• Torah Code 2020
• Torah Codes Trump
• Torah Code Predictions

Welcome!

This site presents the essence of Torah Codes, summarizing the research from the pioneers of the field from 2002 through mid-Aug 2019.

Torah Bible Codes - Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS) Search Software Research and Development ( TorahBibleCodes.com) - is led by Professor Eliyahu Rips of the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1994 Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg (WRR) developed a method for testing the significance of. There is a code in the TORAH, the first five books of the Old Testament. The Code is real and mathematically provable. Incredibly, the Code seems to have information about what is happening today. Names, places and events are all encoded.

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Update (Oct 31 2019): New decade, new video and new website!

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Update (Oct 31 2019): Would you like me to find your name in the codes? Please see these updated instructions. See also this pagefor the latest developments.

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Update (Oct 27 2018): Announcing a landmark book on the codes, a beautiful step forward in spreading Torah code awareness, written in simple language by a friend, a gentleman and a scholar, Rabbi Ephraim Roitman. Includes profound discoveries and blossoming lines of research: Available here.

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Torah Codes are equally spaced letters forming meaningful words and phrases in the original Hebrew Bible, the Torah. The topic was discussed in the Middle Ages by leading Kabbalists. Its study was formalized in the late 1970's by Professor Eliyahu Rips. Since 1997, it has been my great privilege to learn from him and other leading scientists in the field (biographies here). This site presents the essence of our ongoing investigation. Several of our peer-reviewed papers are presented here.

Our work has also received approbations and encouragement from some of the leading Rabbis of our generation.

This site is directed to the layman and scientist

With the right mix of curiosity and perseverance anyone can reap the reward of a rare and abiding kind of new knowledge - a knowledge introduced thousands of years ago and unlocked only now.

Details: see this page for how the code works, followed by the newest evidence presented here.

Predictions and other abuses:

We avoid abuses that result from incorrect methods which unfortunately make their way into some of the more popular codes books and forums. These abuses result in apocalyptic predictions or backing of particular religious doctrines, and they stem from a serious lack of rigor, defined here. They involve statistically meaningless 'codes' that can be found in any text.

In absolute contrast, for the discerning reader:

Torah Code 2020

We focus on simple patterns of encoded words, such as the Names of Hashem (G-d), with significance not remotely approached by one million
searches of comparison texts. The results remain unexplained, despite attempts to discredit the work. These attempts are by and large arguments about work done in the late 1990s and have all been addressed by the steady stream of results since then.

Examples:

Following are two codes that give a flavor for the topic:

First, for centuries, Rabbis and sages have written about the primordial light from Genesis 1:3, from the Garden of Eden. They indicate that the light was hidden away, but is destined to return. Perhaps we are seeing a few of its rays reflected in this code:

Second, the codes are not limited to ancient events, as we see in the following and in many other exampes:

The codes exhibit statistically very rare patterns not seen in ordinary texts.

Does this begin to affirm the words of the great sage, the Vilna Gaon, of 200 years ago, who stated that everything that ever was, is or will be is contained in the Torah?

Links to newer articles current as of Aug 25, 2019 (see this pagefor the latest).

Torah Code History

The Early Years

The first documented reference to equal distant letter skipsis by Rabbi Bachya ben Asher (1255-1340). He writes of a 4 letter42 letter skip Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS) beginning from the first letter of the Torahthat relates to the average length of the lunar month.For a complete explanation of how this 4 letter ELS producesan amazingly accurate average length of the lunar month,see the discussion on the first els.

The Ramak, Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, (1522-1570) served as the Head of the Rabbinical Court ('Av Beit Din') in Tzfat, Israel, during the 16th century. This was a time when Tzfat stood as the worldwide center for Jewish scholarship. His bookPardes Rimonim is a voluminous commentary on the Zohar.He writes in the introduction to Gate 30 that there are several waysthat there is hidden information encoded in the Torah.

The secrets of our holy Torah are revealed through knowledge of combinations, numerology (gematria), switching letters, first-and-last letters, shapes of letters, first- and last- verses, skipping of letters (Dilugai Otiyot) and letter combinations.

These matters are powerful, hidden and enormous secrets. Because of their great hidden-ness, we do not have the ability to fully comprehend them. Further, to see different angles through these methods is infinite and without limit. On this the Torah says, its measure is longer than the world.

