The following will give you a brief insight into one of the mysterious levels of understanding G-d’s eternal love letter, the Torah.
I’d like to thank Aish HaTorah’s Discovery booklet for the form of the wisdom to follow.
7
THE NUMBER 7 is considered one of the most significant numbers in Judaism:
49
THE NUMBER 49, being 7-times-, has great significance in Judaism.
Ivan Panin was a Russian immigrant known at the turn of the century as a brilliant literary figure, multi-lingual, and a mathematician at Harvard University. He was also a devout Catholic.
Among the several languages known by Panin was Hebrew. The brilliant scholar began studying the Bible in its original language. Aware of the numerical values of the Hebrew alphabet, Panin experimented one day by replacing the letters with their corresponding numbers. Suddenly, his trained scientific mind picked up an elaborate mathematical pattern: In the first verse of the Torah alone, Panin discovered over 50 patterns of the number seven. According to Panin, the statistical odds of this pattern being coincidental were one in 33 trillion – 0.00000000000003.
Following this discovery, Panin devoted his entire life to the study of Bible Numerics, and eventually submitted to the Nobel Research Foundation over 43,000 sheets of his research.
In the first verse of the Torah, Prof. Panin found over 50 combinations of “seven.” Below are a few examples.
Number of words in the verse…………………7 (7 x 1)
Number of letters in the verse………………….28 (7 x 4)
Numeric value of the one verb………...…….…203(7 x 29)
Numeric value of the three nouns………………777(7 x 111)
Numeric value of first-and-last letters, in the first-and-last
words…………………………………...497(7 x 71)
Numeric value of the first-and-last letters of every word
……………… 1393(7 x 199)
Suppose we eliminate all spaces in the Torah, and consider the text as one long sequence of 304,805 letters. A computer is then instructed to look for hidden words, encoded at equal skips of letters. For example, the distance between the letters comprising the word “HaShoa” (Holocaust) is 49. Statisticians call this phenomenon ELS – short for “equidistant letter sequence.”
Once the computer has revealed an encoded word, we then format the long list of the Torah’s letters into lines, the length of which graphically depicts best the encoded word. For example, if a code was found at a skip sequence of every 49 letters, we would format the Torah into lines of 50 letters each. No letters are added, deleted or changed; the new line-length simply enables us to view the encoded word more easily.
Maimonides is recognized in the four corners of the globe as one of the most famous of all Jewish commentators. Acclaimed author, esteemed philosopher, renowned physician, and Master Talmudist – this is his legacy. Maimonides is known more popularly as the “Rambam,” an acronym for his Hebrew name, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon.
The Rambam, who lived in Egypt, was a much sought-after medical expert, and he served as the personal physician for the royal Egyptian court. But most of all, the Rambam was a prolific writer on the most important topics of Judaism. His magnum opus, Mishne Torah, (“Review of the Torah”) on the subject of the 613 mitzvahs, is revered until this day as the most authoritative, comprehensive codification of Jewish law. It is a marvel of Jewish scholarship, and was composed in Egypt . In fact, so revered is Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, that he is popularly mentioned in the same breath with the Moses who led the Jews out of Egypt and brought them to Mt. Sinai. As the ancient Jewish maxim goes:
“From Moses until Moses there was none as great as Moses.”
As was stated by the Vilna Gaon, every person is alluded to in the Torah. When the Vilna Gaon was challenged to locate the Torah’s reference to the Rambam, he pointed to this verse. ‘G-d said to Moses, “Pharoah will not heed you, so that My marvels may be multiplied in the land of Egypt .”’ Exodus 11/9. Here, the acrostic RaMBaM is formed by the first letters of each word in the phrase “My marvels may be multiplied in the land of Egypt ” ( Ribot Moftai B’eretz Mitzraim). Mishne Torah, his marvel of Jewish scholarship, was composed in Egypt.
The computer searched the entire Torah to find any other appearance of four consecutive words that form the acrostic RaMBaM,but none were found. Out of approximately 80,000 words, that is the only place in the entire Torah where we find the acrostic “RaMBaM.”
STATISTICAL SCIENCE
A review journal of the institute of mathematical statistics
STATISTICAL SCIENCE (ISSN 0883-4237)
Volume 9, Number 3, August 1994
Published quarterly by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
3401 Investment Blvd. #7
Hayward , California 34545
Printed in the United States of America
Institute of Mathematical Statistics
Organized September 12, 1935
The purpose of the Institute is to foster the development and dissemination of the theory and applications of statistics and probability.
The scientific journals of the Institute are The Annals of Applied Probability, The Annals of Probability, The Annals of Statistics, and Statistical Science.
JOURNAL EDITOR’S COMMENTS
Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis
Doron Witzum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg searched the Book of Genesis looking for pairs of words spelled by picking every d th letter, where d is some integer. The pairs of words were names of personalities and dates of their birth or death taken from the Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel .
When the authors used a randomization test to see how rarely the patterns they found might arise by chance alone, they obtained a very highly significant result, with p=0.000016.
Our referees were baffled: Their prior beliefs made them think the Book of Genesis could not possibly contain meaningful references to modern-day individuals, yet when the authors carried out additional analyses and checks, the effect persisted. The paper is thus offered to Statstical Science readers as a challenging puzzle.
Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg
It has been noted that when the Book of Genesis is written as two-dimensional arrays, equidistant letter sequences spelling words with related meanings often appear in close proximity. Quantitative tools for measuring this phenomenon are developed. Randomization analysis shows that the effect is significant at the level of 0.00002.
Key words and phrases: Genesis, equidistant letter sequences, cylindrical representations, statistical analysis.
The phenomenon discussed in this paper was first discovered several decades ago by Rabbi Weissmandel. He found some interesting patterns in the Hebrew Pentateuch (the Five Books of Moses), consisting of words or phrases expressed in the form of equidistant letter sequences (ELS’s) – that is, by selecting sequences of equally spaced letters in the text.
Suppose we are given a text, such as Genesis. Define an equidistant letter sequence (ELS) as a sequence of letters in the text whose positions, not counting spaces, form an arithmetic progression; that is, the letters are found at the positions
n, n + d, n + 2d,…….n + (k – 1)d.
[The tests showed that the information encoded in the Book of Genesis to the Names and birthdates of Great Rabbis, is encoded in a way that is mathematically and statistically not random!!!!!!! encoded in the Book of Genesis].
Chapter Ten
Excerpts from
"THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE
IN ANCIENT ISRAEL"
by Rabbi Dr. Herzog (former Chief Rabbi of Israel )