Re: Equal Interval Reading

mzeldman@aish.edu
Tue, 24 Sep 1996 19:22:31 +0000

On Mon, 19 Aug 1996 17:01:28 -0400, Jack Adler <jacka@specdata.com> wrote:
> I have been very impressed by the article by Professor Daniel Michelson
> entitled Reading the Torah with Equal Intervals, which I downloaded from the
> web. It certainly seems relevant to the ongoing discussion re: proofs of
> the Mesorah. I believe this approach to the "codes' in the Torah is a basic
> component in Aish Hatorah's Discovery program. The findings discussed in
> Prof. Michelson's article are almost enough to make this natural skeptic a
> believer in Torah MiSinai (the divine revelation of Torah).
> Can anyone tell me if there are any books or other scholarly articles
> available (in English) on this subject and where they can be found? Have
> there been critiques of this approach published by either orthodox or
> nonorthodox reviewers?

There has been much discussion and, unfortunately, misinformation
disseminated regarding ELSs (Equidistant Letter Sequences) in the Torah. As
a researcher and presenter of the Torah codes, I want to set the record
straight on a couple of matters.

1) A rigorous, controlled experiment looking for statistically significant
codes was performed on the Book of Genesis. The results were published in a
top journal of Statistics, Statistical Science in August 1994. (Volume 9,
issue 3). The editor of the journal, Robert Kass from Carnegie-Mellon,
describes the results as "highly significant". To date, not a single error
has been found, nor has any scientific critique been leveled at the
reasearch, despite the fact that the journal goes to practically every
major university with a statistics department around the world.

2) At present the only book that has been published with the consent of the
researchers is a book in Hebrew called "Meimad Hanosaf" (The Extra
Dimension), by Doron Witztum, the leading researcher in the field. He is
presently wroking on a book in English with many dramatic examples of codes
findings as well as a thorough description of the methodology.

Moshe Zeldman <mzeldman@aish.edu>