It was the cryptic comment by Rabbi Bachya that influenced Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandlto engage in his study of the Torah codes. Rabbi Weissmandl was the Slovakianrabbi who developed a smuggling operation near the Slovak-Polish border, whichenabled thousands of Jews, at a high ransom price, to reach then relatively safe Slovakia or Hungary. Then Germany invaded Hungary and deportations beganin the Spring of 1942. After 60,000 had been sent to Auschwitz,Rabbi Weissmandl succeeded in negotiating with Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann's assistant,and was able by a $50,000 bribe to halt further deportations. Unfortunately, the deportations were only delayed.

Rabbi Weissmandl was fascinated byBachya's cryptic comment on the 4 letter ELS. He was certain that there waswithin the Torah, coded in equidistant letter sequences, divinely ordained information.He wrote out on white cards 10x10 arrays of the entire 304805 letter Torah and studiedit for ELSs that were near multiples of 10. After his death in 1957 his Talmud studystudents edited their notes of Rabbi Weissmandl's teachings, including some ofhist Torah codes and published the book Torat Chemed.

In 1976, Rabbi Shmuel Yaniv began working on equidistant letter sequencesand associated gematrias, specifically with respect to religious themes.And he began to incorporate this code point of view in his religious lectures. Rabbi Yaniv published his first book צפונות בתורה,Tzefunot Ba'Torah, Volume 1, in 1988, his second book with the title צפונות בתורה,Tzefunot Ba'Torah, Volume 2 in 1989, and his third book with the title צפונות בתורה, Tzefunot Ba'Torah Volume 3,4, in 1990. All his books are in Hebrew. The translation of the title of his4 volume book is Hidden Things in the Torah.

It was Rabbi Yaniv's teachings in the late 1970's that influenced Professor Eliyahu Ripsto examine the Torah from the point of view of codes.It was also Rabbi Yaniv who told Professor Rips about the existence of Rabbi Weissmandl's book Torat Chemed.

The students of Rabbi Weissmandl wrote in the book that they do not remember some findings that Rabbi Weissmandl told them about. For example, they did not know where was the exact location of the ELS Torah with skip -50 at the end of the book of Numbers. Rabbi Shmuel Yaniv told Professor Rips that Avraham Oren hadsearched for the forgotten findings of Rabbi Weissmandl and was able to restore some of them.

It did not take long for Professor Rips to meet with Avraham Oren who was delighted to show Rips his archive of findings. Most of Oren's work was done using hand-written tables, but in some instances he utilized the then available Apple II computer. Therefore, Avraham Oren must be credited as the first one who used a computer in the search of Torah Codes.

Looking into the archive of Avraham Oren, Professor Rips noticed that there were several tables located in the beginning of the book of Leviticus that contained an ELS of אהרן, Aaron.He was intrigued and decided to check whether there were some more appearances of Aharon in the same passage Leviticus Chapter 1 Verses 1-13. For this, he needed a computer program. This program was written by the late Dr. Boris Zukerman z'l in the very early eighties. Given the number of the letters א ה ר ןin this passage, and assuming the text tobe a random shuffling of its letters, with the maximumabsolute skip set to 200, the statistical expectation of the number of ELSs of אהרןin the specified passage is about 8.3 The program of Dr. Boris Zukerman found 25 ELSs of the key word אהרן in this passage. This became known as the cluster of אהרן. Professor Rips thenchecked what happens if the same search were to be madein a random letter permuted text. He also ran some other statistical tests. All of them were consistent with the calculated value 8.3. Under the assumption that the Poisson distribution is applicable,the probability that this event of 25 ELSs of the key word אהרןwould happen by chance is about 1 to several hundred thousands.This was the first instance of a scientific study of Torah Codes, or, at least, of an application of statistical methods to the study of Torah Codes. More details of this study can be read about in Michelson's article.

Shortly after Professor Rips first met with Rabbi Yaniv, he met Dr. Moshe Katz who was also aware of Rabbi Weissmandel's findings and planned to study the Torah Codes himself. For some time Rips and Katz worked together.

Professor Rips continued to study the Torah Codes focusing on the beginning of the book of Genesis. He did not have a computerized text of the Torah then, not even of the book of Genesis. He only had the first three thousand letters. He was trying to find some more clusters like the אהרן cluster. It turned out that this passage indeed contains a number of clusters like for the words Makom, Mikve, Eden and some others concentrated near the appearances of these words in the plain text. However, none of them was as statistically impressive as the אהרן cluster.In 1988, the אהרן cluster work was published in theJournal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, Vol 151,p165.

