Does the Torah Code Predict American Presidents?

       The first published Torah Code findings in Statistical Science were published by Eliyahu Rips, Doron Wiztum, and Yoav Rosenburg.  They claimed that 66 famous Rabbis were encoded with birth and death dates, and claimed the odds for this being due to chance was 16 out of one million.  This was unchallenged until Dr. Brendan McKay said he could do the same with other non-religious texts, and that the WRR Study played with transliteration to get their results.

      There are people with doctorates in math who say the codes are real.  Dr. Robert Haralick is Chairman of the Computer Science Department at City University of New York.  He points to assassination plots and birth and deaths of famous people.  For some of these, he says the odds that they are there due to chance are less than one in a million.  But still McKay argues that similar plots can also be found in War and Peace or Moby Dick.  Each side tries to point out mistakes made by their opponents

    Michael Drosnin’s first book, The Bible Code, says on page 32 that Clinton is encoded (at skip 33,720) in such way as to touch the word for President in the open text (the matrix also seems to describe the Clinton – Lewinski scandal).  He does not tell us that the matrix he shows uses only the 4^th lowest skip for Clinton.  Clinton and president appear together in a box that is only 7 rows by 5 columns (35 letters).  However, the lowest skip for Clinton is at skip 6,254 and President at skip 43,778.  Here Clinton and president appear together in a box that is 25 letters – only a single column of 25 rows.   Most researchers emphasize the lowest ELS as the most important.  Still, while the above Clinton matrices seem good, it is also true that we can put the (President) J.A. Carter together with the word for president in a box of only 15 letters in the Control text of CodeFinder software.  So what is needed to see if the Codes are really somewhat predictive is a comparison of how all 42 men who have held this job fit in with the word for president in both Torah and Control.

PROBLEM

      The Torah Codes hypothesis is that there will be smaller boxes for historically related things in the Torah than in the Control (scrambled Torah).  The Null hypothesis is that there is no significant difference in box (matrix) size between the Torah and the Control. The Code is based on an Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS).  Which hypothesis will be supported when I find names (at an ELS) of all United States presidents and the word for president  (spelled nun sin yud alef) in Hebrew in both the Torah and Control text?

PROCEDURE

1. Set the skips to search in CodeFinder software at -153,000 to 153,000.  This allows the software to search at skips (Equidistant Letter Sequence or “ELS”) of -153,000, -152,999, -152,998, etc to up +153,000 where – means backwards and + means forward direction.  For a skip of 1,435, the computer will put 1,435 letters on each text line.  If the skip of the axis term (first term sought) is 100,000, the computer will arrange the text with 100,000 letters on one line if the row split function is disabled.  But if the row split of 2 is chosen, it will only put 50,000 letters on one line, and with a row split of 4, it will put 25,000 letters on one line. 

2.  Open the virtual Hebrew keyboard on the software and type Hebrew name you are searching for.  You will need the Hebrew spelling.  I asked a friend in Israel to e-mail me a list of all U.S. presidents in Hebrew from an Israeli web site.  There are many ways to transliterate a Hebrew name into English, but I used only that list.  I always used the last name, and usually used the first name, or first initial, or first and second initials.  It is rare to find a name more than 8 letters long at an ELS, but vowels are often implied and not written in Hebrew as it appears in Torah.  All names used in this experiment had at least 6 letters, but not more than 8 letters. In the case of the Roosevelts, I found in Torah and Control a T. Roosevelt for Theodore Roosevelt, but not F. Roosevelt for Franklin Roosevelt.  Therefore, I used 2 Roosevelt (for second Roosevelt) with the letter bet standing for the number 2.  There was a George H. Bush, but no George W Bush in the Control, so I had to settle for just George Bush for the second Bush.  Spellings used at an ELS had to be the same in both the Torah and in the Control.  For Eisenhower, a slightly shorter, but OK transliteration had to be used because the spelling of his name was not in either Torah or Control.  Also, if a spelling using the letter tet could not be found, tav was used, as both sound like T.

3.  After you type a president’s name, next type in the Hebrew word for president.

4.  Put on settings of 50 rows by 50 columns.

5.  Click search.  The first search is conducted with row split function set on automatic (where the computer automatically finds the best match).

6.  Use only the lowest ELS for each president as found in Torah and Control

8.  Disable the row split.  Repeat the search.

9.  Find the smallest box out of the two ways (with automatic row split on and with it disabled).  Record the smallest matrix for Torah and the smallest matrix for the Control in the Results.

10.  Analyze the results.

RESULTS – See Tables at the Bottom of this Page 

CONCLUSION

       The Torah Codes hypothesis is that there will be smaller boxes for related things in the Torah than in the Control.  The Null hypothesis is that there is no significant difference in size between the Torah and the Control.  The results of this experiment seemed to support the Torah Code Hypothesis. 

• The small matrix (15 letters for J.A. Carter)
• The lowest skip (-6) for Buchanan)

• The overall average matrices were smaller in the Torah (130.9 letters to 166.2 letters).

• 26 more compact matrices in the Torah compared to 16 in the Control

• If an excellent matrix is under 50 letters, more such findings for Torah (8) compared to Control (4)

• If a good matrix is under 100 letters, the Torah wins by a score of 14 to 8.

    The Torah Codes hypothesis does not address skip, although most researchers think the lowest ELS or skip is most important.  This is because if you have thousands of matches or matrices, some will be much better than others.  The trick is to get the desired information there the first time a president’s name comes up.  This experiment suggests encoding in the Torah, but shows that there are good matrices that can often be also made by Control texts, so we shouldn’t get too exited about just one good match.