http://www.slate.com/Features/codedebunk/codedebunk.asp
By Benjamin Wittes
Benjamin Wittes is an editorial writer for the Washington Post. Posted
Wednesday, Oct. 6, 1999, at 4:30 p.m. PT
I'm a rationalist and a skeptic, someone who safely separates faith
from reason. But when I read a scientific paper titled "Equidistant Letter
Sequences in the Book of Genesis," I confess I felt a strong urge to grow
side-locks and a long beard and start atoning for my years of doubt. The
article, published in 1994 in a prestigious, peer-reviewed journal called
Statistical Science, argued with unnerving force that the first book of the
Bible contains embedded codes that predict events that long postdate its
writing and that these codes are, statistically speaking, "not due to
chance." As I wrote in Slate two years ago (see "Cracking God's Code"), the
paper's hypothesis, if correct, would all but prove both the existence of
God and the divinity of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew
Bible).
The paper startled me and many others. People became Orthodox Jews
because of the codes. I know of one man who held off circumcising his son
until the paper was published. It spawned a runaway best seller, Michael
Drosnin's The Bible Code. It became a recruiting tool for ultra-orthodox
Jewish yeshivas. And it amused, then frustrated, mathematicians worldwide.
What made the codes especially eerie was that, while scientists were almost
universally skeptical of them, nobody could figure out what was wrong with
them. No one had published a rebuttal in a peer-reviewed journal. As long as
that remained the case, even rationalists like me had to consider the
possibility that science could support the most radical religious
conclusions.
But the Torah codes' time is finally up. In the current issue of
Statistical Science, Australian mathematician Brendan McKay and three
Israeli colleagues have convincingly debunked them, and the former editor of
Statistical Science who published the original paper has endorsed their
rebuttal. For those of us who were freaked out by the codes, the new paper
comes as a relief.
The codes' rebuttal has taken so long because the science behind the
original paper is very sophisticated. (One of the authors, Hebrew University
professor Eliyahu Rips, is a well-respected mathematician.) The original
paper sought to test the anecdotal observation that pairs of conceptually
related words tend to appear in close proximity to one another in the Torah,
coded in what are called equidistant letter sequences. An ELS is a string of
letters compiled by pulling letters out of a text at regular intervals. For
example, if you start with the first letter of this paragraph and read only
every fourth letter, you will find the word "TORT." Every text contains many
such "codes," so the question was whether the observation of codes with
apparent meaning in Genesis was a deliberate message from the almighty or
mere coincidence.
To test whether the Genesis ELS were intentional, Doron Witztum and
co-authors Yoav Rosenberg and Rips used a computer to search Genesis for ELS
containing the names of famous rabbis and their dates of birth or death.
These rabbis were all born long after Genesis was written, so their names
could not have been encoded on purpose by any human author. Yet in the
Genesis text--unlike in control texts such as a Hebrew translation of War
and Peace--the rabbis appeared on average closer to their own dates than to
the others'. This seemed to show that someone had actively encoded the
text--someone who knew beforehand when rabbis would be born or die.
After years of onerous testing and retesting, McKay and his
colleagues--Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, and Gil Kalai--have found the
serious methodological flaws the peer reviewers missed. First, McKay et al.
note, the codes are hypersensitive to small changes in the data. Excluding
only four of the 32 rabbis essentially eliminates the effect, for example.
The core of their critique focuses on the manner in which the rabbis
were named in the Witztum-Rips-Rosenberg paper. The names of medieval rabbis
are not fixed in the way that modern names are; the great rabbi Moses Ben
Maimon, for example, is often called Maimonides or the Rambam. Searching for
the rabbis' ELS, therefore, required choices about what names to use for
each particular rabbi. Witztum and Rips asked a consultant to compile
appropriate appellations for each rabbi, but the rebuttal paper argues that
the process used by this consultant was sufficiently subjective as to bias
the results. (There is something indisputably bizarre in the spectacle of
distinguished mathematicians squabbling about the correct names of
14th-century rabbis.)