In the course of his research Professor Rips made the observation that some words appear as ELSs withsmall skips near the place where the word appears in the plain text. For example, the word Makom, place, appears with the skip 2 starting with the letter in position 354 of the text while its appearance in the plain text starts with the letter in position 374. A table showing all the ELSs of מקום from the second verse of Genesis through the 2 nearby ELSsthat Professor Rips had observed is shown in the table below.

Another instance of clustering was for the key word גלות,Exile. The number small skip ELSs of this key word in the text of Genesis are: 4 skip 1 ELSs, 2 skip 2 ELSs, one skip -3 ELS and one skip 3 ELS.The small skip ELS of גלות that Professor Rips observedis the skip -3 ELS. As there are only two absolute skips smaller than skip 3, each one of the skips havingsome ELSs, Professor Rips describes this small skip ELS in the cluster he observed as the third minimalskip ELS of גלות.The table below shows the cluster that Professor had observed.

The cluster is in the story of Lot. Recall a mob of men from Sodom tried to grab the angels who were visiting and being sheltered by Lotand take them to the street to sodomize them as they did with all male visitors to Sodom.The last part of the verse Genesis 19:9 says they approached to break the door [ of Lot's house],ויגשו לשבר הגלת.The table below highlights this phrase in the exile cluster table.

This verse and its context struck Professor Rips as being significant. He thought about themany pogroms to which the Jews in exile had been subjected throughout history. In particular, he recalled thepogroms in Russia: in the period of 1881 through 1884, there were over 200 pogromsin the Russian Empire, those in Kiev, Warsaw, and Odessa. From 1903 through 1906there were pogroms in 64 towns and 626 small towns of the Russian Empire. After 1917, there were an estimated70,000 to 250,000 Jews who were killed in Russian pogroms. For more details read thewiki article. So he decided to look for ELSsof the key word פוגרום, pogram that might be close to the phrase: they approached to break the door. What he found surpised him: an ELS of פוגרוםcrosses the phrase ויגשו לשבר הגלת sharing the letter ג. This is shown in the table below.

Torah Codes Trump

This is an example where the ELS is not a small skip ELS. There are 7 ELSs ofthe key word פוגרום andthe ELS shown in the table above is the fifth from the minimal skip ELS in Genesis or the third fromthe maximal skip ELS in Genesis.

In ancient times, the battering ram would be used to break down the door.The earliest Assyrian battering ram dates from about 900BCE.The time of Lot is many hundreds of years before this and we suppose that battering rams were not known in the time of Lot. But the idea that to break down the door you have to hammer at it was certainly known.It is interesting to see that crossing the phrase they approached to break the dooris an ELS of the key word פטיש, hammer.This is shown in the table below.

The pogrom experiment led Professor Rips to hypothesize that not just small skip ELS might be important,but large skip ELSs also could be important if they their rank from the minimal skipELS is not that far.

Later, but still in the early eighties, Professor Rips talked with Doron Witztum who had lived, through 1979, in the same French Hill neighborhood as Professor Rips. Witztum had been a PhD student at theHebrew University studying and teaching physics. He did his first degree in both mathand physics and his second degree in physics, specializing in general relativity.He left his physics studies in 1977 to spend all his time learning Torah.In the spring of 1985 Witztum decided to do some research of his own on Torah codes. Professor Rips gave him a program for searching for ELSs and this enabled him to do his work on the computers at the Jerusalem College of Technology.In the Spring of 1985 Witztum had results he thought interesting and sharedthem with Professor Rips.

Witztum and Rips tell that they realized that the Torah code phenomena occurred with those ELSs that are minimal on large portions of the text, including even ELSs with very big skips, and excluding short skip ELSs which are minimal skip ELSs on only short portions of the text.This came to be known as the principle of minimal skips: the better ELSs are thosewhich are closer, in rank, to being minimal skip ELSs, even if their skips were largein absolute magnitude.

Witztum suggested focusing on ELSs that are minimal skip ELSs on large portions of the text and examine them for two kinds patterns:

• Meetings between minimal skip ELSs of one expression with a conceptually related expression in the string of letters of the Torah text itself
• Meetings between near minimal skip ELSs of two conceptually related expressions

It was at this meeting that Witztum suggested that the proximity of the two patterns should be measured on two-dimensional arrays. Specifically, for a given ELS with skip s to consider cylinders with circumference s, s/2, s/3 etc. Witztum called this the principle of two-dimensional writing and it is on such codecylinders that all Torah code tables are shown today.Witztum's ideas were immensely fruitful.

