....For this second of three pages I will review the long history of involvement by earlier rabbis in finding ELS codes in the Torah before computers were available, and also tell the story of the statistical study that put these codes in the NEWS once computers were indeed available to make such codes easier to find.... Most modern books about the Torah Codes begin by relating these historical items.

.""Rabbeinu Bahya, in his 1291 commentary on Genesis, uncovers a term hidden in Genesis 1:2 in a skipping code of 42 letters, starting at the passage where, according to the Kabala, the 42-letter holy name is to be found!

In the 16th century, Rabbi Moshe Kordaviro stated explicitly that there were skipping letter codes in the Torah. For several centuries, interest in this subject dwindled. Pardes Rimonim p. 68a

The man who rekindled interest in skipping letter codes was the late Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandel. His work on skipping letter codes is all the more remarkable when we realize it was done without computer assistance. Some of Weissmandel's findings were presented in a book, Torat Chemed, edited by his pupils after his death. These findings were the main inspiration for the author of this book in probing the mystery of skipping letters.

Avraham Oren, a computer science teacher from Sedeh Eliyahu - a kibbutz in Beth-Shean Valley, was another pioneer in this field.

Rabbi Shmuel Yaniv of Givat Shmuel added his own findings, and Rabbi Moshe Grillak, editor of the journal of Jewish thought Nitzotzot, has published there an article on the subject.

The idea of implementing the letter skipping concept via a computer scan in a Biblical research, was first suggested by Dr. M. Katz, the author of this book, in a 1983 proposal submitted to the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. The initial findings of this study were published in Nitzotzot. Dr. M. Katz: Skipping Letters to the Unknown Strata (in Hebrew). Nitzotzot, Nissan 5745 (April 1985). pp. 4-15.

Hebrew University of Jerusalem mathematician Dr. Eliyahu Rips made an independent study of skipping letters, focusing on the search for concealed structures within the letters of Genesis.

These initial findings engaged the interest of physicist Doron Witztum, who undertook a thotough investigation. His subsequent book and paper caused a stir among famous mathematicians throughout the world.

D. Witztum: HaMaimad HaNosaf: Al HaKtikva HaDu-Maimadit B'Torah, Jerusalem 5749.

D. Witztum, E, Rips and Y. Rosenberg: Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis, Statistical Science, August 1994, Vol. 9 No. 3, 429-438.

Professor Daniel Michelson, a Soviet immigrant, was another scientist who researched the topic and contributed his share to the pool of uncovered information.

D. Michelson: Codes in the Torah, B'or Ha'Torah 6, 1987 pp. 7-39. 

.. Katz's work and Katz's book "Computorah" are not discussed in Michael Drosnin's 1997 book "The Bible Code" but the Statistical Study that made the Torah Code famous world-wide is discussed briefly on page 21-24. Drosnin interviewed Eliyahu Rips one of the major figures Katz has mentioned above.

"When I applied a computer, I made the breakthrough," Rips explained. "I found words encoded far more than statistics allowed for by random chance, and I knew I was on to something of real importance."

"It was the happiest time in my life," said Rips, who came to Israel from Russia more than 20 years ago, and still speaks with an accent that is both Hebrew and Russian."

"Although he is religious, and in the top right corner of every page of his calculations writes two Hebrew letters thanking God, for him, like for Newton, the math is also sacred."

"Rips told me (Drosnin) he had developed a sophisticated mathematical model that, when implimented by a computer program, confirmed that the Old Testament is in fact encoded."

"He was stalled however in making the final breakthrough, a way to prove the reality in a simple and elegant way. Then he met another Israeli, Doron Witztum."

"Witztum is a physicist but not connected to any university and, compared to Rips, is unknown in the world of science. But it was Witztum who completed the mathematical model, and Rips considers him 'a genius like Rutherford.'"

"He handed me a copy of their original experiment, 'Eguidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesia.' The abstract on the cover page read, 'Randomization analysis indicates that hidden information is woven into the text of Genesis in the form of equidistant letter sequences. The effect is significant at the level of 99.998%.'"

"I read through the paper as we sat in his living room. What Rips and his colleagues had done was to search for the names of thirty-two great sages, wise men from Biblical to modern times, to determine whether their names, and the dates of their birth and death, were encoded in the first book of the Bible. They looked for the same names and the same dates in the Hebrew translation of War and Peace and in two original Hebrew texts. In the Bible the names and the dates were encoded together. In War and Peace and in the two other books, they were not."

"And the odds of finding the encoded information by random chance were ultimately found to be 1 in 10 million."

"In his final experiment, Rips took the thirty-two names and sixty-four dates and jumbled them in 10 million different combinations, so that 9,999,999 were a mismatch, and only one was a correct pairing. He then did a computer run to see which of the ten million examples got a better result -- anf only the correct names and dates came together in the Bible."

"None of the random pairings matched,' said Rips. 'The results were 0 vs. 9,999,999, or one in 10 million."

"A senior code-breaker at the top secret National Security Agency, the clandestine U.S. government listening post near Washington, heard about the startling discovery in Israel, and decided to investigate."

"Harold Gans had spent his life making and breaking codes for American intelligence. He was trained as a statistician. He spoke Hebrew. And he was sure that the Bible code was "off-the-wall, rediculous."

"Gans was certain he could prove that the code did not exist. He wrote his own computer program, and he looked for the same information the Israelis had found. He was surprised. It was there. The dates that the sages were born and died were encoded with their names."

"Gans could not believe it. He decided to look for intirely new information in the Bible code, and thereby expose the flaw in Rips' experiment, possibly even reveal a hoax."

"' If this is real,' said Gans, 'then I figured that the cities where these men were born and died ought to be encoded as well.'"

"In his 440-hour experiment Gans checked not only the names of the thirty-two sages Rips finally used, but also thirty-four others from an earlier list, checking all sixty-six against the names of the cities, and the results made him a believer."

"It sent a chill up my spine,' recalled Gans. The cities also matched the names of the sages in the Bible code."

"The Pentegon code-breaker, using his own computer program, had independently replicated the Israelis' results. Men who lived hundreds and thousands of years after the Bible was written were encoded in detail. Rips had found the dates. Gans had found the cities. The Bible code was real."

"Weconclude that these results provide corroboration of the results reported by Witztum, Rips, and Rosenburg,' wrote Gans in a final report of his investigation."

"In evaluating the Bible code,' he later said, 'I was doing the same kind of work I did at the Department of Defense.'"

"At first, I was 100% skeptical,' said the Pentagon code-breaker. 'I thought this was all just silly. I set out to disprove the code, and ended up proving it."

"The Bible was encoded with information about the past and about the future in a way that was mathematically beyond random chance, and found in no other text."

"Rips and Witztum submitted their paper to a leading American math journal, "Statistical Science". The editor, Robert Kass, a professor at Cernegie-Mellon, was skeptical. But he decided to have it checked out by other experts, the peer review process standard in all serious scientific journals."

"to Kass' surprise, the Rips-Witztum paper passed. The first referee said the math was solid. Kass called in a second expert. He,too, said the numbers held up. Kass did somethingunprecented -- he called in a third expert."

"Our referees were baffled,' said Kass. 'Their prior beliefs made them think the Book of Genesis coud not possibly contain meaningful references to modern-day individuals. Yet when the authors carried out additional checks, the effect persisted."

"Kass sent an E-mail message to the Israelis: 'Your paper has passed the third peer review. We will publish it."

"Despite the automatic skepticism of secular mathematicians, no one could find fault with the math. No one could raise an unanswered question about the experiment. No one could explain away the startling fact that the Bible was encoded -- that it revealed events that took place after the Bible was written."

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