Abstracted by Jackson Snyder, 11/14/95.

Christian literalists believe that the Bible is the "wholly inspired and inerrant Word of God," and that the Holy Spirit guided the minds and hands of the human authors.

Orthodox Jews believe that every letter of the Torah was dictated directly by God to Moses in a precise and unerring sequence.

"Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis" by Witztum, Rips, and Rosenburg of Jerusalem College of Technology and the Hebrew University published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society tends to prove the understanding of Bible literalists. The authors are mathematical statisticians.

They chose 300 Hebrew word pairs with related meanings, like "Zedekiah" and "Metanya," and "hammer" and "anvil." By using a computer to search, they looked for these pairs of words embedded in the text in close proximity, searching across, horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. The word pairs were found similar to the following figures. The 'x's represent unrelated Hebrew letters:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xMxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxHxxAxxMxxMxxExxRxxxxx xxxxExxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxTxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxAxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxAxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxNxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxNxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxVxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxYxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxIxxxxx xxxxxxxZxExDxExKxIxAxHx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxLxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

figure 1 figure 2

They found all 300 pairs in close proximity, and many times. In addition, they tried pairs of related words that didn't exist in the time of the Torah, like "Hasmonean" and "Hanukkah." It was calculated that the odds of finding these pairs of words in such a way was 1 in 50 quadrillion. (A quadrillion is a 1 with 15 zeros after it.)

Jewish tradition tells us that the Torah contains all knowledge. The most brilliant man in all of Jewish history, the great 18th century Rabbi Gaon, wrote that

all that was, is, and will be unto the end of time is included in the Torah...and not merely in a general sense, but including the details of every species and of each person individually, and the most minute details of everything that happened to him from the day of his birth until his death.

This is reminiscent of the words of Jesus:

I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Torah until everything is accomplished (Matthew 5:18).

For their second paper, published in 1994, they took the names of the 66 most prominent men from the Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel who lived from the ninth to nineteenth centuries and paired them with the date of each man's birth or death. There was no way the author of the Torah could have known these men, yet their names and birth or death dates were found in close proximity in every case. The odds of this happening are 1 in 2.5 billion. The same thing was tried on the Samaritan Pentateuch and Tolstoy's War and Peace without results.

What are the implications of these findings? The liberal journal Bible Review says,

The phenomenon cannot be attributed to anything within the known physical universe, human beings included. Moreover, rigorous proof of the existence and validity of the phenomenon requires both high speed computation and only recently developed techniques of statistical analysis.

What then is the purpose of encoding this information into the text? Bible Review concludes:

"DIVINE AUTHORSHIP?" FIGURES

figure 2