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Torah Soft News - Winter 2002

In this issue:

1) World Trade Center attacks found in the Bible code by Fourth International Torah Codes Society Congress researchers - conference review and summary

2) The 'global approach' - a case study.

3) New books and news about Torah Soft

4) The program, audio lectures, subscription info and links.

1) Fourth International Torah Codes Society Congress Reports

- World Trade Center Code Finds

Outstandingly detailed reports of events related to the WTC attack found encoded in the Biblical text at amazingly small probabilities were presented at the latest International Torah Codes Society (ITCS) congress.

The World Trade Center terrorist attack, new 'bullet proof' 'global approaches' to Bible codes research and improved experimental techniques were the foci of researchers reports at this years Bible codes conference.

The leading scientific researchers of the "Bible Code" met in Jerusalem, Israel, this June 25th and 26th to present and discuss their latest findings. The scientists and scholars, organized as the International Torah Codes Society (ITCS), held the 4th annual congress this year at the Jerusalem Safra Square City Hall. The final public session of the meeting, attended by a large audience, was broadcast live on Jerusalem's "Radio 10" radio station. As in previous years, the researchers from the U.S. and Israel partook in a lively symposium and round table discussion of their latest research.

To hear a summary of the Congress visit us at: http://www.TorahSoft.com/media.htm .

Two of the papers presented dealt with Torah codes perspectives on the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Rabbi Chaim Stahl presented papers in English and Hebrew entitled "The Twin Towers," a comprehensive series of multiple-word small groups of coded finds relating to the 9/11 attacks. Rabbi Stahl found many of the details known about the attacks including particulars of the internal organization of the active terrorist cell encoded in the Biblical text. For those readers interested in reading the report, the English version of this paper may be read online or downloaded from Torah Soft's web-site, http://www.torahsoft.com/wtc1.html.

Mr. Art Levitt presented the second of the papers discussing the Twin Towers attacks. The particular encoded find that motivated this research is the sentence, "Cursed is Bin Laden and revenge is for the Messiah" first discovered by Leib Schwartzman in the text after the September 11th attacks. Unique to this sentence, besides its length, is its conformance to proper Hebrew grammar and syntax, and semantic connections to the Bible itself. This sentence is believed to be the longest top-news-related proper phrase yet found encoded in the Biblical text. The research entitled, "Experiment with Long Expressions," discussed the development of a mathematical model that could be used to discuss the validity of any "long" top-news-related complete sentence found encoded in the Torah. He found the probability of finding the same phrase with the additional extension "I have nicknamed you 'utterly destroyed,'" (harmah ahencha) to be very conservatively one part in 100 million. In addition, Mr. Levitt discussed plans for making a formal statistical experiment to confirm his initial calculations. More details can be viewed at http://www.torahcodes.net .

The Global Approach

Among the highlights of the conference were three papers discussing research on the "global approach" to Torah, or Bible, codes research. Mr. Levitt's paper discussed one form of "global approach". Professor Robert Haralick discussed some theoretical considerations of the "global approach". Mr. Nachum Bombach presented his research of a global approach case study, which will be discussed in some detail later in this newsletter.

The "global approach" answers oft-repeated criticisms raised against Dr. Eliyahu Rips and Doron Witztum's original, groundbreaking Bible codes research originally published in 1994. Prof. Robert M. Haralick of the City University of New York presented the first technical paper, entitled, "How to make a convincing experiment." His paper discussed the theoretical underpinnings of the "global approach". Prof. Haralick asks the question: What is the Torah codes hypothesis? One possible way of answering this question is: If you have key words that have a "close" semantic connection, then these key words will also appear "close" together in the Torah text. A second possible answer is this: If you find key words "close" together in the Torah text, then there must exist some connection between those key words in reality. This second answer is the basis of the "global approach" to Torah codes research. The new approach reduces charges of possibly accidental or intentional bias in the selection of the data set used in the original Bible codes experiments.

In a 'global' approach several major changes are introduced in the design of an experiment. Instead of choosing a narrow list of pairs of keywords to match with each other, a lexicon that is contained in some source, like a dictionary or set of books, is used. One choice of lexicon is the words in the Bible. Secondly, rather than depending on yet another independent source for the spelling, or form of listing of a date, the spelling used in the lexicon is used for the experiment. Then a set of rules is drawn up for how the experiment will be conducted. The experiment is conducted and the results calculated. There is no 'wiggle room', or room for experimenter bias, whether accidental or by design, in either the selection of the lists of words, or in their spelling. The only decisions in the hands of the experimenter are what lexicon is used and what 'rules' are used.

