Solving the Bible Code Puzzle

A paper of Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg in this journal in 1994 made the extraordinary claim that the Hebrew text of the Book of Genesis encodes events which did not occur until millennia after the text was written. In reply, we argue that Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg's case is fatally defective,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Statistical science 1999-05, Vol.14 (2), p.150-173
Main Authors: McKay, Brendan, Bar-Natan, Dror, Bar-Hillel, Maya, Kalai, Gil
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bible
Bible code
Book of Genesis
data selection
data tuning
ELS
Equidistant letter sequences
Peacetime
Permutation tests
Preprints
Rabbis
Significance level
Statistics
Torah
Torah code
War
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Summary:A paper of Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg in this journal in 1994 made the extraordinary claim that the Hebrew text of the Book of Genesis encodes events which did not occur until millennia after the text was written. In reply, we argue that Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg's case is fatally defective, indeed that their result merely reflects on the choices made in designing their experiment and collecting the data for it. We present extensive evidence in support of that conclusion. We also report on many new experiments of our own, all of which failed to detect the alleged phenomenon.
ISSN:0883-4237
2168-8745
DOI:10.1214/ss/1009212243