In order to demonstrate that "data tuning" alone could account for the
effect, McKay and his co-authors made their own alternative list of
appellations for the rabbis, a list they describe as "of quality
commensurate" with Witztum and Rips'. This alternative list produced no
effect in Genesis but a huge effect in War and Peace. Then, McKay and co.
sought to produce the most accurate list they could, using their own
consultant. With this list, they found no statistical evidence of codes in
any text.
Further evidence of tuning was found in other decisions Witztum and
Rips made about their data. The authors of the first paper erred, McKay and
his colleagues claim, in how they chose which rabbis to include. The rabbis
were supposed to be chosen by an objective criterion--the length of their
entries in a particular encyclopedia--but because of the "careless manner"
in which this was carried out, rabbis were included who should not have
been, while others were wrongly excluded. Birth and death dates were also
flawed. The authors collected dates from a wide variety of sources, but
apparently did not establish firm rules to decide among disputed dates.
McKay and his co-authors also claim that aspects of the experimental design
(such as the way distances were measured between rabbis and dates) were
tuned. When McKay and his colleagues varied the experimental method, the
choices of dates, and the way dates were expressed, the results almost
invariably deteriorated.
The rebuttal authors note still other problems in the original paper. The
Torah's text has varied over the centuries, and when dealing with ELS, tiny
variations can be ruinous. Yet when McKay et al. compared the text Witztum
and Rips used to other Torah texts--some of which are probably more
historically reliable--the Witztum and Rips text produced the strongest
results. The authors also note that even using the flawed Witztum-Rips
methodology, no book of the Torah besides Genesis shows any effect at all.
McKay and his colleagues do not accuse the original authors of fraud,
speculate on how their data-tuning took place, or ask whether the tuning was
consciously done. But they conclude that all the choices available to
Witztum and Rips created "wiggle room," thus permitting the authors' biases
to corrupt the results. "All of our many earnest experiments produced
results in line with random chance," they conclude. "In light of these
findings, we believe that [the] 'challenging puzzle' has been solved." For
all but the true believers, the publication of the rebuttal paper seems
likely to end the Torah codes debate.
But for the true believers, of course, the phenomenon was always more
than a mere "puzzle," and they are not about to roll over. Rips was
sufficiently enraged by Statistical Science's acceptance of the rebuttal
paper that he retained a lawyer, who advised the journal that "the
accusations in the article about to be published ... are untrue and libelous
of Dr. Rips." Rips sought a delay in publication and the chance to respond
to the critique in the same issue. (Statistical Science rejected his request
but will consider publishing his formal comments in a later issue.) Rips
contends that the rebuttal paper misrepresents the original experiment's
methods and that it ignores subsequent tests that he regards as immune from
data-tuning charges. He wrote me in an e-mail, "I believe that the evidence
for the Torah Codes is now stronger than ever. I find the paper by the
critics more than extremely unfair."
Those who want to believe in the Torah codes will always be able to
find ELS that impress them. But there's a difference now. To believe today
that the almighty wrote the Torah is once again, as it should be, a matter
of faith. It's not a conclusion that can be forced on me--or anyone else--by
statistical science.
Related in Slate
In case you missed it, click here to read Benjamin Wittes' 1997 piece on the
original Torah codes paper. Soon after, "Chatterbox" reported on the first
hints of flaws in the research. Earlier this year, David Klinghofer and
Stephen Dubner had a dialogue on the Torah's proper role in Judaism (click
here to read the first installment, then follow the daily links to later
ones).
Related on the Web
An abridged version of Witztum and Rips' original paper, as well as coverage
of the current controversy, can be found on the Official Torah Codes Web
page. Australian National University, where McKay teaches, has posted his
article; and Barry Simon, an Orthodox mathematician at CalTech, wrote a
piece attacking the codes from scientific and theological points of view.
Witztum responds to these charges on his own Web page. Aish HaTorah, an
international network of Jewish education centers, has assembled additional
pro-codes information. You can visit the Web site for Pi--last year's
sleeper hit movie about a mathematician who tries to decode the Torah. To
buy Michael Drosnin's book, click here. And to conduct your own research on
the subject, consider using the Bible Decoder, a software package that can
probe the Book for messages in any language.
Benjamin Wittes is an editorial writer for the Washington Post.
Illustrations by William L. Brown.
© 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.