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Torah Codes Tutorial : Page 5

Bogus Example
Hitler Nazi in War and Peace

Physicist David Thomas wrote an article in the Nov/Dec 1997 Skeptical Inquirer illustrating a table found for the key words: Hitler and Nazi in an English text of War and Peace. The Thomas article is a challenge to Drosnin's statement on p26 of his book The Bible Code:

The words [meaning the key words] formed a crossword puzzle [meaning a table containing ELSs]. Consistently, the Bible code brings together interlocking words that reveal related information. With Bill Clinton, President. With the Moon landing, spaceship and Apollo 11. With Hitler, Nazi. With Kennedy, Dallas. In experiment after experiment, the crossword puzzles were found only in the Bible. Not in War and Peace, not in any other book, and not in ten million computer-generated test cases.

David Thomas wrote his own program to search for tables in books other than the Torah text. The one shown below is his table showing the connection between Hitler and Nazi from War and Peace.

Hitler Nazi
The cylinder size is 69. This is the table found by David Thomas, most probably by using some interactive method. If the expected number of ELSs are set to 20, the table found by our automatic methodology has a smaller area than this one. The probability that a text from the ELS random placement text population would produce a table as small in area as the one produced by the War and Peace text is greater than 38.5/100. This table is not statistically significant.

David Thomas concludes,

I found "Hitler" linked to "Nazi" dozens of times in several books. When I set out to engineer a "hidden code" link of "code" and "bogus" in KJV Genesis, I was able to produce sixty closely linked pairs. And every single one of these pairs could fit inside a reasonably sized puzzle. The source of the mysterious "Bible code" has been revealed -- it's homo sapiens.

Using table area as the compactness measure, the probability that a table as compact as this will occur in an ELS random placement monkey text population is greater than 38.5/100. This kind of table is expected to occur and does not indicate that anything unusual is going on in the War and Peace text. This table is, therefore, not similar to Torah code tables. This table does not qualify as an encoding.

It is clear from the David Thomas article that he thinks that the production of any (what he calls) reasonable sized tables constitutes something that we would consider by our criteria a Torah code. But his example is of a table whose size is expected to happen by chance. So nothing unusual has happened. The key words Nazi and Hitler are not encoded in War and Peace and David Thomas, physicist that he is, nevertheless does not understand what Torah codes are.

Drosnin's Holocaust of Israel 5766

In his book The Bible Code, on page 55, Drosnin shows a table having an ELS for the key word Holocaust of Israel, שואת ישראל, with a close meeting with an ELS for the key word 5756, התשנו, the way the year September of 1995 through August of 1996 is designated in Hebrew. The table of this closest meeting has minimal skip ELSs. There are no ELSs with smaller skips than these in the Torah.

The probability that a table as compact as the table shown below would arise in a text of the ELS random placement monkey text population is 20.5/100,000. So the table has small skip ELSs, has relevant key words, and has a small p-level. Thus one might think that it would qualify as a Torah code. But the key words of this table correspond to no event. So the table is not a Torah code table.

Holocaust of Israel
The cylinder size produced by the search is 27387. This table is the smallest area table in Torah text containing one ELS of each of the key words: ?שואת ישראל and התשנו. The probability that a text from the ELS random placement text population would produce a table as small in area as the one produced by the Torah text is 20.5/100,000.
Drosnin Holocaust of Israel Drosnin Holocaust of Israel
The cylinder size produced by the search is 3912. The expected number of ELSs was set to 20. This table is the smallest area table in Torah text containing one ELS of each of the key words. The probability that a text from the ELS random placement text population would produce a table as small in area as the one produced by the Torah text is 20.5/100,000.