ELS, therefore, required choices about what names to use for each particular rabbi. Witztum and Rips asked a consultant to compile appropriate appellations for each rabbi, but the rebuttal paper argues that the process used by this consultant was sufficiently subjective as to bias the results. (There is something indisputably bizarre in the spectacle of distinguished mathematicians squabbling about the correct names of 14^th-century rabbis.)

In order to demonstrate that "data tuning" alone could account for the effect, McKay and his co-authors made their own alternative list of appellations for the rabbis, a list they describe as "of quality commensurate" with Witztum and Rips'. This alternative list produced no effect in Genesis but a huge effect in War and Peace. Then, McKay and co. sought to produce the most accurate list they could, using their own consultant. With this list, they found no statistical evidence of codes in any text.

Further evidence of tuning was found in other decisions Witztum and Rips made about their data. The authors of the first paper erred, McKay and his colleagues claim, in how they chose which rabbis to include. The rabbis were supposed to be chosen by an objective criterion--the length of their entries in a particular encyclopedia--but because of the "careless manner" in which this was carried out, rabbis were included who should not have been, while others were wrongly excluded. Birth and death dates were also flawed. The authors collected dates from a wide variety of sources, but apparently did not establish firm rules to decide among disputed dates. McKay and his co-authors also claim that aspects of the experimental design (such as the way distances were measured between rabbis and dates) were tuned. When McKay and his colleagues varied the experimental method, the choices of dates, and the way dates were expressed, the results almost invariably deteriorated.

The rebuttal Illustration by William L. Brown authors note still other problems in the original paper. The Torah's text has varied over the centuries, and when dealing with ELS, tiny variations can be ruinous. Yet when McKay et al. compared the text Witztum and Rips used to other Torah texts--some of which are probably more historically reliable--the Witztum and Rips text produced the strongest results. The authors also note that even using the flawed Witztum-Rips methodology, no book of the Torah besides Genesis shows any effect at all.

McKay and his colleagues do not accuse the original authors of fraud, speculate on how their data-tuning took place, or ask whether the tuning was consciously done. But they conclude that all the choices available to Witztum and Rips created "wiggle room," thus permitting the authors' biases to corrupt the results. "All of our many earnest experiments produced results in line with random chance," they conclude. "In light of these findings, we believe that [the] 'challenging puzzle' has been solved." For all but the true believers, the publication of the rebuttal paper seems likely to end the Torah codes debate.

But for the true believers, of course, the phenomenon was always more than a mere "puzzle," and they are not about to roll over. Rips was sufficiently enraged by Statistical Science's acceptance of the rebuttal paper that he retained a lawyer, who advised the journal that "the accusations in the article about to be published ... are untrue and libelous of Dr. Rips." Rips sought a delay in publication and the chance to respond to the critique in the same issue. (Statistical Science rejected his request but will consider publishing his formal comments in a later issue.) Rips contends that the rebuttal paper misrepresents the original experiment's methods and that it ignores subsequent tests that he regards as immune from data-tuning charges. He wrote me in an e-mail, "I believe that the evidence for the Torah Codes is now stronger than ever. I find the paper by the critics more than extremely unfair."

Those who want to believe in the Torah codes will always be able to find ELS that impress them. But there's a difference now. To believe today that the almighty wrote the Torah is once again, as it should be, a matter of faith. It's not a conclusion that can be forced on me--or anyone else--by statistical science.

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Benjamin Wittes is an editorial writer for the Washington Post.

COMMENTS

The Fraymaster responds:

The author of The Bible Code, Michael Drosnin, responds:

Your article posted late yesterday about the Bible code would not have been published if your reporter, or your editors, had taken the time to check out the facts.

As author of The Bible Code [buy it here], I've spent the past seven years checking out all the claims and counter-claims. Here's two basic facts your article ignores:

(a) The data for the original Bible code experiment was chosen by an independent scholar, Dr. Shlomo Havlin of Bar-Ilan University, who did not know how the data would affect the outcome of the experiment.

That alone absolutely refutes the new accusation that the data was "tuned" or "fitted to the tests."

(b) The original Bible code experiment was replicated by an American codebreaker, Harold Gans, for more than 25 years a senior National Security Agency crypto-analyst. He not only re-did the experiment from scratch, but also confirmed the code using entirely new data.

That alone absolutely refutes the new claim that the results of the Israeli experiment can't be replicated. I understand your reporter's false relief in not having to believe in the Bible code any longer. I'm also secular.