During 1985 through 1987 Doron Witztum produced a stream of remarkable findings.Professor Rips was particularly impressed with Witztum'sdiscovery of the הגאון מוילנא, The Gaon of Vilna, code. The minimal skips for both key words in the book of Genesis have a remarkable meetingin a segment of only 46 letters out of 78064 letters of the book of Genesis. This meeting is shown in the table below.

Witztum's French Revolution Study

One of Witztum's early studies was of the French Revolution, an important historical topic.In a period of three years, the royal monarchythat had ruled France for hundreds of years collapsed. In some senses this was thestart of equal rights for all men in the European countries. The first Witztum table we show uses the keywords מהפבה הצרפתית,French Revolution. הצרפתית,French, has only one ELS in the book of Genesis and it is therefore the minimal skip ELS.

The second table below shows the meeting Witztum foundin Genesis of the smallest skip ELS for the key word בצרפת,In France with the key word מהפבה,Revolution.

The flashpoint of the French Revolution was on July 14,1789 when mobs stormed the Bastille which represented the royal authority in the center of Paris. While the prison only contained 7 inmates at the time of its storming, its fall became an icon for the FrenchRevolution. The table below shows the closest meeting between ELSs in Genesis of the key wordsBastille and Revolution. Notice that the ELS for מהפבה,Revolution, in this table and the previous two tablesis the same skip 9 ELS. This ELS tightly links together these three tables, tables appearingon very different and non-resonant cylinder sizes.

At the time of the French revolution the King of France was Louis XVI. He wasfrom the royal family of the house of Bourbon. The table below, which Witztum found, shows the smallest areatable in Genesis having ELSs of the key words House of Bourbon and Louis.

The table belowshows the smallest area table having ELSs of the key words King Louis of France.He was the last king of France and suffered the guillotine in 1793.

By the late 1980's Witztum put together his findings in his firstTorah code book, המימד הנוסף,The Additional Dimension, which was published in the winter of 1988.

The Great Rabbi's Experiment

In the summer of 1985 Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg (WRR)decided to investigate convergences between ELSs of the names and appellations of famous rabbinical personalities and their dates of birth and death.This study would be a formal study of the meetings between near minimal skipELSs of two conceptually related expressions. At that time Yoav Rosenberg was a student at the Jerusalem College of Technology.It was he who wrote the program. Later he went on to complete his PhD in ComputerScience at Hebrew University.

To this end a list of personalities was prepared, using the Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel for the basis of the list. The list was to include only the most famous individuals, i.e. those whose entries consisted of at least three columns of text, and for whom dates of birth and/or death were cited. A list of names and appellations was prepared before the experiment began, by Professor Shlomo Havlin, then head of the Department of Bibliography and Librarianship at Bar Ilan University, following professional guidelines. The rules of orthography and the form of the Hebrew date were also established a priori by the linguist Yaakov Orbach, of blessed memory.

Measurements of the convergences indicated that there is a very strong tendency for the some of the appellations of the personalities to converge with their associated dates. WRR published their results in a Hebrew University report describing their research, in the autumn of 1986.

The report was sent to Professor Diaconis, who is a statistician.Thinking that the experimental results was due to tuning the method to the data, he proposed that a new list of famous personalities be prepared, to be investigated using the exact same program.To compile the new list WRR took those personalities whose entries in the Encyclopedia of Great Men of Israelwere between 1.5 and 3 columns of text, and for whom a date of birth and/or death were cited. The dates were written in exactly the same format as was previously established. This time, too, the list of names and appellations was prepared a priori by Professor Havlin, using the same professional criteria. Measurements were made using the same program as in the first experiment. The results were very successful.

A paper describing the two experiments was published as a Hebrew University report in the winter of 1988.A shortened version of this paper was submitted for publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Professor Robert Aumann. Professor Diaconis was one of the reviewers. In a letter to Professor Aumann, dated 3 Aug. '88, Professor Diaconis suggestedthat a permutation test be used to estimate the p-value of the result. Eventually the details of the test, the number of permutations and the requisite level of significance, were agreed upon by Professor Diaconis and Professor Aumann (as laid down in a letter dated 7 Sept. '90, written by Professor Aumann and approved by Professor Diaconis two days later).Professor Aumann delivered a copy of the agreement to WRR. At Professor Aumann's recommendation a new paper was composed, even before the experiment was run. This version described the new test, leaving out the results, which did not yet exist. This paper was sent to Professor Diaconis and to several other well known statisticians. They approved the test as it was described in the paper, and they stipulated (each one independently) the level of significance that should be required.