A second technical paper and an analysis of an example of "how not to study Bible codes" rounded off the presentations of the first day of the ITCS congress.

Dr. Alex Rottenberg of Jerusalem presented the second technical paper, "The Best Meetings and Torah Codes Pointers." This paper discussed aspects of how one might qualitatively and quantitatively characterize any particular Torah code find or finds. Many code finds that researchers have previously found strike the viewer as unique and somehow special. However there was no way of determining their uniqueness in a scientifically acceptable fashion. Dr. Rottenberg's research describes a method that addresses this situation. How can one designate the 'best meeting' between two key words or determine if any particular find is significant? For more information on this research see the Torah Soft web site, or listen to the complete lecture on the Torah Soft CD.

Actualities - Truth and Falsehood in Torah codes

The final presentation of the day, by Dr. Moshe Katz, entitled "Falsity in the guise of Truth," ("Da'as Sheker b'maasveh shel da'as emes" in Hebrew) dissected inaccurate and misleading statements in a pamphlet, entitled Da'as Emes ("True Knowledge"). The pamphlet, by Yaron Yaran, a former student, was distributed at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv. The widely distributed pamphlet tries to discredit the concept of Torah codes based on misinterpretations of several Talmudic and post-Talmudic rabbinical writings. Dr. Katz discussed the misleading statements in "Da'as Emes," explaining and correcting the misleading statements according to accepted mainstream Talmudic commentaries.

Codes and the Ten Commandments

Professor Eliyahu Rips of the Hebrew University Department of Mathematics presented a paper entitled, "Multiple meetings and other structural patterns" to begin the second day of the ITCS congress. In this presentation he showed a few of many skip encoded long phrases found in semantically related passages in the Torah. Several examples were given from the Ten Commandments. For example, the minimal letter code occurrence of the phrase, "the murderer" was found near the story of the first murderer in history, the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. Additional occurrences of the same phrase were found near relevant passages of other murders, relating to Cain, Lemech, Esau, Amalek, and the story of Moses and the Egyptian taskmaster. Similarly, the phrase, "the adulterer" was found near relevant passages in the Torah. The best minimal find was found by the story of Zimri the son of Salu and the Moabite princess, Cozbi the daughter of Zur. Additional finds were found near the relevant stories of Esau, Bilaam and his donkey, the commandment regarding the adulterer and adulteress, and that of the betrothed virgin. Prof. Rips showed examples of this phenomenon in all of the five negative commandments of the Ten Commandments, among more than 300 such occurrences that he discovered.

A large audience attended the last session of the conference and was broadcast live in Jerusalem. Dr. Moshe Katz and Professor Robert Haralick spoke about the latest advances in Bible codes research and presented a summary of some of the research presented during the congress. Thereafter questions were fielded by a panel of the scientists from the packed house that came to listen and question. Dr. Moshe Katz acted as moderator and Professors Eliyahu Rips and Robert Haralick answered questions from the audience.

2) The Global Approach - a case study

In Mr. Bombach's 'global approach' study, entitled, "Doing Objective experiments using the Global Approach," a globally constructed list of key phrases was compared to semantically related passages in the Biblical text. The following experimental technique was employed. A list of all five-letter words occurring in the Five Books of Moses was compiled. Two word phrases made from all possible combinations of the list were constructed and examined - only phrases that were semantically possible and conformed to the rules of Hebrew grammar were kept. Of this new list some 3,000 were found encoded in the Torah text (according to basic principles of probability no ten-letter phrase would normally be expected to be found in a text the length of the Torah). Some 5,000 semantically related sentences were found in the text, offering a possible 18 million 'matches' between phrase and sentence. In order to reduce the amount of labor required, Mr. Bombach set as criteria for a 'match' that: 1) one of the phrase key-words must appear exactly in the related sentence, and 2) that the second key-word of the phrase be found in a grammatically related way in the same sentence. Some 350 such closely related phrase-sentence matches were found. One example of his results is this: the phrase "and instead of the flood" was found near the passage of G-d's announcement to Noah that he intended to bring the Flood (Genesis 6:17). Another example is the key phrase "and they carried grapes" which is found close to the description of the Israelite spies bringing large clusters of grapes on their return journey from Canaan (Numbers 13:23). Mr. Bombach calculated the probability of his successful experiment at one in several million, well beyond the probabilistic confidence threshold needed for validation.