But this new attack by the same old critics does not let Wittes off the hook. He, in fact, has done what he accuses those who believe in the code of doing--he has taken on faith the false claims of the critics.

Had he actually checked the facts, he would know the critics have not "solved the Bible code puzzle"--they told a lie.

They knew that the esteemed scholar who chose the data had stated in writing that he did not know how the data would affect the experiment. They knew that the NSA codebreaker had publicly confirmed that he replicated the experiment. These critics even lied about the results of their own experiments--which did not "debunk" the Bible code.

In fact, the critics first experiment confirmed the Bible code. So they ran a second experiment rigged to fail, and then hid the positive results of their first experiment by lumping them together with the fixed experiment.

All of us who are not religious think we know that the Bible code simply cannot be real. When I first heard about it, that was my entire reply--"I'm not religious."

But then I learned Hebrew, obtained a copy of the computer program used by the world-class mathematician who discovered the code, and worked with it myself every day for years. And then I found in the code a warning that Yitzhak Rabin would be assassinated, and told the Prime Minister--a year before he was killed.

I still don't believe in God. I'm still not religious. But I can assure you that the code is real. Your reporter perhaps too quickly, too easily embraced the Bible code--and has now, like many a disappointed convert, too quickly, too easily embraced the critics.

I'm surprised that you and your editors have followed him without even trying to check out the facts.

And Benjamin Wittes replies to Drosnin's post:

Both Professor Havlin's role in assembling the data for the rabbi's experiment and Mr. Gans' work on the codes are discussed at length in the rebuttal paper. In fact, the central point of that paper, as I noted in the article, is that the criteria Prof. Havlin applied in creating his list of appellations was insufficiently well-defined before the dataset was assembled to be scientifically valuable. Far from ignoring this, I described it as "the core of [the] critique."

While my article does not discuss Mr. Gans' experiments, that is chiefly because they were never published in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal to begin with. The fair-minded reader will agree that the McKay paper devastates the Gans experiments completely.

It is also false to say that I ever embraced the Bible Code or am now a disappointed convert. Rather, I always believed--and still do--that the codes would, if demonstrated to be real, propel a scientifically minded person towards Orthodox Judaism. I have, at the same time, also always believed they would ultimately be debunked. Hence, they did not change my religious convictions at all, though they shook them.

Consider, by contrast, Drosnin, whose work constitutes the least scientific and most intellectually shallow end of the Torah codes discussion. He regards the codes as a proven fact, yet somehow still professes non-belief. How is it possible that such a future-predicting code embedded in such an impenetrable form in an ancient document could be the work of something less than God? How can one believe in the codes and not it God?

It is not McKay and his coauthors who "told a lie." That dishonor, rather, belongs to Drosnin himself for publishing a work that grossly transcends even the now-discredited science on which it was purportedly based.

Many readers, like this one, think that searching for mathematical "proof" of God's existence misses the point:

Faith means that you don't have to have proofs of the existence of God, oh ye of little faith. Anyone whose faith depends upon mathematical letter sequencing in War and Peace or any other inspired writing is grasping at straws.

God meanwhile becomes a wiley cryptographer, encoding astonishing and tremendously important messages: the names of future rabbis. Would that He would have encoded the secrets of day trading. Or perhaps he did and we need the cryptanalysts to ferret out the next IPO sleeper.

This Fray poster gives C.S. Lewis' defense of God's existence:

Benjamin Wittes says that the loss of the Torah codes is a relief. But would it not be sensational to find proof, by way of the rational mind, for a God with continuing interest in our well-being?

C.S. Lewis provided a different kind of rational defense of deism: that the human tendency to claim a moral standard-- even though there is some minor variation on what that standard is claimed to be--suggests that a concern for right conduct is part of our being, put there by a creative force that is more like a mind that anything we know. It would be fine with me to believe with heart and mind. What would be a relief is a loss of skepticism.

…while this respondent says the Bible code controversy represents humanity's desire to find order in randomness, whatever the cost:

The method of ELS generates lots of nonsense with occasional character sequences that we find meaningful. It is possible to find such "messages" in virtually all texts. And we find more than just the names of rabbis--we find the names of political, entertainment and historical figures, including the names of skeptics such as Sagan, Einstein, Asimov, and even the religious right's frequent target, Darwin. The method of ELS demonstrates not divine involvement but human propensity to find order amid random noise.

--Michael Brus (10/8)

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