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An early
seeker of hidden messages in the Bible
was Isaac Newton, who believed that the
Bible "is a cryptogram set by the
Almighty - a riddle of the Godhead of
past and future events divinely
fore-ordained. This prophecy is called
the Revelation, with respect to the
Scripture of Truth, which Daniel was
commanded to shut up and seal, till the
time of the end. Until that time comes,
the Lamb is opening the seals."
But as far as is known, the 13th-century
Spanish Rabbi Bachya ben Asher was the
first to describe an ELS in the Bible.
His 4-letter example related to the
traditional zero-point of the Jewish
calendar. Over the following centuries
there are some hints that the ELS
technique was known, but few definite
examples have been found from before the
middle of the 20th century. At this
point many examples were found by the
Slovakian Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl
and published by his students after his
death in 1957. Nevertheless, the
practice remained known only to a few
until the early 1980s, when some
discoveries of an Israeli school teacher
Avraham Oren came to the attention of
the mathematician Eliyahu Rips at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Rips
then took up the study together with his
religious studies partners Doron Witztum
and Alexander Rotenberg, and several
others.
Rips and Witztum invented the ELS letter
array and used a computer to find many
examples. About 1985, they decided to
carry out a formal test and the "Great
rabbis experiment" was born. This
experiment tested the hypothesis that
ELSs for the names of famous rabbis
could be found closer to ELSs of their
dates of birth and death than chance
alone could explain. The definition of
"close" was complex but, roughly, two
ELSs are close if they can be displayed
together in a small rectangle. The
experiment succeeded in finding
sequences which fit these definitions,
and they were interpreted as indicating
the phenomenon was real.
The great rabbis experiment went through
several iterations but was eventually
published (1994) in the peer-reviewed
journal Statistical Science. Although
neither the Editor nor the referees were
convinced by it, they also could not
find much formally wrong with it, so the
paper was published as a "challenging
puzzle." Statistical Science, it should
be noted, does not publish original
research, but concentrates on surveys,
interviews and interesting statistical
puzzles.
Witztum and Rips also performed other
experiments, most of them successful,
though none were published in journals.
Another experiment, in which the names
of the famous rabbis were matched
against the places of their births and
deaths (rather than the dates), was
conducted by Harold Gans, an employee of
the United States National Security
Agency . Again, the results were
interpreted as being meaningful and thus
suggestive of a more than chance result.
These Bible codes became known to the
public primarily due to the American
journalist Michael Drosnin, whose book
The Bible Code (Simon and Schuster,
1997) was a best-seller in many
countries.
In 2002, Drosnin published a second book
on the same subject, called The Bible
Code II. The Jewish outreach group
Aish-HaTorah employs the Bible Codes in
their Discovery Seminars to persuade
secular Jews of the divinity of the
Bible and to encourage them to trust in
its traditional Orthodox teachings.
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