3) New books and news about Torah Soft

Several new books about Bible codes have been released in the past year. The major stimulus seems to be the remarkable codes found regarding the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks last September 11.

Rabbi Mattityahu Glazerson published "The Twin Towers in Torah Codes: Related Topics in the light of Torah Codes." The collapse of the world trade center, the current danger in the Middle East and other related topics are discussed in the light of Torah codes. Addressing the glaring immorality that the West has become associated with in Islamic fundamentalist circles, Rabbi Glazerson discusses the weaknesses in Western society that a Bin Laden can fasten on to, wreaking havoc with the weak and the strong together. Based on a historical Biblical perspective, Glazerson offers a profound analysis of the causes of terrorism and a prescription for its cure. Available through Torah Soft's web site.

Michael Drosnin, author of the Simon and Schuster book, "The Bible Code" has written a sequel entitled, "Bible Code II: The Countdown to Armageddon". Torah Soft hasn't yet had a chance to review it, and hope to offer a review in the next Torah Soft newsletter. However, from the title it appears to be another of Drosnin's combinations of some truth and some attempted (frightening, poorly supported and most likely false) prophecy.

The cover picture depicts a September 11th Bible code matrix found by Art Levitt and Prof. Eliyahu Rips last September and posted on the Torah Soft web site over 10 months ago.

Harold Gans has expressed the generally accepted widespread view among Bible codes scientists that one cannot predict the future with Bible codes. He uses this cartoon description from Charles Schulz's "Charlie Brown" character Snoopy. Snoopy we find sitting on his doghouse reading from a book, "All cats have four legs." Snoopy, the philosopher, thinks, "I have four legs: therefore I must be a cat!" The flaw in the argument is obvious. Let's try it with one version of the Bible code hypothesis: 1) "All significant events in the world are encoded in the Bible." When we have: "I found something encoded in the Bible!" we may conclude: 2) "Therefore, what I found must be (or will be) a significant event in the world!" Logically, we can learn from Snoopy that this second statement isn't so. That the second statement isn't so doesn't mean that the first one is also false.

It is relatively easy to pick up a newspaper today and find warnings of impending disasters. To find the same warning in the Bible, encoded or otherwise, does not mean that the disaster is bound to happen. We at Torah Soft believe that the good Lord gave us freedom of choice to take his counsel to heart and act to stave off evil. Available at Torah Soft's web site.

Rounding up our review of Bible codes books dealing with the future is Dan Harlap's "The Bible Code: A Journey to Judgement Day." A personal account describing how he became a Bible codes "believer" Harlap uses Bible code finds to illustrate his personal world outlook, from money to psychology, world politics, music and history, both ancient and modern. Available at Torah Soft's web site.

Barry Roffman an erstwhile Bible codes researcher promises us that his long awaited book on his Bible codes inspired search to find the lost ark of the covenant is still in the offing. A short description by Prof. Robert Haralick of his project is found on Torah Soft's audio lectures page. See there for more.

Torah Soft is planning with the Jerusalem based Root & Branch association (http://www.rb.org.il) the second Bible codes seminar. Last years all day program was addressed by many distinguished Bible codes scientists. This year's event is being planned for late January and may have grown to be a two-day event.

Stay tuned to the Torah Soft newsletter for further information.

At last years R&B event Torah Soft's CEO Dr. Spielberg gave a paper discussing color maps Bible codes and some general scientific principles for evaluating the Bible codes hypothesis. If your group or organization would like an interesting lecture on this fascinating subject, whether at an introductory or advanced level, Dr. Spielberg is available to speak about the topic of the Bible code. Contact Torah Soft for more information.

4) The program, audio lectures, subscription info and links.

The full story

For purchase information for the Bible codes CD, with the complete lectures of the ITCS conference, more information about the ITCS congress, Prof. Haralick's audio summary of the ITCS conference, links to the web sites of ITCS researchers, the full text of Rabbi Chaim Stahl's World Trade Center attack study, an audio report on Barry Roffman's "Search for the Lost Holy Ark," and past issues of the Torah Soft News, visit us at http://www.TorahSoft.com .

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