The experiment was run in the winter of 1991. The results were very significant: pvalue = 0.000016, well beyond the proposed cutoffs. The results were then incorporated into the paper. The paper was finally published in the journal Statistical Science, Vol. 9 (1994) No. 3, 429-438. The journal article indicates the affiliation of bothWitztum and Rosenberg at Jerusalem College Of Technology. That affiliation arosebecause Jerusalem College of Technology gave them access to theircomputation facility in return for the agreement to list their affiliationsas the Jerusalem College of Technology.

The method designed by Witztum and Rips in the great rabbi's study for scoring compactness is interesting.It involved two independent components. The first component was the compactness of pairs ofELSs in terms of their geometry on the cylinder. The second component involved the qualityof the ELSs. The quality of the ELSs itself had two components. The first component wasthe fraction of the text over which the ELS is minimal. The second component wasthat in searching for ELSs, the maximum absolute skip was set so that the expectednumber of ELSs for the key word would be about 10. In later years, Torah code researchers like ProfessorHaralick did not fully appreciate the need for incorporating the quality of the ELSin terms of the fraction of the text over which the ELS was minimal or in terms ofa ELS quality measure like the Rotenberg R-value. All the tables on this sitehave been created using a protocol that uses area of the table as the compactnessfor the geometry component and the maximum absolute skip being set on the basisof expected number of ELSs. The resulting compactness measure is undoubtedly lesssensitive a detector than the original Witztum and Rips design.

The WRR publication caused a controversy. A discussion of the controversy canbe found at http://www.torah-code.org/controversy/controversy.shtml.Some aspects of the controversy are explained in http://www.torah-code.org/papers/icpr98.pdf.Witztum's website is http://www.torahcode.co.il/and has his extensive remarks on the controversy.The Torah code opponents not only systematically maligned Witztum and Ripsas if they were corrupt politicians, but carried on an agenda of doingmethodologically incorrect non-apriori experiments to show thatcompact tables can be found not only in the Torah but in non-Torah booksas well. Indeed counterfeit experiments produce counterfeit results.This whole controversy from the counterfeit side, cased in languagethat has the appearance of mathematical and statistical correctness can be found in the website of Professor McKay, in the writings of Dr. Dave Thomas of Skeptical Inquirer, in the website of Professor Simon, and the website of Avraham Hasofer. In addition you can view the slides of one of Professor Simon'stalk against the codes.

Following publication of the paper in Statistical Science, in March 1994, Professor Rips was invited to give a guest lecture to the Israeli National Academy of Sciences on the subject of: ELS's in the Book of Genesis: the Statistical Significance of the Phenomenon.A paper (in Hebrew) with this title, co-authored by WRR, was submitted to INASbut was not published.

In 1995 WRR published as a preprint an article entitled: Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis: II. The Relationship to the Text. This article dealt with convergences between expressions appearing as ELS's and expressions appearing in consecutive letters in Genesis. One of the samples discussed in the article was the Nations Sample. Measurements conducted on this sample indicated a particularly high level of statistical significance: the p-level for one of the two statistics used, was better then4/1,000,000,000. In light of criticisms leveled against the composition of this sample and its measurement, by Professor Bar Natan, Professor McKay, and Professor Sternberg, a new and refined study was conducted which led to p-value of 5/100,000,000,000. Thus, a careful analysis of the critics' data and suggestions led to new results supporting WRR research hypothesis with high significance.

Torah Code Predictions

Since WRR's experiment using the second list, other experiments involving different lists have been conducted, including several designed to replicate the original second list experiment. A number of works and published papers are found at Witztum's website.At the beginning of 1999, several lists of names and appellations were compiled by Dr. Simcha Emanuel, a specialist in rabbinical history at Tel-Aviv University. He was engaged by MBBK (McKay, Bar-Natan, Bar-Hillel & Kalai), opponents of the Codes' research, and his work was guided by them without WRR's knowledge. One of the lists was intended to 'mimic' WRR's second list. Emanuel's new list contains names and appellations of the personalities included in WRR's second list, which he collected without seeing Prof. Havlin's original names and appellations for it.Witztum repeated WRR's original experiment exactly, with one single change: Instead of Havlin's names and appellations, he used Emanuel's.The experiment succeeded with considerable significance. You can read about it in the paper New Statistical Evidence for a Genuine Code in Genesis.In 2004, Witztum published his second book צופן בראשית,The Code of Genesis which describes and explains his research and gives an accurate account of the Torah Code phenomena. As well it also the documents that the complete story of the WRR publication in Statistical Science.Mr. Witztum published a paper The Hidden Birth Dates of Personalities of Genesis at the 2006 InternationalConference on Pattern Recognition.